The following essay is adapted from a speech delivered to the Military Moms of Greenwich in 2024.
Perhaps nowhere is the break between the past and the present more manifest than in today’s military. For three thousand years the place of honor around the campfire or counsel table was the warrior’s. For most of human history, male military service was widespread, if not universal. In most Native American languages, the word for “man” and “warrior” are identical.
The honor of warfare drew all of society. At Harvard University during World War I, President Lowell nearly shut the school down so it could train soldiers. Eleven thousand, three hundred and nineteen Harvard alumni or students served from sixty different classes. Three hundred seventy-three were killed, forty-three of whom were students who enlisted before they graduated. At that time, members of elite society perceived a duty to fight for one’s country, but they were also attracted to the honor of this calling.
A change in this foundational element of human experience has gradually occurred. A tiny ROTC presence was only recently permitted back at Harvard. In a 2023 poll, 72 percent of Americans replied that in the event of a major conflict involving the U.S. they would not be willing to join the military. Almost half of young people age 18–29 said they would not be willing to risk their lives in the event of a military invasion of America, and 30 percent said they would rather surrender than risk death. Willingness is only part of the problem. A 2022 Pentagon study shows 77 percent of target military-age male recruits were unqualified to serve based on fitness, drug use, or other reasons.
Half of one percent of Americans serve in the military and only a small fraction of those in combat roles. On the coasts, among our so-called elites, many don’t know anyone in the military, not among their family, extended family, or friends. I have a son in the Marines and two more who will enter soon. When my wife and I mention our children’s service to others, we often sense incredulity. They express admiration, but don’t want their children serving. Recall the comment of an Afghanistan veteran: “We were fighting a war and everyone else was going to the mall.” Our society no longer understands how to think about those who would offer their lives for their country and whose primordial profession it is to take the lives of others.
Language is a mirror of society. Words that used to be commonplace even seventy years ago are gone. You hear “courage” and “hero” all the time but their meaning has been deformed by misuse. Properly understood, these positive virtues demand something from you. They have been replaced by tolerance, inclusion, empathy—qualities that, more than anything, demand you do nothing, judge nothing.
The eloquence of two soldier intellectuals stands out on this conflict between modernity and the warrior. What is extraordinary about Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ernst Junger is their similarities despite their differences. Holmes was a Union officer in the U.S. Civil War, Junger a German in the trenches of WWI. Both saw extensive combat in conflicts of legendary brutality. No arm chair jingoes, both were severely wounded multiple times and fought with exceptional courage. Both warned of a rational, technocratic, materialist individualism and the eclipse of tradition. They were prescient men.
In his 1895 Soldier’s Faith Speech at Harvard, Holmes addressed growing “individualist negations.”
We have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. . . . we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented . . . how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife's tale, to be replaced . . . by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.
And Junger, in his World War I memoir Storm of Steel, writes:
When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country—and the time will come—then . . . the idea of the Fatherland is dead. . . . For all these great and solemn ideas bloom from a feeling that dwells in the blood and cannot be forced. In the cold light of reason everything alike is a matter of expedience and sinks to the paltry and mean.
One hundred years ago, they saw a cresting wave that is now breaking. The most honest commentary about war must always account for its central paradox. It is the venue for man’s greatest depravity. But war is also man’s most grand endeavor, inspiring incomparable energy, excitement and awe, the stage for soaring acts. All the Christmas Eves of my life blend together but one, kneeling in the sand, holding a candle and singing at midnight with my fellow Marines in the Saudi Desert in 1990. Holmes again: “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.”
Our children are part of an ancient tradition, but the tradition of the military mom is precisely as old. The first warrior created the first worrying mother. Heroism is trumpeted but the grief inextricable from it is borne in anonymity. Perhaps this is the most unfair thing about war.
This special bond is also the military mom’s burden. Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s funeral oration for those fallen in the Peloponnesian War tells us as much about the present as the past. To the parents of the dead, he says there is no pretending that his words will eliminate their grief. “Comfort, therefore, not condolence,” he says, “is what I have to offer to the parents of the dead.” He delivers not sympathy and pity, but, while acknowledging their grief, affirmation of “a death so glorious as that which has caused your mourning.” “For it is only the love of honor that never grows old; and honor it is, not gain as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.” An odd amalgamation for us today, suffering and triumph hand in hand.
Though America may not fully understand your position as military moms, take solace in the knowledge that you are far from alone. You join the company of the greatest drama in human history: the warrior’s mother. Your companions are millions of ghosts at peace, the mothers of Pericles’s Hoplites, medieval bowmen, and privates at Gettysburg.
I think about the two Navy SEALs lost recently in the Red Sea, and about their parents. I was surprised how little coverage they received, and how fleeting. I disdain the manifest fecklessness of the policy they died executing. The parents of the fallen often animate their grief by lashing out at a cause of the loss. The equipment should not have failed, the plan was foolish, the aim unrealistic, my son died for nothing. But war could be defined as a colossal endeavor in mismanagement, waste, and overreach. An American mother’s son will never be worth a ball bearing plant in Schweinfurt or the borders of Ukraine. The soldier has never chosen his equipment, his leaders, or his war aims, only his duty.
What did those SEALs die for? For us this seems an important question. Holmes speaks of a soldier’s faith.
In the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty . . . you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face annihilation for a blind belief.
Junger perceived the exact same faith:
And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight.
I believe those SEALs died for this. As Edith Hamilton wrote, “It is by the power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows. . . . Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly. The great soul in pain and in death transforms pain and death.” Perhaps it is another paradox that only potential for loss, or loss itself, allows us to fully appreciate what we lost.
G. David Bednar, a former infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps who fought in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, writes from Greenwich, Connecticut.
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Image by U.S. Department of Defense, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
