For Veterans Day, I worked with the American Institute for Boys and Men on a piece about how veterans group forge a sense of tribe among men and boys. For the article, I interviewed The American Legion about its Boys State and Boys Nation programs and Team Red, White, and Blue about its community-building work. I include the introductory section here, with a link to the free, publicly-available post.

One line from the film Black Hawk Down, which tells the story of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, captures an ethos core to the U.S. military: “No one gets left behind.” We hear it over and over. Even in the midst of battle, when Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight informs Major General William Garrison ,the overall commander for the operation, that it will take longer than anticipated to retrieve a fallen comrade. Garrison says, “Danny, no one gets left behind.” Those five words constitute a promise among service members, to come home together, alive, wounded, or dead.

Veterans groups carry this promise forward into civilian life. Going back to the earliest days of the republic, veterans have marched to the mantra of “leave no veteran behind.” In doing so, they have served as pioneers in building social connections. This is particularly true with respect to male social connection, given that approximately 89 percent of veterans are men.

Yet despite the outsized role they play in men’s social connections, veterans groups are rarely highlighted in conversations about the social and loneliness challenges confronting many men in America, especially those without college degrees. Twenty-eight percent of men under the age of 30 report having no close social connections.

This is an unfortunate blind spot. Not only because of their vital work for veterans themselves, but also because of the lessons they can offer to other groups and institutions. In order to better understand these lessons, I interviewed leaders and members of two different veterans organizations, Team Red, White, and Blue (Team RWB) and The American Legion (Legion), about how they build connections among men and boys. Here’s what I learned…

Read the full article at - https://aibm.org/commentary/how-veterans-groups-build-social-connections-among-men-and-boys/.

“The idea is therefore submitted, whether an efficient military branch of government can be invented, with safety to the great principles of liberty, unless the same shall be formed of the people themselves, and supported by their habits and manners.”

The idea. The American Army, our military more generally, and most importantly, the relationship between the military and the society it serves started as just that, an idea. Could a standing Army exist without irrevocably infringing on citizens’ freedom? Could a nation dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality also produce soldiers willing to serve and fight in an institution that must necessarily demand sacrifices of liberty, to include potentially the loss of one’s life? These questions had little to no historical precedents back in the early days when Henry Knox was thinking about how a new nation could best manage its defenses.

These questions remain vital for us today. Nothing in the relationship between the military and American society is a given; it will only be what we make of it. I am optimistic and confident we can steward this responsibility honorably and decently. But it will not unfold of its own accord.

Henry Knox. Source: Library of Congress.

So in this next phase of Army 250 I will be broadening my focus. For the past year and a half my goal has been to lift up the many ways the Army has influenced American society and culture, with an emphasis on its significance outside of battlefields and wars. My hope was to make visible the many ways the Army is America and to illuminate connections which have become hidden in our era of an all-volunteer force. Going forward, I will shift to consider the question of why. Why this Army? Why this military?

My focus will be on pivotal moments throughout history that shaped the relationship between America and her military. Some of these events are well-known, such as President Truman’s clash with General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War; many others less so.

The military is a vital civic institution, yet we dedicate relatively little energy in civics or history class to understanding it in the same way we might look at the Congress, the Executive Branch, or Supreme Court. We rarely ask ourselves why is it that we no longer have a Secretary or War and instead have a Secretary of Defense? Or why is the National Guard both a Federal and State institution? Why is it we have defense contractors? Why is it that service-members must concede some rights and liberties, but preserve others? These questions get to the heart of how our republic has created the most powerful military in the world, yet one that has never mounted a serious effort to overthrow the civilian leaders; an accomplishment basically unprecedented in history.

Some of our questions will have straight-forward answers; most will not. I start this new phase as a fellow journeyman with you. I will be learning alongside of you. I have no agenda other than encourage all of us to dedicate as much civic learning towards the military as we do the other institutions of government.

Mechanically, I will be writing less frequently. My goal will be to publish a newsletter once a month. I also expect to write in a more chronological fashion, though I acknowledge moving from the past to the present can sometimes create a false sense of order and pre-determinism. I’ll do my best to guard against this.

I’ve benefitted enormously from your support and partnership throughout the first phase of Army 250’s existence. I look forward to us continuing together in the months ahead.

Army 250 is a passion project exploring and celebrating the unique relationship between Americans and their military. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. Henry Knox is one of the less well-known yet pivotal figures in American military history. He served as a senior general and head of artillery in the Continental Army, and then as the first Secretary of War. One of the more recent biographies is Mark Puls’s, which came out in 2010—https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Knox-Visionary-American-Revolution/dp/0230623883.

I still remember the day the bar broke me. It was Presidential Fitness Test time at my elementary school. I made it through the runs (shuttle and long-distance), sit-and-reach, and curl-ups (sit-ups) okay, but then came the bar. Although the standards allowed for a push-up alternative, at my school we did pull-ups. Or, at least some kids did.

A few kids crushed the pull-up, easily clearing 10 reps. Some did okay, getting their chin above the bar a handful of times. But most performed more or less like me. I jumped up and pulled with all my might, eyes closed for effort (and to avoid seeing my peers watching me); my little biceps flexing, I moved my head a few inches towards the bar before dropping, muscles spent. My second try proved no more successful than the first. A bit humiliated, I shuffled out of line.

Though mortifying in the moment, the day’s events passed quickly. There was a ceremony for kids who qualified for the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, but the test had little staying power. As was likely the case for the millions of elementary school students who took the test as kids, I had no idea that the test had some higher-order purpose nor that the test emerged from a process where the Army played a role.

But the story of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, now known as the Presidential Youth Fitness Challenge, is worth recalling. There are elements bound to a specific point in time, one where Americans trusted their institutions and followed their lead in adopting new fitness regimes; but there are also timeless elements that speak to the Army’s relationship to the physical health of the nation. Both pieces tell us something about our nation, our Army, and ourselves.

Pull-ups and fireworks. Source: DVIDS.

Before Sputnik, there was Kraus-Prudden

Few moments are carved as deeply into Americans’ collective memory as Sputnik.1 The Soviet’s successful satellite launch in 1957 caused many of America’s leaders to fear we were losing the space and missile race. In response, we passed major legislation augmenting our space and technical education programs. Sputnik continues to serve as a codeword for any ominous development where America risks losing ground, most often in national security, to an adversary. But before Sputnik, there was Kraus-Prudden.

Though mostly lost to history, Kraus-Prudden refers to a fitness test conducted by Dr. Hans Kraus and Bonnie Prudden with American and European schoolchildren. 57.9 percent of the American children failed the test, compared to only 8.7% of the European children. These results were published in 1954 and captured President Dwight Eisenhower’s attention. Sports Illustrated ran an article on the findings called “The Report that Shocked the President.”

At a White House event in July 1955, Dr. Kraus and Bonnie Prudden briefed President Eisenhower, Vice-President Nixon, and a group of senior government leaders. In response to the stark findings, President Eisenhower, who once said, “Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg”, organized the President's Conference on the Fitness of American Youth at Annapolis in 1956. Coming out of this conference, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10673, “Fitness of American Youth”, which created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness and a civilian advisory board.2

The Army makes two notable appearances at this point. The second Conference on the Fitness of American Youth was held at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1957. This conference created the action plan for a 1958 nationwide physical fitness survey, what ultimately became the Presidential Fitness Test. In a related effort, in 1958, the Army Infantry School hosted its first Physical Fitness Seminar, at Fort Benning, Georgia, where one of the main working committees explored the question, “What part can the Nation play in the Army’s progress towards fitness?”. These and other related events bound the Army and the nation more closely on the theme of physical fitness.

Although President Eisenhower launched the Council on Youth Fitness, it was the next president who kicked things into a whole new gear.

Vigor, Vigor, Vigor

Though plagued with physical issues throughout his life, John F. Kennedy (JFK) was a lifelong athlete and passionate about sport and fitness. In 1960, after winning the presidency, he published an article in Sports Illustrated called, “The Soft American” decrying the nation’s lack of physical fortitude. As president, he put new energy into the Council on Youth Fitness. He challenged the Marines, and Americans more broadly, to complete a 50-mile hike in 20 hours, for example. And he significantly ramped up promotion of the Presidential Fitness Test, getting what we would today call influencers, such as Charles Schultz of “Peanuts”, to promote fitness.

In 1962, JFK wrote another article, titled “The Vigor We Need", in Sports Illustrated, again calling for action on fitness while also detailing the results the nation had achieved thus far. A new pilot program had been launched, involving 200,000 students across five states, that showed impressive results: after one six week period, 25 percent of students who had initially failed the fitness test were able to pass; by the end of the school year, on average 80 percent of students who initially failed the tests were able to achieve a passing score. And the number of schools offering a fitness program increased by 13 percent.

JFK’s leadership on national fitness proved to be a high-water mark. No subsequent president put as much personal emphasis on fitness or was able to command such widespread support as he did. This in part reflects the high level of trust Americans had in institutions, including governments, during the time of Eisenhower and Kennedy. As trust in institutions collapsed starting in the mid-1970s, even if a president had wanted to prioritize fitness, he would have faced a much more polarized and distrustful population. But with that said, JFK put unique energy and vigor into his fitness initiatives and his personal leadership was an essential element behind the widespread adoption of youth fitness programs.

Strong Nation, Strong Army

The Presidential Fitness Test went away in 2013. In the years since the heyday of JFK’s leadership on fitness, Americans’ life expectancies have increased and there are signs more Americans are participating in fitness activities, but there are also worrisome signs with respect to the nation’s physical health. Youth fitness and sport activities, much like many elements of social and civic life, are more atomized and commercialized; massive numbers of young people are ineligible for military service due to physical and medical reasons; and many Americans do not regularly work out or engage in strenuous physical activity. All these developments bear on the Army and the nation’s military readiness.

While the Army is often seen more as a recipient of our society’s approach to fitness, as the Council on Youth Fitness history shows, the Army can also be a driver. This is the case, albeit in fairly limited fashion, with the Future Soldier Preparatory Course the Army launched in 2022 to help young Americans “overcome academic and physical fitness barriers to military service.” Military veterans are also actively leading on this front, with veteran or veteran-founded groups like Team Red, White, and Blue, F3 Nation, and the company GoRuck, among many others, engaging tens of thousands of Americans in various kinds of physical workouts. But much more can and should be done to improve our nation’s level of physical strength.

For now, though, we can all go hit the pull-up bar. I’ll see you out there.

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Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s place in American society. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

Additional Resources:

1. The Army’s physical fitness test has long been, and will likely always be, a source of much commentary, analysis, and humor. A selection of articles on this front include: https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/dumb-and-dumber-the-armys-new-pt-test/; https://www.army.mil/article/253358/why_fitness_matters_reviewing_history_of_army_fitness_testing; and, https://www.army.mil/article/285501/army_introduces_new_fitness_test_for_2025.

2. and did a great piece on the history of the Army’s PT test: https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/history-of-the-armys-pt-test/.

As Secretary of State Daniel Webster, speaking on the nation’s 75th birthday, observed, the Declaration, “has met dangers and overcome them; it has had enemies, and conquered them; it has had detractors, and abashed them all; it has had doubting friends, but it has cleared all doubts away”. The occasion for Webster’s speech was the laying of a cornerstone for new construction to the U.S. Capitol. George Washington had performed a similar ritual in 1793, and in his remarks, Webster connected these two events as points in a story that would extend far into the future:

“those blessings our fathers have tasted, and we have tasted, and still taste. Nor do we intend that those who come after us shall be denied the same high fruition. Our honor as well as our happiness is concerned. We cannot, we dare not, we will not betray our sacred trust.”

