A Country Worth Fighting For
When the Man and I first became friends, we would entertain ourselves by going out for late night donuts and arguing about politics, theology, and the military. He was ROTC in college, and I was a liberal arts major, who didn’t grow up in this country, and we loved the challenge of getting the other person to see a different perspective.
You can see how that worked out for us.
These days, the Man and I meet in the middle ideologically a lot more often than we used to. And, obviously, at least to some extent, my feelings about the military have shifted. Enough that I married him, at any rate.
But part of being in the military (or being married to someone in the military) is seeing it for what it is, seeing how it’s changed, seeing how it lives up to its ideals or doesn’t. Every year on Veterans Day, those thoughts tend to come to the surface for me as I watch the “thank you for your service” notes scroll across my Facebook newsfeed.
And part of me, okay, a lot of me, wants to say: the best way to say thank you to a veteran for their service isn’t a free meal or a cup of coffee, but to help make this a country worth serving, worth defending, worth sacrificing for.
Hear me out. I’m not saying that the free meal or the cup of coffee isn’t nice. What I am saying is that more and more our military is made up of men and women who are trying to figure out why they’re here.
Did they join for the free health care? Trust me, they’ll pay for it in hours waiting on the phone or military doctors treating ibuprofen as a vitamin.
Did they join to see the world? They’ll somehow end up stuck in U.S. bases, one after another, bopping from the east coast to the west coast until they have every rest stop on I-40 memorized.
Did they join to get out of neighborhoods riddled with drugs and gang violence? Guess what we also have in the military? Yep. Drugs and gangs. As my husband likes to say, the military is a snapshot of society. We get what the rest of the U.S. gets.
And here’s the problem, when our military members don’t know what they joined up for any more, then it really does become about the free meal or the cup of coffee or that 5% military discount. And that means it’s not worth anything at all.
Because I didn’t have three out of five kids on my own just so the Man can get a free cup of coffee. We haven’t moved 9 times in 14 years for a 5% military discount. We haven’t endured long nights and challenging assignments and countless TDYs and both deployments (which is nothing compared to many of our peers) so that the Man can sit down on Veteran’s Day to a free steak dinner at Applebees.
We did it because the Man thinks that America is worth it (even if what he says is that he serves so idiots are allowed to keep on being idiots). I may still be on the fence about America and the idiots. (That’s a joke.)
But, yes, I do want to challenge us to think about what kind of country our servicemen are defending. Do we think our country is worth sacrificing for? If not, what can we do in our own small circles of influence to change that?
I’m thinking about this a little extra right now because our current base has issued an invitation for people to send in pictures and messages about why they think our zip code is the best in the U.S. Base leadership is trying to foster a sense of pride and ownership, but also striving to help us see what we can celebrate in a base that is isolated and surrounded by a windy, arid desert. Anyway, I found myself thinking about what we have here that I see as worth celebrating, what we have hear that’s worth being proud of, worth defending—and I saw a lot.
I love the desert with its wide vistas, its stark beauty, its vivid sunrises and sunsets. I love the hummingbirds and bobcats and coyotes. I love our base swimming pool and bowling alley and library (where our librarians know us and give us grace for late library books). But more than that, I love our neighborhood.
It’s a place where children are out playing together who have different skin colors and religious backgrounds and cultural history.
It’s a place where, when we see a lost dog, we track it down to find the owner, and sometimes its three or four of us getting that dog back into its backyard as its humans are still 40 minutes away in town.
It’s a place where, when a toddler is lost, four teenagers mobilize on bikes to comb the neighborhood until they find him.
It’s a place where you can still borrow a cup of sugar, no questions asked. Where if there is a need, others will step in and try to meet it. Where people remember what it’s like to be new or alone or broken—and try to have grace. Where we talk about openly about struggles like depression and PTSD and anxiety. Where there are pickup games and shared fire pits and open fridges/pantries for the children who are having nerf wars in our front yards.
It’s a place that, in a country like ours, shouldn’t be the exception but the rule. And I’m incredibly grateful to have gotten to experience it.
I have rarely gotten to live in a neighborhood like this one, and I’m really going to miss it when we leave. It’s not perfect. There is gossip and hurt feelings and back biting and petty meanness and cliquishness, but what I see when I look at our neighborhood, what it’s characterized by, is a desire to have each other’s backs and to see each other succeed.
And that, my friends, is something worth fighting for.
I wish that I could see more of it when I look at America. I wish you could see more of that too. A place where the money we spend on our defense budget is worthwhile because we have schools and hospitals and infrastructure and people and relationships and neighborhoods that are worth protecting.
So I’m asking all of us, on the day after Veteran’s Day, what can we do, no matter how small, that could make that more of a reality?
