This week Shelley and I departed for the Midwest to visit children and grandchildren and attend an annual reunion with the 1st Infantry Division officers I served with in war and peace. I write about many of them in Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War. I have known many very fine officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers throughout my career, but the ones I served with in the Big Red One were truly exemplary. They knew their art, were superb leaders, and when it came to combat, they were singularly focused on one thing. Victory.
In many ways, these men and women are some of the finest of America, those willing to give, as Lincoln said “the last full measure of devotion” for freedom. Sadly, there are those in America who do not appreciate that sacrificial thinking. Patriotism seems to be on the wane these days. Love of country has been replaced by a rising disdain for the founders of our nation and the institutions that we rely on to sustain our freedom. While many of the fine soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines I served with in the military remain very patriotic, they share the concern that we live in a time of rising unworthiness.
By that, I mean we dwell among people who take freedom for granted. The modern and oft-quoted aphorism is “Freedom isn’t free.” That is so true, even if some think those words are trite. They aren’t. They are true. As true as the first day they were spoken, and the veterans and active members of the 1st Division with whom we will sojourn this weekend know that. They really do believe in the motto of our division: “No Mission Too Difficult; No Sacrifice Too Great. Duty First!” They lived and fought by that. All of us deserve leaders worthy of those who would follow such a credo in the defense of our land.
That is the point of this: worthiness. We in America elect our leaders. We hope we elect the best, not the worst among us, for their responsibilities are great. Setting aside ideology for a moment—even as that is an important consideration in electing leaders—for those who desire and cherish freedom, leaders must also be worthy of it. That means they must act based on a world view worthy of freedom. Contrary to the thoughts of some, we are not free because of our Constitution. We are free only if we live a life worthy of that freedom.
That means lives where virtue, kindness, mercy, charity, compassion, hard work, responsibility, good conduct, and a daily recurrence to fundamental principles of goodness and decency shape our lives and guide our decisions and actions. There’s nowhere I know better to find these principles than in the Bible. But consistent with the notion of the freedom we cherish, putting God at the center of our lives is a choice reserved for you and me individually. It cannot be compelled by our government, but its influence is beneficial to those seeking to be worthy of self-governance and the freedom that is secured by those like I served with in combat.
In that regard, there is another level of collective worthiness that occurred to me as I rode westward and the “Big Sky” of the resplendent plains loomed before my eyes. Freedom is diminished–and indeed threatened–when we elect leaders unworthy of the office and responsibility we grant them for a season, not a lifetime. There are many fine people who live in our land. Good and decent ones, even as we experience a rising tide of those who are completely inadequate to the freedom they are privileged to have. But all of us are best served by leaders who are just, clear, decisive, and yet humble. The kind of leader we want in office who might be charged with sending America’s military forces into combat. Indeed, that is that sort of leader I pray will find a path to high political office.
Unfortunately, however, we deserve what we preserve in political leadership. And when we elect careerist and arrogantly self-centered people who think they and they alone deserve to rule over us, then we preserve a kind of leadership that in many ways is unworthy of the sacrificial leadership we require to sustain self-governance.
I know what marks good leaders. As we used to say in the Army, we knew “what right looks like.” And what I see in America today simply doesn’t. Just as the great plains loomed before me this week rolling onward to the verdant plains of Kansas, so too are the decisions we will make in being worthy of freedom.
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