Today, 174 years later, it is our privilege and responsibility to carry this sacred trust forward.

Independence Day is a time for grandeur, even excess. It’s a day for fireworks, barbecues, hot dog eating contests, and concerts; for marches by John Philip Sousa and music from Aaron Copland; and for speeches like Webster’s (which went for two hours) that reflect on our storied past and highest ideals.

But it is also a day for quiet, a moment to consider the responsibilities freedom requires of us. It’s a day for stories of sacrifice, hope, and faith; for listening to the rendition of “America the Beautiful” that Ray Charles performed on October 28, 2001, in the shadow of 9/11, on a piano placed on home plate during the second game of the World Series; and for speeches like the one Frederick Douglass gave in 1852, that demand of us a greater commitment to realizing the full magnitude of freedom and equality promised in the Declaration.

American soldiers celebrate Independence Day in Paris, 1917. Source: Library of Congress.

Rather than offer my own reflections on the 4th of July, I am sharing a suite of Independence Day essays and articles from writers, primarily on Substack, with a military connection or background. These stories speak from different viewpoints and offer a range of thoughts on the meaning of Independence Day. I hope you enjoy reading these pieces and that they both challenge and inspire us as we commemorate our nation’s 249th birthday.

1. Hard to Explain by

Navy veteran Ben Davis writes a fictional piece about two men climbing a mountain together. The piece is filled with the silence of what they came to talk about but mostly avoid—whether one of the men should join the military. It is a poignant piece about military service, both the life-fulfilling—“A year later, or maybe even a few shitty days later, all of a sudden you’re willing to die for these people”—and the painful—“whether you get blown up or killed. And whether you’re going to kill someone else, someone you didn’t mean to kill. Or maybe you did mean to kill them at the time, and then later, you realize you didn’t need to.” It is a meditation on service, sacrifice, and people, and well-worth reading as we observe this Independence Day.

This was originally posted on Alpinist (https://alpinist.com/features/hard-to-explain/).

2. He Didn’t Ask. He Declared. By

The Whirl of ReOrientation: Escape the Script. Win the War.

He Didn’t Ask. He Declared.

Why does July 4th still matter…

Read more

10 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Mark McGrath | OODA Strategist

Marine Corps veteran Mark McGrath writes about how the Declaration of Independence was an “Orientation strike” that permanently shifted the American people into a new narrative reality, one where living under a king was no longer possible. He talks about the enormous power of the Declaration—”You don’t wait to be free. You act free, and force the world to reconcile with your decision” and its lessons for us today.

3. The 4th of July by

Mind of Things

The 4th of July

In a break from my normal discussions of defense, tech, and policy, I want to reflect on military service and family…

Read more

10 months ago · Justin Mc

Army veteran Justin Mc talks about the 4th of July and storytelling. He looks at his own family’s story, where individuals have fought in every major conflict going back before the Revolutionary War. On Independence Day, it became a custom for members of his family to share war stories, from the humorous to the tragic. Justin ends by considering the power of storytelling in the military and in our society more generally, writing, “Now, the fireworks are a bit too loud and my hearing is shot, but between the explosions and silence, the memories of the stories, mine and those I carry with me, ring loudly.”

4. Why the 4th of July Still Maters by

What then?

Why the 4th of July Still Matters

Read more

10 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Sam Alaimo

Navy veteran Sam Alaimo considers the importance of Independence Day. He cautions us on the risks posed by movements that seek to strip away people’s freedom and right to “self-command”. As an example, he looks at, among other things, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and its regime of death and destruction. He reminds us that Independence Day matters not just as a reminder of freedom won in the past, but to “our right to fight — and win — every war for freedom in the future.” He closes by observing how in this sense, Independence Day is about more than just America, it is about the revolution that made freedom the unalienable truth for all people.

5. What the Fourth of July Reveals About the Unfulfilled Promise of America by Theodore Johnson

Navy veteran Theodore “Ted” Johnson asks “What does the day [Independence Day] mean and who does it belong to?”. He weaves in reflections and observations about race and the American story, rituals, and the ways we might feel pulled towards emphasizing either reckoning or pride on Independence Day. He ends by asking us to consider three themes, all interconnected: pride, reckoning, and aspiration.

This is an excerpt from a book was originally posted on Lithub (https://lithub.com/what-the-fourth-of-july-reveals-about-the-unfulfilled-promise-of-america/).

6. 4th of July Edition by

Renaissance Humans

4th of July Edition

Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert…

Read more

3 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Adam Karaoguz

Navy veteran Adam Karaoguz talks about the many differing threads that are part of our “collective, controlled hallucination, this idea of America”. He looks at signs of concern, from our eroding capacity to talk to one another and commiserate with strangers, as well as signs of hope, such as the work of groups like Braver Angels. In the end, Adam argues it is up to us to bring Americans together. “We have to decide to do it, together. I hope that we do.”

7. “Some Elements of the American Character" by John Fitzgerald Kennedy

In 1946, as part of his first campaign for Congress, Navy veteran John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) gave an Independence Day speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston. In his remarks, JFK spoke to the religious, idealistic, patriotic, and individualistic elements of the American character.

Note: originally posted by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum (https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/independence-day-oration-1946).

8. An American Insurgency by Sean Marquis

Army officer Sean Marquis takes a technical analysis to the Revolutionary War, looking at the conflict through the framework offered by military doctrine. Specifically, he uses Joint Publication 3-24, Counterinsurgency, to assess whether the founders qualified as “insurgents”. He closes by giving “thanks to the insurgents, revolutionaries, patriots, freedom fighters, or whatever other titles are given to the founders for the bold actions they took to bring the country I call home into being.”

Note: originally posted by the Modern War Institute (https://mwi.westpoint.edu/july-4th-celebrating-the-good-guy-insurgents/).

In his 1851 speech, Daniel Webster said, “But to-day, we are Americans all; and all nothing but Americans.” Nothing but Americans. Without collapsing or eroding our fierce individualism, Independence Day is a day for us to see in each other our common American identity and to hold our shared story a bit more tightly. These are things well worth celebrating.

Happy Independence Day!

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s place in American society. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. Daniel Webster also gave a stirring Independence Day address in 1800, as a student at Dartmouth. You can learn more here.

2. Army officer , in his personal capacity, recommended as Independence Day reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech. The National Constitution Center has a good primer on this speech.

This battle occurred two months after I was born. It joined a long list of violent events along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that started almost immediately after military commanders representing the United Nations, North Korea, and China signed an armistice in 1953. Today, in 2025, this list continues to grow longer.2 Prior to doing research for Army 250, I knew about a handful of these incidents, such as the 1976 attack where North Koreans killed two American soldiers with clubs and axes, but most of them were new to me.3 In many ways, this sums up America’s relationship with the Korean War: ever present and always overlooked.

A War We Never Knew

The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. bears the following inscription: "Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met." It’s a beautiful, poetic statement, one worthy of the sacrifices so many made on the Korean peninsula. But it is also tragically ironic in that the Korean War is a war Americans never knew and its veterans a people they never met.

In this sense, the words inscribed on the memorial remain incomplete. They are a promise carved in stone, but not yet enshrined, as is said with the Lincoln Memorial, “in the hearts of the people”. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the war, an appropriate milestone to consider the opportunity and responsibility we have to fulfill this promise our nation made.

Korean War Veterans Memorial. Source: Department of Defense.

The Full Weight of the War

We forget the Korean War not because it was in any way insignificant. Even just considering the years 1950 to 1953, Americans fought in Korea for about as long as we fought in World War II.4 Close to two million Americans served in the Korean theater of operations. Aout 37,000 Americans were killed, over 92,000 wounded, and approximately 8,000 declared missing in action.5 Over 150 service members received the Medal of Honor for actions during the war. It was a long, brutal, war, fought in hellish conditions, and it directly affected millions of Americans.

It was also a major, geopolitical event. It turned the Cold War hot and brought home the terrific magnitude of violence we could experience in our conflict with the Communist bloc. As T.R. Fehrenbach wrote in 1963, “that such a skirmish between the earth’s two power blocs cost more than two million human lives showed clearly the extent of the chasm beside which men walked.”6

It caused America to fight a massive and sustained conflict with communist China and permanently altered our relationship with the Asia-Pacific. The Korean War set the context for both America’s Vietnam War and South Korea’s rapid economic growth as one of the four Asian Tigers.78 And the war’s influence continues to be felt—the US-South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty, signed in the aftermath of war, remains, in the words of the U.S. State Department, a “linchpin for security and stability in the Indo-Pacific”, with approximately 28,500 American service members still stationed in South Korea today.

The war’s impacts were not just limited only to foreign affairs; it was a transformational event for both the military and American society. On the military side, the Korean War featured one of the highest-profile ruptures in the history of American civil-military relations, when in 1951 President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, the commander-in-chief of the UN forces in Korea and one of the most famous military leaders in America.9 It also was the “first large-scale, jet-on-jet combat in history” and the first conflict to put an newly-independent Air Force to the test. Military strategist John Boyd, astronauts John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong, and baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams all flew in the Korean War.

Cartoon of President Truman wearing General MacArthur’s hat; sketched in 1950 when many Americans viewed Truman as less capable as a commander-in-chief. Source: Library of Congress.

The Korean War also saw the first deployment of the newly-created Army Special Forces. Though variations of Special Forces (as we understand it today) had existed prior to this point, the first Special Forces unit, the 10th Special Forces Group, was activated in June 1952. 99 Special Forces soldiers deployed to the Korean War as individual replacements in 1953. The headquarters for these units has continued to serve as the home for Special Forces and is now known as the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

Finally, with respect to its influence on American society, the Korean War was a transformational experience on matters of race and gender. It was the first large-scale conflict where the American military was racially integrated and women had permanent military roles. In 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order (EO) 9981, desegregating the military, and signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, a bill authorizing women to serve in permanent (i.e., both in peace and war) roles in the regular military. Over 600,000 Black Americans and approximately 120,000 women served in the Armed Forces during the Korean War period. One of the roles women served in during the war was as nurses as Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH), the main location for the hit television show M*A*S*H.10

Draft text of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. Source: National Archives.

For all these reasons and more, historian Clay Blair rightly described the Korean War as one of the most consequential conflicts of the twentieth century.11 But even this understates its importance, as a more accurate characterization is that the Korean War is one of the most consequential conflicts in the world. There has been no peace treaty. South Korea remains technically in a state of war with North Korea and America has a deep, active, and formal defense alliance with South Korea. A reassessment of the war’s place in our public consciousness, to give the war the significance and depth it truly merits, is long overdue.

Freedom is not Free

What might such a reassessment look like? To begin with, we can read books on the war, its veterans and all those directly impacted by the conflict. The list of books on the war should be longer, but there is still no shortage of great reads, such as: Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War, David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, On Hallowed Ground by Bill McWilliams, This Kind of War by T. R. Fehrenbach, Valleys of Death: A Memoir of the Korean War by Bill Richardson and Kevin Maurer, and Hampton Sides’s On Desperate Ground, among others.

