MB Civic

By Sarah Elizabeth Kreps | May 29, 2006; A23 | The Washington Post

One of the early scenes of Michael Shaara’s book about the Civil War, “The Killer Angels,” presents the commander of the 20th Maine Regiment, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, with 120 mutineers from the 2nd Maine. Chamberlain is informed that the mutineers had accidentally signed up for three years while the rest of their regiment had signed up for two and had since gone home. As the Battle of Gettysburg nears, Chamberlain must advance his regiment and determine how to handle the mutineers. In a great display of leadership, he delivers a rousing speech:

“Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came . . . because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back at home. We think on that, too. But freedom . . . is not just a word. We’re an army going out to set other men free.”

Afterward, 114 of the 120 mutineers join his regiment and proceed to fight at Gettysburg, the turning point in the Civil War.

On Memorial Day, this passage offers two important reminders. First, at many moments in its history the United States could have taken a dramatically different course without the commitment of the military. Second, we tend to romanticize the causes for which soldiers have fought in the past: for independence in the Revolutionary War, abolition in the Civil War, against aggression in World Wars I and II. But it is instructive that even the soldiers in these wars were at times unclear as to their immediate purpose. They were ultimately driven by the hope that they were part of an army that was helping perpetuate the freedoms they had been given and passing along those freedoms to others. Even amid the political acrimony that sometimes surrounded decisions about war, soldiers rose above the chaff and performed their duty with integrity.

So it is today with the service men and women fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and fronts on the war against terrorism, both at home and abroad. They have volunteered to serve their country, driven less by a tangible antagonism to a particular adversary than by a fundamental sense of the long term and the freedoms they are seeking to preserve.

As a young cadet, I volunteered for the Air Force for such idealistic reasons. My grandfather’s family had emigrated from Italy in the early part of the 20th century, but when World War II broke out, he joined the Army on the side of his newly adopted country. He served as an Army intelligence officer for 25 years. He fought against the Germans in North Africa, saw Mussolini’s body displayed by partisans in Milan and fought again a few years later in Korea. The stories he had and the pride he felt helped me appreciate how his generation had made my own freedom possible. So I decided to continue the tradition.

I was in Air Force ROTC during college, wearing a uniform at a time and in a place where the military was thought by many to be antithetical to American values. In my freshman year at Harvard in the late 1990s, I was walking across the Yard in uniform when a civilian yelled at me, condemning particular military policies he thought were at odds with his freedoms. Initially taken aback, I later puzzled over his disconnected logic: How else would it be possible for him to yell at the military except for the fact that the military has at many times in our history fought to keep those freedoms intact?

After four years of active duty in the Air Force, I am now on the other side of the military-civilian line. Many of my friends and students are still in the military, several deployed abroad in hazardous theaters, honorably carrying out the duties and delivering on the ideal for which they have volunteered. They will never ask for recognition but will assert quite sincerely that they are happy to serve such a fine country. They deserve the gratitude of each of us whom they serve.

Whether or not one agrees with the politics of the military, it’s important to consider the path the United States would have taken without the dedication of its armed forces. We would certainly lack many of the liberties we now take for granted. Fortunately, this question is merely a thought exercise.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Law and Politics at Georgetown University and an adjunct professor of political science at George Washington University.