We can also go out and meet Korean War veterans. There are still hundreds of thousands of veterans still alive today. There are also many Korean War veterans’ stories available via the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project.

Finally, we can visit memorials. In 2022, the national Korean War Veterans Memorial added a new Wall of Remembrance, which shows the names of 36,574 American servicemen and 7,114 Koreans (who were part of the Korean Augmentation to the US Army or KATUSA forces) who gave their lives during the war. These names are given additional presence through the 19 statues situated on the “Field of Service”; these statues, when combined with their reflections, create a total of 38 images of soldiers, inviting us to see the 38th parallel (the demarcation between North and South Korea) in our minds. The statues also put faces to the war, a critical feature given its overall obscurity. During the development process for the memorial, General (ret.) Richard G. Stillwell, chairman of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Advisory Board, said to the designers, “Just show their faces. Show their faces.”

The 19 statues of the Korean War Veterans Memorial. Source: National Park Service.

It is the memorial’s job to show us their faces, but it is our job to see their faces. It is our job to see their war. In doing so, we can turn it into our war in our minds, memories, and hearts. And in doing so, we can each carry forward the war’s most powerful message, written in 10-inch silver letters at the memorial: “Freedom is not free.”

Source: DVIDS.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s place in American society. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. You can learn about the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation on its website here.

At 384 pages it is a tome. The table of contents alone runs for more than 15 pages. It is filled with bureaucratic minutiae. Most sentences read like this one: “AMENDMENTS.—(1) Section 217 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998 (Public Law 105–85; 111 Stat. 1660), as amended by subsection (a)(1), is further amended—”. However, somewhere between the amendments of amendments are 37 words that while written in the sterile language of laws, speak to the deepest values of the nation.

“The Secretary of each military department shall review the service records of each Jewish American war veteran or Hispanic American war veteran described in subsection (b) to determine whether that veteran should be awarded the Medal of Honor.”

Medal of Honor from the 1940s. Source: Library of Congress

Put simply, the law directed the military to review the records of service members potentially denied the Medal of Honor due to the fact that they were Jewish or Hispanic. This was both an admonition and a challenge, a call for the nation to wrestle with the righting of wrongs and confront instances where individuals worthy of America’s highest military award for valor were rejected due to their race, ethnicity, or religion.

In both outcomes and process, these 37 words revealed much about who we are as Americans and our national story more generally. Consider, first, the outcome.

Tibor Rubin receiving the Medal of Honor in 2005. Source: Army.

Holocaust Survivor and Hero of the Korean War

As a result of this review, America went on to present dozens of individuals with the Medal of Honor.1 One of the recipients was Tibor Rubin.2 His story alone showcases American exceptionalism at its finest.

Corporal Tibor Rubin was born in 1929 in Hungary. As Jews, his family was targeted by the Nazis and suffered tremendously in the Holocaust: Rubin’s parents and sister Edith were murdered in concentration camps. Rubin, only 13 years old, was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where the Nazi commander said, “none of you will ever make it out of here alive.” Rubin managed to survive, however, and in 1945 was liberated by the American Army. As a result of his liberation, Rubin vowed to move to America and serve in the Army.

Soon after the war, Rubin fulfilled this vow. In 1948 he traveled to America and in 1949 he joined the Army.3 Still not yet an American citizen, Rubin deployed in 1950 to the Korean War as part of the 8th Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division.4

In July 1950, near the Pusan Perimeter, Rubin single-handedly defended a critical hill for over 24 hours, holding off the North Korean forces long enough for his regiment to successfully withdrawal. Then in October, near Unsan, Rubin again stepped forward to cover his unit’s withdrawal. This time, however, he was captured by the Chinese military. Rubin spent more than two and half years as a prisoner of war (POW) in terrible incarceration camps. Yet even when confronted once again with a death-camp, Rubin demonstrated exceptional bravery: he taught his fellows POWs how to manage their brutal treatment, risked his life to steal food and bring medicine, and ultimately helped save dozens of his fellow prisoners.5 For his heroism as a POW and on the battlefield, Rubin was nominated for the Medal of Honor four times by his brothers in arms. Yet he did not receive the award.

This was due to intense antisemitism. Numerous affidavits from Rubin’s fellow soldiers underscore that their senior sergeant denied Rubin recognition because he was Jewish. Rubin later recalled that this sergeant referred to him as “son of a bitch Hungarian Jew.” The issue was compounded by the war deaths of Rubin’s commanders, the officers most likely to have kept his Medal of Honor case active.

Rubin left the POW camps as part of a prisoner exchange in 1953. He returned home, became an American citizen, and built a wonderful life. He continued to express a love for the Army and was active in veterans groups. But something did not sit right with his fellow veterans.

Best Country in the World

Veterans of Rubin’s unit began organizing to petition the military to take up Rubin’s case. They eventually became part of a broader effort, one that included a campaign by Mitchel Libman, a Korean War veteran, to advocate on behalf of Leonard Kravitz. Kravitz was a Jewish soldier who gave his life in the war and had been, in Libman’s view, unjustly denied the Medal of Honor.6 Working with veterans’ groups such as the Jewish War Veterans of America, this citizens-led campaign ultimately succeeded, with Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida introducing the legislation that turned into the Medal of Honor review in the 2002 NDAA.7

President George W. Bush awarded Tibor Rubin the Medal of Honor in 2005. Rubin referred to this as receiving, “the highest honor of the best country in the world." Rubin passed away in 2015, having done more than his fair share to make America the best country in the world.

America is not perfect. Rubin and many others should have received the Medal of Honor in the 1950s. They did not because we failed, on the individual and institutional levels, to live up to one of our most deeply-held values, the belief that “all men are created equal”. This was not the first nor would it be the last time we failed to recognize the heroism of men and women for reasons counter to our national ideals. That we later righted these wrongs does not mean we should forget the failures. But it does mean they are not the end or totality of the story.

In Rubin’s case, the story continued with American citizens doing what we have done since the earliest days of the republic when confronted with a failure of justice. They organized and found common cause with other Americans of different backgrounds and views. They petitioned the government and persevered in the face of setbacks. Finally, they brought political leaders of different parties together to enact a new law. As a result, we recognized true heroism and wrote into the American story new chapters, ones that more fully capture the contributions of all our fellow-citizens; or to borrow from Steven Smith, we enlarged our “conception of who belongs in the American family.”8

This process, as much as the outcomes produced by the 2002 NDAA, highlights something exceptional about Americans and the nation. Among our people there exists such deep commitment, however messily and imperfectly it is expressed in day-to-day life, to make the country an ever-better version of itself; to give even greater meaning to the transcendent ideals laid out in our founding documents and reinvigorated at multiple times in our history. And as a nation, America has a unique capacity to right its wrongs; to become, through the efforts of its citizens, ever more deserving of the love Tibor Rubin expressed when he received the Medal of Honor.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s place in American society. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. The Association of the United States Army has a graphic novel on Corporal Rubin and his service. You can view it here.

2. Here is the Army’s official site for Corporal Rubin’s Medal of Honor.

3. Patty Nieberg at Task & Purpose did a thorough article on Corporal Rubin; you can view it here.

4. Daniel Cohen wrote a book, Single Handed, about Tibor Rubin, which you can see here.

What does this mean, then, for wars which are known only as acronyms? On a recent visit to my local VA clinic, I noticed a sign saying “OIF/OEF/OND”. These letters stand for Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq 2003-2010), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan 2001-2014), and Operation New Dawn (Iraq 2010-2011), the official names of the conflicts in which millions of Americans served.12 Seeing them posted in the VA, I thought to myself, “is this how these wars will be remembered”?

Or put differently, will my grandchildren say that I served in OEF? Or will they say the Afghanistan War? The War on Terror?

Soldiers lower the final American flag at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. Source: DVIDS.

Subconsciously, this question of memory has been building for awhile. Earlier in June, I started research for the 75th anniversary of the Korean War. On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Though the conflict turned into a brutal war that cost close to 37,000 Americans and over 400,000 South Koreans their lives, it was called the “forgotten war” as early as October 1951.3 The war—technically a “police action”—featured prominently in the 1952 president election, but never secured any lasting place in the American psyche. This lack of collective reflection undermined the transition experiences of those who had served and arguably negatively impacted American national security decision-making for many decades, especially with respect to East Asia.4

I can see a Korean War veteran in the late 1950s walking into the VA. He notices a sign on the wall, maybe it reads “KMAG” for Korean Military Advisory Group, or “UNC” for United Nations Command. Outside on the street, those letters mean almost nothing, but within this former soldier’s mind, they mean almost everything. Though their functional purpose is to provide directions for treatment, these acronyms are portals for the initiated, entry points for a journey to places with names such as Taejon-ni, Hill 255, Sobangsan, Kasan, and others.

The power of such remembrances for veterans has long been noted. World War II veteran Paul Fussell, in his epic study of World War I literature The Great War and Modern Memory, wrote that for soldiers, “[r]evisiting the battlefields in memory becomes as powerful a ritual obligation as visiting the cemeteries.” For veterans and families of the post-9/11 wars, the letters OIF, OEF, OND—and we could add OFS and OIR among others—are integral parts of these rituals. But that is not the case for most Americans.

To the extent the broader American population tries to reflect on these wars, they face a pneumonic battlefield littered with terms and letters. Thrown in the mix alongside at least five different operational names (e.g., OIF, OEF, etc.) are terms like the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the War on Terror, GWOT, and so on. Each name captures part of the story, but only a part.

If we had a robust shared understanding of the main story, if there was one, true, common narrative that the vast majority of Americans understood about these wars, we could probably be all right with this jumble of names. Wars are never neat and tidy, and always subject to debate, but there can be some matter of truth that penetrates with sufficient breadth and depth to allow disagreements to play out across a common foundation. This can make all the difference when it comes to revisiting, reflecting on, and ultimately learning from war, even if we refer to those wars with different terms. After all, what does it matter that we enter through different doors if we all end up in the same room? But I question whether we have a common foundation with the post-9/11 wars.

But I also don’t believe the matter is closed. We are still in these wars. This is literally true, with soldiers still serving in places such as Iraq, but narratively true as well. The meaning of these wars is still something not just up for debate, but arguably still yet to be known. Much like Churchill ended up seeing World War I and World War II as one long war, Americans may yet see the first several decades of the 21st century as one long conflict, the end of which still remains in the future.5

Thus the imperative is to get engaged, to shape both how we remember the post-9/11 wars and the lessons we take from them. We can all still influence not just the names our grandchildren and their children use to describe our wars, but the meaning, the broader national narrative, the names evoke.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s place in American society. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. Paul Fussell passed away in 2012. PBS has some background info on his military service here.

Source: Army.

This week in lieu of an essay, I’m providing a roll-up of Army 250 events. I will pick up normal writing next week (more on this at the end). Hopefully you can attend or watch one or more of the events listed below. If there is not an event within driving distance from you, consider hosting an event! Everyone can celebrate Army 250. If you need suggestions on how to host an Army event, please email me (dan@army250.us) and I am happy to help!

Army 250 Week

Source: Army.

The Army put out a helpful guide to a series of formal events this week. The list shown below includes these events as well as others I found online. The American Legion also has on its website a great list of activities.

June 9

• National Museum of the United States Army (NMUSA): NMUSA’s brand new special exhibition, “CALL TO ARMS: The Soldier and the Revolutionary War” is now on display. This includes a rare collection of Revolutionary War artifacts and stories of our nation’s first soldiers. It will run through June 2027.

June 10

• Army 250 celebration U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys, South Korea.

June 11

• Twilight Tattoo at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia.

June 12

• Fairways to Freedom event, Ruggles Golf Course, Aberdeen Proving Ground.

• Army 250 celebration at The Great American Beer Hall, Medford, Massachusetts.

June 13

• Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 250th birthday commemoration, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. AUSA is hosting a celebration starting on June 13 and running through June 15.

• Army birthday run (7am )at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia.

• U.S. Mint will announce the Army coin.

• Fort Gregg-Adams Museum Enclave—this event includes the Army Quartermaster Museum, the Army Women's Museum, and the Ordnance Training Support Facility. (Note: this and many other events are listed on the website of VA250, Virginia’s 250th Commission.)

• Richmond, Virginia Army 250 birthday celebration (also on June 14 and 15).

• Detroit, Michigan Army 250 birthday celebration (AUSA).

June 14

Army birthday festivities will be livestreamed at https://www.dvidshub.net.

Here is a rundown of the June 14 celebrations in and around Washington DC:

• 8:15 a.m. - The day will begin with the Army Birthday Wreath Laying at Arlington National Cemetery and will be livestreamed from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

• 9:30 a.m. –Fourteen (14) teams of soldiers will compete in an Army Fitness Competition on the National Mall in D.C.

• 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. The Army Festival – a free and family friendly Army festival at the National Mall; it will include musical performances from Noah Hicks, DJ Nyla/Stage Flip, and Scotty Hasting; Army demonstrations, activities for kids and equipment displays; and, opportunities to interact with NFL representatives, Army Astronauts, soldiers and Medal of Honor recipients.

• 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m. The parade – The 90-minute parade will take place on Constitution Avenue Northwest between 15th Street and 23rd Streets and will include: approximately 6,600 soldiers with participants from all the Army’s Divisions and representation from the National Guard and Army Reserve, Special Operations Command, United Stated Military Academy and Reserve Officer Training Corps. Due to security screening requirements, please plan to arrive early. NO one will be turned away even if they do not pre-register. Non-registrants will undergo additional screening at festival entrance. Public RSVP: REGISTER HERE and Media Credential Request: There will be a designated media riser for a limited number of credentialed outlets. Members of the media can request credentials using link: REGISTER HERE. All requests must be submitted by Tuesday, June 10, 2025, at 12:00 PM EDT.

• 8:30 p.m. (Approximately)– The President of the United States will oversee an Enlistment/Reenlistment Ceremony & Golden Knights Jump at the Ellipse, with Flag Hand-Off Presentation.

• 8:30 – 9:30 p.m. – Special live broadcast activities at the Ellipse fFireworks and entertainment).

Other activities on June 14 include:

• Army birthday dinner - Army Heritage Center Foundation, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

• Event in Carson City, Nevada.

• Army birthday celebration at The General George Patton Museum of Leadership, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

• Army 250 celebration in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Other Events

• Events in Bavaria Germany.

• June 18 Army 250 celebration at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

• June 28 birthday celebration in New Orleans, Louisiana (AUSA).

A Cool Thing

U.S. Army Garrison Fort Hunter Liggett organized a multi-day, 250 mile ruck march to honor the Army’s 250th.

What’s Next for Army 250

The Army is celebrating its 250th from 2025 through 2033, the end of the Revolutionary War, so I will continue to do so as well. I will continue to write on the relationship between the Army and American culture and society, and explore related topics of civic culture and military history. I will also try to highlight interesting events tied to America’s 250th as we approach 2026.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. The Army has an official Army 250 site where you can explore an interactive timeline and read about the wide array of Army 250 events.

2. The Defense Visual Information Distributions Systems (DVIDS) has as great site up where you can track and follow Army 250 events.

This possibility can be glimpsed with the Army. In May 2025, the Army released Field Manual 1 (FM-1), The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms. This publication is intended for young Army leaders, to help inculcate them in the story of the Army, its purpose, identity, values, roles, and responsibilities. FM-1 also communicates to the reader their part in the story, weaving together a series of real-world examples that speak to the range of roles and leaders found in the Army: Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore and Sergeant Major Basil Plumley commanding their battalion through the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, Specialist Salvatore ‘Sal’ Giunta leading his soldiers through an L-shaped ambush in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester fighting through an ambush near Salman Pak, Iraq, and many others. It is a powerful identify-forming document. But it is directed only at members of the Army.

Could there be an FM-1 equivalent for civilians? Could we create a document that tells a story and offers a suite of values and responsibilities that American civilians should uphold with how they orient towards and engage with the military? Could such a document have any impact on improving the quality of discourse and national-security decision-making in the country?

It’s possible that the answer to any or all of these questions is no. But we are a nation where the military ultimately reports to civilians. This makes the question of what it means to be a civilian a matter of life and death. As such, however improbable an FM-1 for civilians might seem, it could be an endeavor worth pursuing.

Minute Man Monument. Source: Smithsonian.

Citizen-Soldiers to Civilians and Soldiers

We start with first principles given to us by George Washington. First, American soldiers and civilians are both citizens.2 “When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen…” This sentiment, which Washington first said in 1775, has held true for the entirety of our nation’s history. It creates a common identity that binds together all Americans, regardless on one’s direct connection to the military.

Second, civilians control the military. Washington established this principle with how he commanded the Army during the Revolutionary War, reinforced it in how he ended the Newburgh Conspiracy, and brought it home when he resigned his commission in December 1783. This principle was subsequently codified in the Constitution (which also distributes military authority between Congress and the Executive) and statutes.

Washington Resigning His Commission by Ferdinand Pettrich. Source: Smithsonian.

For much of the nation’s history it was the identity of “soldier” that suffered from underemphasis. Concerned about the potential for permanent armies to undermine the new republic, America’s founding generations deliberately kept the Army (and Navy and Marines) small. National security relied on “citizen-soldiers” who mobilized as individuals or militias during periods of acute crisis.3 Although the professional military grew more robust over the 19th and 20th centuries, America still relied on surging forces via drafts or volunteers up through the Vietnam War.

But in 1973, America transitioned to an All-Volunteer Force and created a new, fundamental distinction between civilian and soldier. Since then, although American men ages 18-25 have continued to register for the draft (selective service), experiences of and expectations for military service have shifted dramatically.

On the one hand, the military has grown significantly more professional. FM-1 is just the latest example of how the Army intentionally seeks to inculcate a strong professional identity. Comparable efforts are found across the military. (For more on the Army’s professionalization journey, see this piece from last year.)

On the other hand, most civilians have grown more detached from the military and the idea of military service. A recent survey found that if a world war were to break out that involved the U.S., only 15 percent of Americans say they would volunteer or serve if called; 13 percent said they would not volunteer and refuse to serve if called up; and 60 percent said they did not believe the military would want them to serve (age, physical or medical factors, etc.). While it’s impossible to realistically measure how people would react to a future war, the data indicates the extent to which many Americans feel no responsibility for military service.4

There is nothing inherently wrong with Americans assuming a professional force bears responsibility for fighting wars, provided civilians still see clear roles to play in the national security system.5 A nation’s strength is only partially captured with conventional measures that look at defense spending, sizes of forces, technological capabilities, etc. It matters a great deal how a society determines to wage war and how it responds to crisis, adapts as conflicts unfold, and manages the transitions of those who serve. In these determinations, civilians have enormous influence and impact. Put differently, if we could create a truly comprehensive measure of national power, we would see that so much of our strength (or weakness) ultimately depends on roles that only civilians can play.

These roles are clearest for civilians within government (e.g., elected or appointed officials and defense department civil servants) or who work in the defense industry. But ordinary civilians also have important roles. Civilians can have an impact through voting and corresponding with elected leaders, for example, or through serving on things such as Selective Service boards. Civilians decide what military educational content schools offer and whether and how programs such as ROTC and JROTC are offered. They can engage with local veteran and military family groups in civil society efforts. The list goes on and includes responsibilities that are universally applicable, such as staying informed on military affairs.

But as civilians, do we see these roles? Do we know what it looks like to uphold these responsibilities? Or could we use a playbook, an FM-1 equivalent?

FM-1. Source: Army.mil.

FM-1 for Civilians

First things first, what an FM-1 for civilians would not be. It would not be a legal document. The identity of civilian does not confer any additional legal obligations beyond those required of citizen. Nor should an FM-1 for civilians come from the military or any government agency. Any such top-down effort would almost certainly fail. The most productive pathway would be harness civil-society and engage Americans at the local level.

Such initiatives have a long history of success in America. Our capacity to produce change via civil society is a unique quality of America, one that Alexis de Tocqueville noted as early as 1831, writing, “Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”

In addition to flowing through civil society, an FM-1 for civilians would argue at the level of norms, values, and rituals. The goal would not be to produce a set of new laws, but rather to invigorate a shared identity, one with the power to shape and influence behavior. Today we often refer to such matters as issues of our civil religion, a framing sociologist Robert Bellah put forth in 1967 to describe the “beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that form a sort of shared theology within Americans’ way of life. Though lacking in formal or coercive authorities, matters of our civil religion can weigh significantly on Americans’ choices and actions.

An FM-1 for civilians could thus emerge from the collective deliberation and input of many different groups and parts of society. We could field-test, so to speak, ideas at events hosted by schools and civic groups and online forums organized by any number of membership groups. We could build a myriad of channels—offline and online—for Americans to weigh in on the conversations. In order to generate the most robust and constructive engagement, we might imagine the process leaning more into asking questions rather than seeking to generate rigid prescriptions. For example:

1. How should individuals, as voters orient towards the military in ways that acknowledge the wide range of political attitudes Americans hold towards the military and foreign policy? How can we best ensure a shared commitment to a healthy military institution while appreciating that American political groups will pursue different policy agendas and goals?

2. As technologies such as artificial intelligence and drones become more salient in warfare and expand and blur the boundaries of what we consider the defense industry, what are the responsibilities employers and employees have to learn about the military? About military ethics?

3. How should parents talk with their children about military service? Similarly, how should coaches, advisors, teachers, and others with influence on the youth discuss military service?

4. How should middle and high schools teach and offer programming about the military? How should the school community engage with such content and programming?

5. What responsibilities do civil servants, elected officials, and appointed officials have towards the military? How should these civilians understand their roles?

6. What responsibilities do all civilians have with respect to staying informed about the military? What about with respect to visiting military installations or otherwise getting to know the force?

7. Finally, what sorts of obligations do civilians feel the military has towards them?

There are many more such questions we could pose. Through hundreds of conversations and thousands of inputs from ordinary Americans, we could construct a document that brought to life how American civilians conceive of their roles and responsibilities, both present and aspirational, with respect to the military. The goal with this document, our FM-1 for civilians, would be less to provide a laundry list of what civilians should do and more to surface compelling arguments for why and towards what end. By weaving in narratives that show the myriad of ways civilians engage with the military, showing the roles of parents, voters, coaches, civil society leaders, faith leaders, defense industry employees, defense civil servants, etc. our document could let all civilians see themselves in the story. Done well, such a document could not just drive new conversations about what it means to be a civilian in America, but lead people to feel a greater sense of both personal responsibility and agency towards the health of our military.

Little Platoons

This is not to say any of this would be easy. Civil society has been described as “little platoons” and in America, these little platoons fight against each other almost as often as they fight together towards a shared objective. Such would certainly be the case with any conversation about civilians’ roles and responsibilities towards the military.

Conversations about protesting wars, for example, would likely produce significant heat (though hopefully also at least as much light). Similarly, the partisan polarization more present in Americans’ attitudes towards the military today would likely show up in whatever town halls, online events, and other forums used to generate an FM-1 for civilians. But while acknowledging these concerns, it’s also possible, I’d argue even probable, for such a process to surface surprising areas of common ground.

Too often we let fears of polarization stop us from pursuing ideas that actually share broad support. There is a thirst evident among so many Americans for something different, something new. I can imagine few better areas to make such an attempt than to discuss our common considerations, concerns, and responsibilities with respect to the institution charged with our national defense, the military.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. In 2024, scholar Alice Friend published a book, Mightier Than the Sword, that seeks to provide a more robust framework for what civilian control of the military looks like. You can also see an article she wrote on this topic here: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/what-makes-a-civilian/.

2. FM-1 is a unique piece of military doctrine, however, all the branches of the military branches have a core, identity-forming publication. In addition to FM-1, the Army has ADP-1, The Army; the Marines have MCDP-1, Warfighting; the Air Force has AFDP-1, The Air Force; the Navy has NDP-1, Naval Warfare (I had trouble locating the actual document, so if folks have an easily accessible link to the most current version, please share); and the Space Force has SFDD-1, The Space Force.

May you have a meaningful and fulfilling Memorial Day weekend.

Source: DVIDS.

Recent Memorial Day Writing

Dan Vallone - Why We Visit Graves on Memorial Day

This piece first appeared online in Christianity Today yesterday, May 23, 2025. In it I discuss the importance of physically visiting gravesites on Memorial Day. I approach this from a military perspective and from a Christian one. Both the military and the church have ritualistic approaches to death, which enable us to feel both intense grief and the utmost reverence.

Link here: Why We Visit Graves on Memorial Day

Kayla Williams - Who Should We Honor on Memorial Day?

Kayla is an Army veteran and author of Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army and Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War. In 2023 she wrote a guest op-ed for the New York Times discussing those who have died from war, but who are less frequently brought up in the context of memorialization: Army nurses in WWI where their service status was not yet formally decided; service members who die from ailments such as cancer where the root cause was service-related; and those who die by suicide, among others. Her essay challenges us to consider how we might expand our conception of who is honored on Memorial Day, to more fully capture the day’s meaning.

Link here: Who Should We Honor on Memorial Day?

The National Maul - Memorial Day and U.S. Military Rugby

This is a beautiful piece from Martin Pengelly about rugby, the Army (and other parts of the military), war, and Memorial Day. It includes notes stories from his book Brotherhood, about the West Point rugby team that will make you laugh and cause you to reflect on the somber nature of sacrifice and the terrible realities of war.

The National Maul

‘From the comic to the sacred': Memorial Day and U.S. military rugby

In Seattle on Friday, the Seawolves will face the Houston Sabercats in a Major League Rugby game that will have much to say about who makes the end-of-season play-offs. As Friday is also the start of the Memorial Day weekend, the Seawolves are making it a…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · The National Maul

Scott Cooper- The Risks of Memorial Day Not Being Personal

Scott is a retired Marine Corps officer and someone I had the privilege of working with on a series of public opinion projects focused on Americans’ attitudes towards veterans and the military. In this piece, published yesterday (May 23, 2025) in War on the Rocks, Scott warns of the risks America faces the more Memorial Day becomes impersonal; the dangers of having a nation where most feel little direct connection to the military.

Link here: The Risks of Memorial Day Not Being PersonalArmy 250 Memorial Day post in 2024

Army 250 Memorial Day Article from 2024

Last year I wrote about Army Major John Alexander (“Alex”) Hottell III, who gave his life to the nation in 1970 while serving in the Vietnam War. He is now buried at the West Point Cemetery. Before he died, Alex composed a beautiful and moving eulogy for his own death.

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Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

Occasionally, they were invoked explicitly, as when a panel lamented America’s inability to stop looters from raiding Iraq’s art in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, compared to the heroic preservation efforts of World War II’s Monuments Men. But more often the ghosts existed in silence, their presence felt only by the unstated contrasts: the righteousness of Gettysburg and the muddled sense of purpose of Iraq; the clarity of victory with Normandy and the heart-wrenching loss with Afghanistan.

Pennsylvania Monument, Gettysburg National Military Park. Source: Author’s photo.

Neither the Civil War nor World War II were as clear or decisive as we sometimes imagine. A little over a decade after Lee’s surrender, Federal troops left the South and decades of segregation and Jim Crow set in; similarly, within a few years of V-E day, the Iron Curtain dropped and the Cold War began. Yet both wars have powerful, national narratives grounded in truth.

The Civil War preserved the nation and eliminated slavery. As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Through victory in the Civil War, America realized this new birth of freedom, however imperfectly, and carried forward the torch of liberty and equality.

Gettysburg National Military Park. Source: Author’s photo.

In World War II, America—along with our allies—defeated fascism. With the invasion of Normandy, we answered what General Eisenhower called the “hopes and prayers of liberty- loving people everywhere”. And in victory, we secured for ourselves and future generations a world freed from the tyranny and oppression of the Axis powers. America’s warriors then went home and helped create decades of prosperity. As Stephen Ambrose wrote in his book Band of Brothers, “The job completed, the company disbanded, the men went home.”

One cannot walk the grounds of Gettysburg or the American Cemetery in Normandy without sensing the special place these sites and their stories occupy in America’s civic religion.

But being in the presence of these stories also raises questions. What are the sacred stories and sites for the War on Terror? Or put differently, what stories do our ghosts tell and where do they live?

The first inclination might be to look to 9/11, the memorial in New York, and President George W. Bush’s remarks. We have that moment when, prompted by an onlooker saying he could not hear the president, Bush shouted “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” We also have the speech he gave just over a week later before a joint session of Congress, where he told the nation and world:

“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated…The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.”

Yet neither the words spoken at Ground Zero nor in the well of Congress yielded a narrative that achieved broad resonance with the War on Terror.

There proved too much dissonance between the Churchillian narrative President Bush struck and the way the war played out in Afghanistan and Iraq.1 At the end of his speech, Bush said, “As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.” Our war never produced an age of liberty and while I reject the idea that we have lived in age of terror, we have failed to overcome the fear that first visited us that clear morning in September.

As for 9/11 itself, while the memorial is sacred ground and Bush’s remarks a powerful part of that story, they belong to that day. The narrative they tell belongs to the extraordinary loss inflicted on thousands of families and the nation as a whole, and to the even greater heroism demonstrated by so many police, fire fighters, other first responders, and ordinary Americans who rushed into the fire and smoke. It belongs to the dust and the battle so many survivors had to fight to secure medical support. But outside of the Horse Soldier monument which stands ever vigilant over the memorial, 9/11’s narrative is not a war story.

In truth, it’s not clear the War on Terror has a coherent narrative. There are stories of victory and defeat, solidarity and betrayal, and perhaps most of all, confusion and frustration. The war struck the military and veteran community deeply, yet seemed to land so lightly on most of society. Yet while acknowledging this narrative fog, I was struck recently by a line from the 2025 film Warfare: “You are not alone.”

In the film it is meant literally. Lieutenant Macdonald is shouting to his injured platoon-mate Elliot, trying to give him hope as he hovers between life and death. But it also captures something deeper about the war on terror. As the war descended into long, drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it grew ever more important to fight for each other, to bring people back home, and in so many ways, to ensure that no one felt alone in the conflict. These motivations always drive soldiers’ actions, but as the strategic contexts grew murky and the prospect of clear-cut victory dimmed, the entire battle space became, from a narrative standpoint, the unit.

This is a message powerfully conveyed in Warfare. Directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, the film shows a a platoon of Navy SEALs as they occupy, defend, and finally evacuate from a house in Ramadi, Iraq. It is based on a real battle Ray was a part of and it draws on the memories of many service members present that day. But the viewer never knows the actual mission. You don’t know why the SEALs are in the house or what their unit is doing in Iraq more generally. All you see is what the SEALs experienced in a single day—the boredom, the brutal fight, and the brotherhood.

“You are not alone” then, is the mission.

This holds true for the broader War on Terror experience.

My tour was nothing like that of the fight in Ramadi, but even I felt this. My commander, for example, was adamant we travel across Afghanistan to deliver end-of-tour medals to our soldiers (I was on staff at the time). Our soldiers had been distributed throughout the country to train the Afghan military and police, and so he felt, I believe, that they needed to physically re-connect to the broader unit; they needed to know that they were seen and part of our shared story. They needed to know, in other words, that they were not alone.

It’s a mantra that has defined so much of the past almost twenty-five years. It’s a promise we carry to those we served alongside, to the fallen, and to all our families, that they will not be alone. In uniform and civilian life, good times and bad, youth and old age, you are not alone. It’s an honorable narrative and a privilege to carry the promise.

But veterans need not carry it alone.

A Site

Right now there is no single War on Terror site invested with the spiritual power of a Gettysburg or Normandy. Many memorials exist across the country and Section 60 at Arlington is known as a shared resting ground for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is no setting analogous to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (which includes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall).

That will change soon.

The Global War on Terrorism Memorial has moved into the design phase, with a projected opening in 2028. This landmark will serve as a unique space for all Americans to gather, reflect, learn, and engage with the war’s narrative together. Elliot Ackerman, a Marine Corps veteran and co-chair of the memorial’s design advisory council described his hopes for the memorial by saying:

“My hope is that the Memorial will be a place where people who have been touched by the GWOT in any way can gather and reflect. Whether you’re a veteran, a family member, or a student visiting the nation’s capital, I hope this Memorial will help people make sense of the conflict and find meaning in it. If we can reflect on what this war meant, then we can derive meaning from the war. Making meaning is the way people heal, and ultimately, it’s the way people can come home.”

Home. Home is the ultimate end goal when we say “you are not alone”; the final destination for the promise we carry. We need not wait for the memorial to be part of this, but a national site will give us a common starting point, a place where each of us can see our part in the story.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. Learn more about the Pennsylvania Monument here.

2. Learn more about the GWOT Memorial here.

The conversation ranged from the comic to the sacred. John Orloff started by describing how he felt his mission was to just “tell the story” of Easy Company. Although he resisted efforts to “juice it up”—noting, appropriately, that if you need to juice up a story about men who jump from airplanes into gunfire and then fight through some of the worst conflicts in the largest war humanity has ever known, then “you are not a f*cking writer”—he spared no effort on research. It was clear John had talked dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times with the Easy Company soldiers still alive when Band of Brothers was filming. John also shared that when he took on writing episode 9 and the concentration camp, he struggled with the enormity of that task and had writers block for several weeks.

Dale Dye relished talking about how he put the Band of Brothers actors, or as he affectionately calls them, “maggots”, through a high-intensity boot camp prior to filming. Alongside this good-natured ribbing, both Mark and Matthew grew emotional at times when discussing the soldiers they portrayed in the series. It was clear how deeply both men have been moved by their Band of Brothers experience: Mark has Dukeman’s service number tattooed on his shoulder, for example, and Matthew leads battlefield tours through his We Happy Few 506 company. Matthew also shared pieces of a letter Floyd Talbert—who experienced a difficult post-war transition and only re-connected with Easy Company towards the end of his life—wrote to Dick Winters (who commanded Easy during D-Day and for much of its harshest fighting) wherein he talked about how much Winters meant to him. For a man who struggled with connection, Talbert’s letter revealed the depth of love he felt for Winters and his fellow brothers of Easy.

Statue of Major Dick Winters near Utah Beach, Normandy. Source: DVIDS.

It was thus fitting that the conversation ended with Peter Youngblood Hills, who played Darrell “Shifty” Powers in Band of Brothers, surprising everyone by showing up in-person. It was a great moment—Peter stood in line to ask questions at the end of the conversation, but when his time was up, he stayed at the mic and asked Dale if he would lead the group in calling cadence. The panelists could not see clearly who this persistent audience member was and for a moment, confusion reigned. But then Peter started calling cadence and when he revealed his identify, the panelists jumped out of their seats to embrace him in a hug. It was a beautiful demonstration of how the bonds among the cast and crew mirrored those that exist in the infantry. I can imagine no better way to have closed a session where the topic was “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.1

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. You can see the tour program, We Happy Few 506, co-founded by Matthew Leitch here.

2. You can see J.D. Huitt’s history series on YouTube here and here.

3. You can check out the Gettysburg Museum of History here.

This effort, which historian and author Robert Edsel referred to as a campaign to “salvage Western Civilization”, was the feature of a conversation at the Gettysburg Film Festival among Edsel, Susan Eisenhower (historian, scholar, and grand-daughter of General and President Eisenhower), and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. Known most prominently through the film The Monuments Men, which was based off of Edsel’s book, America’s World War II cultural preservation initiatives were at once smart military strategy and exceptional humanitarian endeavors.

Army 250 discussed Monuments Men back in November 2024.

The Monuments Men, or Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program as it was officially called, had support at the highest levels. Although Edsel noted the concept was initially the brainchild of art experts such as Paul Sachs, the director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, General Eisenhower issued directives that made commanders and troops responsible for protecting cultural sites and materials “so far as war allows". Edsel underscored that the push for this effort came, at first, to counter Nazi propaganda that was telling Europeans the Americans were looting and destroying cultural artifacts (the very thing the Nazis themselves had done and continued to do wherever they occupied territory). The Monuments Men enabled America to demonstrate its commitment to preserving Europe’s cultural artifacts and sites.

One of the orders from General Eisenhower instructing commanders to preserve cultural sites and artifacts. Source: National Archives.

The propaganda benefits of the program does not, however, take away anything from the historic humanitarian contribution it made to Europe and the world. Never before had anything like this been done. As both Edsel and Susan Eisenhower underscored, Ike believed deeply in the foundational role art plays in enabling individuals and civilizations to grow and flourish. This sentiment is evident in remarks he gave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946 when accepting an Honorary Life Fellowship. You can listen to the remarks and see notes he prepared for the event, a few lines of which underscore his philosophy towards art:

“But I do know that, for democracy at least, there always stands beyond the materialism and destructiveness of war the ideals for which it is fought. Thus, the awful test of war is primarily a testing of the spirt, and so it is possible for the fighting man to experience, in war, a definite spiritual growth. But for simpler reasons than these, I believe that many of our veterans have gained renewed interest in art and the world of the artist.”

This “testing of the spirit” was brought home at the festival by award-winning singer-songwriter Judy Collins, whole led us in singing “Amazing Grace”. Collins has previously talked about the song as conveying “hope and healing” and that it “has a feeling about surviving terrible things. But it gives you a moment of hope.” As Europe and the world emerged from the ravages of World War II, the thousands of artifacts preserved by the Monuments Men and Women proved a wellspring of hope, connecting hundreds of millions to stories about their past and enabling them to envision a better future.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. Check out the Monuments Men and Women Foundation here.

As I got into Gettysburg last night, my mind went not to the words Lincoln said here over 160 years ago, but to words that Dwight Eisenhower never said. The message Ike crafted just prior to the launch of Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944, to be released in the event the attack on Normandy failed, is one of the great pieces of American writing that few people know about. Perhaps it is being here at Gettysburg and reflecting on how close this battle was that sent my mind to consider Ike’s words, but they are worth writing in full here.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Through the incredible heroics of so many Americans, Brits, Canadians, and others from across the Allied force, Ike never had to release this message. But I still marvel at those last two lines, praising the bravery and dedication of the troops while taking full and singular responsibility for the failure. A lesson in leadership that stands the test of time.

I’ll close with a lesson on love. My first event at the Gettysburg Film Festival concluded with actor Martin Sheen leading about 1,200 people in singing “America the Beautiful”. I missed the first couple of seconds, but I am sharing a recording here. I have been blessed to sing this ode to America in many different settings and it never fails to move me. It is such a gift to feel the shared sense of love evident in people’s voices.

More to come from Gettysburg.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

You can learn more about the festival at its homepage here.

You can also follow the festival on Facebook and Instagram.

“Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.”

E.B White “On Democracy”

Baseball is spliced deep into America’s DNA. In the midst of World War II, author E.B. White included baseball in his stirring articulation of democracy, trusting that the metaphor would be universally understood by his American audience. It’s been fifty years since football displaced it as America’s favorite sport to watch, yet baseball still looms as our national pastime. The romance of the sport taps deep into the most compelling parts of nostalgia and hope: baseball is when Ray gets to play ball with his dad as hundreds of cars come to watch in Field of Dreams. But it’s also the ultimate underdog story, with mavericks like Billy Beane in Moneyball pulling together teams of outcasts that topple giants. Even at its most unromantic, with teams whose budgets rival the GDPs of nations, baseball still pulls us in with its spectacle and grace, epic rivalries, and the hope we hold onto that one day we might step up to the bat. I’m far from the world’s biggest baseball fan, but when the opportunity arose to practice a few swings at Fenway, it did not matter that the stadium was empty and the balls thrown by a machine, it was magic.

But before all that. Before the magic and the spectacle. Before YES Network and Moneyball. Even before Murderers’ Row. Baseball was Army.

Or was it?

Some call it a myth. Others say the evidence is “pathetic”. But whatever shortcomings there might be in the historical record, Army veteran Abner Doubleday is officially credited as inventing baseball in 1839, when he was a cadet at the United States Military Academy (West Point). This means every home run, strikeout, and double-play is part of the Army’s story.

Abner Doubleday. Source: Library of Congress.

The tale behind Doubleday’s fame is one for the ages. Baseball began in earnest following the Civil War, but in 1907, a group of baseball executives, led Albert Goodwill Spalding—a former pitcher who went on to found the sports equipment giant Spalding—formed the Mills Commission, to identify the origins of the game. The commission head was A.G. Mills, the president of the National League and friend of Abner Doubleday.1 In April 1908, the Commission produced its final report declaring, “The first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, NY, in 1839." The evidence for this determination was testimony from a man named Abner Graves, who wrote a letter saying he saw Doubleday invent the game. The Commission apparently did not investigate the claim and Doubleday, having been deceased for over 15 years, was unable to confirm or deny the attribution. Whatever its veracity, the announcement provided baseball with a powerful origin story.

Early baseball—the Atlantics of Brooklyn Baseball team, 1865. Source: Library of Congress.

General Doubleday, while never as famous as Grant, Custer, or Sherman, was nonetheless well-known for his military exploits and leadership. He supposedly fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861; he fought bravely at Antietam and Fredericksburg, among many battles; and at the Battle of Gettysburg, he assumed command of I Corps when Major General John Reynolds was killed and led 9,500 Army soldiers in holding off more than 16,000 Confederate soldiers. Christopher Gwinn, Chief of Interpretation and Education at Gettysburg National Memorial Park, calls this Doubleday’s “best day during the Civil War.” Following the war, Doubleday commanded an all African-American unit in Texas, where he set up baseball games to build morale for his unit. He was, by all accounts, an impressive leader of character and a patriotic American; in other words, a worthy founder for America’s national pastime.

The Mills Commission’s decision has had major impacts. The Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, New York largely due to its connection to the Doubleday origin story; the baseball field at West Point is Doubleday Field (as is the field in Cooperstown); and America held a celebration of baseball’s centennial anniversary in 1939—100 years after Doubleday supposedly created the game. Doubleday—and through him the Army—are thus now deeply woven into the fabric of the game.

But Doubleday is far from the only connection between baseball and the Army. Legends such as Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and Willie Mays, among many others, all served in the Army. More recently, West Point graduates Chris Rowley and Jacob Hurtubise played in the MLB. One need only watch a game at Doubleday Field to see the bond between the Army and baseball remains strong.

My baseball career ended early; it started going downhill when they removed the batting tee. But my attachment to the sport runs deep. About twenty years ago, when my father-in-law, a lifelong, dedicated baseball fan, was battling cancer, I asked the West Point baseball team to sign a poster for him. They rallied essentially the whole team to sign a beautiful wall print. This meant a great deal to me, to my then-fiancée (now wife), and to my father-in-law. He passed away not long after and I’ll be forever grateful for the gift baseball gave us during a hard time. And now as a father, I look forward to bringing my son to many a game as he gets older. I can’t teach him much about how to swing or pitch, but I can tell him about the magic of baseball and its long roots in America, which might just include a young West Point cadet organizing a game out in Cooperstown almost two hundred years ago.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. The National Baseball Hall of Fame’s website is here.

2. West Point Baseball’s website is here.

3. You can learn about MLB's military appreciation programs here.

4. Abner Doubleday is buried at Arlington; you can learn more about his gravesite here.

It was not the Army that first sacralized burial rituals and ground in America. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, “The concept of the Good Death was central to mid-nineteenth century America, as it had long been at the core of Christian practice.”1 But the Army did play an important role in transforming the burial experience in America, in ways that continue to influence us today.

The catalytic event was the Civil War. The magnitude of death unleashed by this war overwhelmed the Army and nation in both an operational and spiritual sense. Logistically, it broke the Army’s ability to efficiently and appropriately process its dead (and those from the Confederate forces). And similarly, by confronting the nation with death on a previously unimaginable scale, the Civil War challenged Americans to wrestle with new meaning for the word sacrifice.

Across both these fronts, the Army eventually helped create new innovations and institutions that altered the practice and purpose of burial in America. Operationally, the Army contributed to the birth of the modern mortuary business, bringing national scale to what had previously been a familial affair. Spiritually, and perhaps more significant for our purposes, the Army pushed the nation to build the first-ever national cemeteries, forever concretizing the concept of national sacrifice. As Faust puts it, “Death created the modern American union—not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.”

Fields of Death

The numbers stagger the mind. In the Civil War, approximately 620,000 soldiers died.2 Taking just the deaths among Union forces, the number is over 360,000, or about 2 percent of the 1860 population. That would be as if 6,500,000 soldiers died today.3

We really have no way to comprehend that magnitude of death. In her 2023 foreword, Dr. Faust talks about America’s experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, which took the lives of approximately 1,100,000 people. Yet as tragic as that figure is, it still pales in terms of overall size and, perhaps even more differentially, density.

Battle of Antietam. Source: Library of Congress.

The Civil War dead did not fall in a distributed fashion across the entirety of the country; they perished en masse in very specific, often quite small, geographies. At the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), over 12,000 Army soldiers died in one day (about 12 hours to be more precise), on a battlefield of approximately 3,200 acres. 3,200 acres is about four times the size of New York City’s Central Park. Can you imagine 214,000 Americans dying today, in one day, in such a small box of terrain? The answer is no.

Neither could the Army in 1861.

Anticipating a quick, light conflict, the Army failed to mobilize for mass casualties. As late as 1862, Army units took to battle without dedicated ambulance personnel to extract the dead and wounded. But even when the Army had personnel and infrastructure to manage the dead, they were still insufficient to the task. At the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3 , 1863), where over 3,000 Army soldiers died, “so many bodies lay unburied that a surgeon described the atmosphere as almost intolerable.” The smell from the dead would only go away when frost came in October, shortly before President Lincoln arrived to dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery.4

Dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. Source: Library of Congress.

Being compelled, by desperation or the inadequacy of resources, to leave the dead unburied or half-buried was deeply upsetting for soldiers. As Roland Bowen of the 15th Massachusetts wrote, “This is not how we bury folks at home.”5 In the midst of this desperation, however, both the methods and meaning of death were changing.

From Death An Industry is Born

Thomas Holmes started the Civil War as a captain in the Army and ended it as the “Father of Modern Embalming.” Holmes had already established his proficiency with embalming when the war broke out and his business—he resigned his commission with the medical corps and charged $100 a body—took off as casualties mounted. While best known for embalming President Lincoln, Holmes was one of the key players who helped usher in the funeral and mortuary industry as we know it today.

This industry expanded during the Civil War to manage everything from ferrying the dead off the battlefield to settling bodies in their final resting places. Transportation companies such as the Staunton Transportation, advertised their ability to survey entire battlefields and carefully return bodies preserved “in a natural and perfect condition” to their families. New facilities—what we know as funeral homes—popped up to house the dead before burial, moving this process out of families’ homes and into a commercial setting.

Staunton Transportation Company advertisement. Source: Library Company of Philadelphia.

At the close of the war, in March 1865, the War Department issued “General Orders No. 39, Order concerning Embalmers”, which required licensing and adherence to a specific set of prices. This marked the first steps towards professionalizing the funeral industry. Today there are over 15,700 funeral homes in America.

Our Final Resting Places

In the front yard of the house where I grew up, there is a cemetery. It’s a small plot with just a few graves, all members of the same family that first built the house in the 18th century. This was the norm in early America. Families were responsible for burial for reasons both practical—few commercial mortuary institutions existed—and religious—pious Americans felt strongly the sacred obligations towards the dead. Starting in the mid-1800s, however, this began to change.

In 1831, to address issues of weak infrastructure and overcrowding at church yard burial grounds, members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society founded Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. This was the first of a broad, national movement to construct large, communal burial grounds. Over the decades, such cemeteries sprouted up all across the country.

It was the Civil War, however, that imbued grave sites with an entirely new meaning. Up until that conflict, America had no national cemetery for war veterans and their families. In 1862 this changed when Congress passed legislation authorizing the President to “purchase cemetery grounds, and cause them to be securely enclosed, to be used as a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.” By 1864 there were 27 national cemeteries in existence.

This legislation created a new national commitment to America’s war dead. This responsibility gained even greater meaning when Congress passed the National Cemetery Act of 1867, directing the War Department to ensure the burial for all soldiers who served in the Civil War. With this act, as Dr. Faust writes, “the federal government legally signaled its acceptance of responsibility for those who had died in its service.”

This responsibility, revolutionary at the time, has remained a cornerstone of America’s relationship with its Army (and military). It is a promise to those in uniform, that should anyone fall in the execution of their duties, Americans will hold them close as our dead and that we, as a nation, will expend every effort to see them laid to rest with respect and honor. The sanctity of that promise, however imperfectly we have honored it at times, is made manifest when we visit Arlington or other national cemeteries.

The Full Measure of Faith

The faith Justice Holmes speaks of was justified again and again in the Civil War. The willingness of soldiers to suffer unbelievable numbers of casualties, only to march once more into battle, stunned and inspired the nation. From the depths of these sacrifices emerged a revolutionary commitment from America to find, bury, and honor its war dead. This commitment, while focused initially on the hundreds of thousands of Civil War dead, has had no sunset clause. The physical embodiment of this commitment, our national cemetery system, remains today a home and memorial for all those who give what Lincoln described as the “last full measure of devotion” to our country.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

1. PBS produced a series, Death and the Civil War, based on Dr. Faust’s book.

2. Two of the trade associations for funeral directors and morticians produce interesting survey data on Americans’ feelings about and plans for death. You can see examples here and here.

3. Though not directly tied to the Civil War, America’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency reflects a similar commitment to our nation’s service members and their families as to the one that led to the national cemetery system. Since the Department of Defense established a Special POW/MIA Office in 1964, this agency (in various organizational forms) has returned approximately 1,500 personnel.

4. In February 2025, Army 250 wrote about Oliver Wendell Holmes and his speech, “The Soldier’s Faith”.

-Matt Gallagher, “Where's the Great Novel About the War on Terror?”, June 14, 2011

Close to 15 years ago, Matt Gallagher asked why the Global War on Terror (GWOT) produced a great wealth of non-fiction memoirs and books, but no defining pieces of fiction. Was it a function of time, as maybe the definitive novel just needed a certain amount of distance from the wars to gestate? Or was it because the wars were too messy, sprawling, and, well, “forever” to capture with any degree of comprehensiveness? Or perhaps it was because the wars were too distant–viscerally immediate for a small fraction of the population, but abstract affairs for most? At the time, none of these explanations seemed satisfactory.

I did not know Matt in 2011, but I see in this line of inquiry–and I may be reading in my own feelings–a desire to explore GWOT’s story as understood from the perspective of the broad American public. What did the wars mean to them? What were the storylines? Who were the characters and what were the plot lines? When war fiction catches fire, it illuminates answers to these questions. Even if all we glimpse are partial answers, such shadows of truth are preferable to wondering whether any stories had even registered with Americans; wondering, in essence, whether the wars meant anything at all to our people?

Much later than Matt, I tried to answer these questions with public opinion research. At the time, I was leading a research nonprofit focused on reducing polarization. We launched a series of public surveys that asked Americans not just how they felt about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but about the narratives they held regarding these conflicts.

We asked, for example, about proximity to the conflicts. Did they know someone who served in the Iraq War? Had they ever talked with an Iraq War veteran about his or her service in the war? The most common response to both questions was “No”.

Source: The Veterans and Citizens Initiative.

We also asked Americans to compare and contrast GWOT (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) with two other wars that loom large in the American mind: the Vietnam War and World War II. As the graphic below shows, GWOT was seen as much more similar to Vietnam than World War II.

Source: The Veterans and Citizens Initiative.

And we probed people’s memories to see which events from the wars stood out. As this chart shows, with the Iraq War, the initial invasion, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the withdrawal all had much greater levels of familiarity than even major strategic developments like “The Surge” of 2007.

Source: The Veterans and Citizens Initiative.

These studies never provided any sort of comprehensive answer to the question Matt asked in 2011 or to the underlying questions of meaning that first animated my research, but they showed that stories exist. The narratives might be vague and disjointed in many respects, but even in 2022 when I was doing this research, people held strong memories and impressions of GWOT.

Rather than using public opinion research, Matt answered his own question through storytelling. As an author, editor, reporter, and teacher, Matt has produced some of the most definitive works of GWOT fiction and nonfiction. He has also helped elevate the broader military writing community, enabling the American public to hear more voices from the GWOT generation (as well as voices from older and younger military generations).

Matt’s first book, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, was published in 2010 and was an immediate hit with the military community and broader public. The book was based on the blog then-Lieutenant Gallagher maintained while leading a platoon, the Gravediggers, on a fifteen month tour in Iraq (2007-2009). Though the blog was eventually shut down by the Pentagon, Matt’s book took Americans into the platoon-level experience in Iraq. It was heralded by veteran military authors such as Bing West, who wrote, “He [Gallagher] is also your classic mud grunt, disdainful of staffs, suspicious of outsiders, bemused by the eccentricities of higher headquarters ("we found ourselves playing dance, monkey, dance") and angered by any Iraqi or American who is mendacious, clueless or lazy.”

Source: Matt Gallagher.

In 2013, Matt, along with Roy Scranton, edited Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. This work featured military writers such as Phil Klay, Colby Buzzell, and Siobhan Fallon (whose work and story we featured in an earlier Army 250 post). As one of the first such compilations, Fire and Forget helped cohere the GWOT writer community–in the closing section of the Preface, the editors wrote: “Truth, truthiness, in this mass media cacophony we live in comes up something for grabs. Well, here’s some. Grab it. We were there. This is what we saw. This is how it felt. And we’re here to say, it’s not like you heard in the stories.” Truthiness continues to be up for grabs, but this anthology helped bring many more lived experiences and perspectives into the mix.

Source: Matt Gallagher.

Finally, In 2016, Matt wrote a GWOT war novel, Youngblood: A Novel. Set in Iraq as America withdraws, Youngblood earned widespread praise. Tim O’Brien, whose own The Things They Carried remains one of the definitive books from Vietnam, said, “"Youngblood is not only a 'war novel,' it is a rich, fully formed, and beautifully executed novel-novel, way beyond the chicken coops of genre, a novel about the human heart in contest with itself, a novel about memory and longing and grief and hope and guilt and late-night ironies that raise a chuckle to the lips of the dead.”

Source: Matt Gallagher.

Matt graciously agreed to be interviewed for Army 250. What follows is a lightly-edited version of our e-mail correspondence.

You’ve talked about how the experience of having your Iraq War blog shut down motivated you to tell the story that eventually became Kaboom, but had writing always been a passion or interest of yours?

Writing and reading were ubiquitous elements in my life long before I thought about writing myself. The biggest room in my childhood home was my mom’s library, and she taught my brother and me early that reading was a way to learn about life, better appreciate it and enjoy it, all at once. She was new to the west—Reno, Nevada, to be specific—so she read Joan Didion and Robert Laxalt. She admired Tom Wolfe but found his depiction of Virginia women in one of his novels off and wrote him a letter saying so. He wrote back, allowing that she might have a point.

Some books I read as a boy that I remember influencing me, even changing the way I thought: The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Giver. The Chronicles of Narnia. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Johnny Tremain. The Martian Chronicles warped my brain in middle school, in the best of ways.

Sometime in 10th grade I gave up the dream of making the NBA and wandered into the office of the high school newspaper. It felt natural because reading was already how I engaged with the world. I didn’t know it then, but I’d found both my tribe and life’s pursuit.

What surprised you most about the reception to Kaboom?

With the blog, I was surprised at how many people who weren’t family or friends ended up reading it. It’s easy as a deployed soldier to feel disconnected from your country, to believe no one cares about the war you’re fighting. And while there was (and is) plenty of truth to those vexations, enough random blog readers showed me, when I needed it most, that many Americans do care about servicemembers and what’s happening on the other side of the globe in their name.

With the book, I got a rapid and forceful education in how some people read to fulfill—rather than challenge—their preconceived notions. One evening, I read a passage from Kaboom in Washington D.C. and had an angry protestor type call me a warmonger for my efforts. Okay. Later that week, I read the same passage in Philadelphia, and had an attendee in the front row say under his breath that I was “A hippie p****.” Which is it? I can be one but not both! So, I learned something obvious, that people often come to the concept of modern war with their own deeply held ideas, and all any writer can do with the subject, particularly a veteran-writer, is tell the hard truths about it, messy ruin, dark absurdity, all the rest, too.

Your first book, Kaboom, stood out for giving voice to the young soldiers of the War on Terror. We’re now more than 20 years out from the invasion of Iraq and I’m curious, how has becoming a parent influenced, if it has, your writing? (On my mind as I ask this is Tim O’Brien’s 2019 book, Dad’s Maybe Book.)

There’s no doubt being a dad to two young boys has influenced how I think about the world, which in turn affects my writing. It’s been over fifteen years since I served in Iraq, yet I still find myself thinking sometimes about the teenage insurgents tasked with taking AK potshots at American soldiers and emplacing roadside bombs under dark’s cover. Were they diehard jihadists? Almost definitely not. They were doing what likely seemed natural to them, furious about the war, their family’s poverty, about their dead or imprisoned fathers and uncles, who knows what else. Most honest American veterans I know would say that would’ve been them, had circumstances been flipped.

Of course, there’s limits to empathy in real life, especially when these teenage insurgents would kill you and your soldiers if given the opportunity. Still. I wonder what the ones who lived are doing now, how they look back on our shared skirmishes and close calls. One of the reasons I cherish literature is it allows for this kind of rumination.

Then there’s the fallen, friends I remember who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at impossibly young ages like 21, 22, 24. They’ll never hold their newborns and be able to tell them the ridiculousness of life is mostly worth it. They’ll never see what’s happening with the new generation and wonder what the hell is going on. They’re missing out on so much. Even though the loss of them is worn now by time the sorrow lingers, deepens.

The question was about parenthood. Would I kill for my sons, to protect them, if I felt I needed to? Yes, no doubt about it. And for that reason, I think I understand why war happens better than I did when I fought in one.

One of the reviews for your most recent novel, Daybreak, categorized the book as “the first great military-inspired novel of this post-Global War on Terror era”. Were you conscious of such a shift, from the GWOT era to a post-GWOT era? Did that at all inform or show up in your writing as you crafted the book?

Sometimes you write stories that take 200, 300 pages, full of nuance and complication and narrative arc, etcetera, and then you see a review that crisply explains what you did in one sentence. This was one of those. Certainly I was aware during my own time in Ukraine, and while writing Daybreak, it was different than what had come before. But it didn’t influence the story much, because I prefer to start with character(s) and build out from there. Yet of course the aftermath of the GWOT seeped into the book, how could it not? So many Western veterans I encountered over there were sifting through the previous two decades, trying to make sense of it and their part in it all. Kabul fell, what, six months before the renewed Russian invasion? Zelensky put out the call for international soldiers willing to fight for Ukraine, those who answered it were, quite often, GWOT veterans, in all shapes, varieties, and experiences. The ghosts of old wars haunt every current one. This was just the example I myself was familiar with.

Wars are different, soldiers are different, but there are often similarities and consistencies. You’ve been an active advocate for and supporter of Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion. In your time with Ukrainian soldiers, how does their experience and outlook compare with your time in Iraq back in 2007-2009?

In some ways, they were quite similar—the everyday courage displayed by young, rough-and-tumble people willing to say, “I’ll go,” because someone has to. The camaraderie I witnessed among the Ukrainians on the squad and platoon levels couldn’t help but bring me back to my time in uniform and on the line. In other ways, though, it was tremendously different. This is an existential fight for Ukraine. They’re not sweating out fifteen months, trying to survive and find some vague string of purpose they can take home with them. It’s victory or ruin, the potential destruction of everything they love and know. That’s hard for American brains to comprehend, I think. I’ve been over there a few times and embedded with various Ukrainian units and it’s still challenging to comprehend, to be honest.

What’s the most memorable interview you’ve ever given? And, is there an interview that you conducted (i.e., interviewed someone else) that stands out in your memory? If you could interview anyone, who would it be?

The most memorable interview I’ve given is easy. (And a shameless humblebrag, so sorry but not sorry.) In 2016, David Petraeus interviewed me in person at the 92Y in Manhattan. He’d read a positive review of my novel Youngblood and reached out over LinkedIn. I thought at first it was college friends of mine screwing with me … anyhow, to have the commanding general of the war I fought in asking about my writing and tour was pretty surreal, considering eight years before my scout platoon and I had pulled very outer security for him and his detail when they came to our rural outpost in Iraq. All the more so because some of my writings over the years have been critical of his counterinsurgency strategy. I’m not a fanboy, I tend to be skeptical of power, but I won’t lie, it was a cool evening.

The most memorable interview I’ve conducted is a tougher one. There’s the grandmother near the Russian border teaching herself Ukrainian at the ripe-old-age of 75 because it’s the only way she can think of to honor her fallen grandson. There’s the Zoom call with a young Afghan woman telling me about her escape plan from Kabul as Taliban patrols roam her neighborhood. There’s Tim O’Brien, who you mentioned earlier, one of our greatest living novelists and clear-eyed chroniclers of American war. There’s Chris Paul, the Hall of Fame-bound point guard, who I interviewed when we were both at Wake Forest and he was just a skinny freshman with ambitions on the starting lineup.

I’ll stop there. Writing’s taken me many weird places and allowed me to meet many fascinating people, something I hope to never stop being grateful for.

My dream interview? George Orwell’s ghost. He saw the political machinations of the postwar world coming and wrote with such clarity and exactness. So many writers these days have nothing to offer but their own musings and contempt for anyone and everything that disagrees. He wasn’t like that. He said what he meant, meant what he said, then lived his principles.

You’re now a writer in-residence at the Institute for Future Conflict at the Air Force Academy. What are the main ways in which the questions the cadets ask you are different from what you get asked by veterans of our generation (the GWOT generation)? What are the ways the questions are similar?

These kids grew up in an America that was always involved in foreign war. You can tell. Many also come from military families. We’re reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell right now, and we spent a good fifteen minutes discussing two diverging definitions of “peace” in it: is it “a hiatus betwixt wars,” as we tend to think of it, or is the real thing more a “millennia of imperishable peace,” which a lot of countries and societies have never known, to include our own? Is such a thing even possible?

The cadets I’ve been charged with teaching are gifted, intellectually curious, practical—every day, they inspire me with their courage and implicit sense of duty, and I try to give them my absolute best, as they deserve. I also can’t help but feel that we’ve failed their generation in some way by giving over to them such a messy and violent world. I don’t think it had to be this way, but I’m also a fool novelist, so who knows.

A piece of advice you’ve given to writers, especially veteran writers, is to remember that “good writing, even writing that’s interested in chronicling a lived experience close to the bones of it all, remembers it’s about bringing others to that place and time.” Are there places and times that are most on your mind as you look towards your next book or the writing you are doing now?

Escaping the tumult of 2025 right now is both a privilege and my professional obligation. I’m working on a book involving a hapless soldier and time travel. Some mornings before work, I’m mired in the particulars of Civil War happenings in 1863. Other mornings I’m figuring out what the hell America in 2150 might resemble. It’s fun. It’s humiliating. It’s writing.

How does that pertain to advice for aspiring writers? I don’t know, maybe just try to remember serious writing that aims for public audience is more an act of communication than expression. That old wisdom from David Foster Wallace has helped me out a few times when I’ve attempted to be too clever or writerly.

Back in 2016, in a reddit interview, you mentioned that you had the “Wheel of Time” series on your top shelf, next to Hemingway and Don Quixote. What’s on your top shelf now?

Full disclosure, my family and I moved to Colorado eight months back and most of my library is still packed up in boxes in the basement. So the top shelf now consists of Lego sets built by my eldest son that he wants to keep from the interests of the dog.

Once I unpack: Conrad’s Lord Jim is a tremendous meditation on bravery and failure, incredibly relevant to the experiences of many GWOT veterans, I think. For Rouenna by Singrid Nunez knocked me sideways, it’s as much about what it is we owe one another as friends, citizens and human beings as it is about the lifelong trauma carried by a nurse who served in Vietnam. And over the Covid summer (five years ago now, somehow?), I participated in A Public Space’s “Tolstoy Together,” which was an online book discussion of War & Peace, led by the novelist Yiyun Li. Tolstoy, man, what a mad, clairvoyant genius. If anyone reading this hasn’t yet sat down with War & Peace, it’s worth the mighty slog, I promise.

I’ll close by reflecting on a quote from the final chapter of Kaboom, when Matt transitions out from the Army and is driving away from his base: “I wanted to feel like a titan who had just dropped a great boulder of burden. Instead, I felt like a naked man locked outside of a clothing store.” Many of us have felt something like this. It might not be standing naked outside a store, but we know that feeling of distance from people around you and have felt the barriers that can separate you from the rest of society, even while at the same time you feel enormously exposed and vulnerable.

One of my motivations in launching Army 250 was to give voice to these kinds of experiences among the military community. But I also wanted to speak to what I see as the civilian corollary to standing naked outside of a clothing store. For those disconnected from the military, interactions with the armed forces can be quite discombobulating. The experiences are much less intense and fraught with far fewer risks than those faced by folks transitioning out, but nonetheless, for most Americans, stepping onto a military installation feels like visiting animals at the zoo. Even just talking about the military can put many Americans immediately into spectator mode.

Instead of feeling naked or like a spectator, we want more Americans to feel at home wherever they are in the military-to-civilian spectrum. We want conversations about the Army (and other services) to be ‘us” conversations and not “them” conversations. One of the most powerful ways to build that sense of connection is through stories that transcend identities of military or civilian and bring us into a shared experience of war and life. Matt Gallagher tells such stories and helps others give voice to such. He is, as he described Tim O’Brien, a clear-eyed chronicler of war; someone we can trust will continue to challenge and entice us to engage with war, the “hard truths about it, messy ruin, dark absurdity, all the rest, too.”

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

You can see Matt’s books and other work on his website here.

Gettysburg’s unique place in the American story is what led filmmaker Ken Burns to choose it as the home for a film festival dedicated to American history. The Gettysburg Film Festival, launched in 2023, exists to “bring Americans together in a shared appreciation of our history and the stories that make us who we are.”

We are taking a quick break from Army 250’s series on Army-related writers to lift up the Gettysburg Film Festival. This year the theme of the festival is “Victory in World War II”. Events kick off on May 8, 2025, the 180th anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. And Army 250 will be there to cover the festival!

Source: Gettysburg Film Festival

This year the festival focuses on films, television shows, and books that tell America’s World War II story. You can see the full schedule here, but storytellers that will be there include Ken Burns, Martin Sheen, Anna Deavere Smith, Robert Edsel of Monuments Men, John Orloff and others from Band of Brothers, Susan Eisenhower, author of How Ike Led, and many others.

I’ll be there to cover the events, talk with the participants and attendees, and ultimately, to help tell this story. As we approach the Army’s 250th birthday in June, I can think of few better ways to draw out how important the Army has been to American society and how deeply the Army is woven into our fabric as a nation.

As historian Harold Holzer once said, “all roads lead to Gettysburg.” But so too do all roads depart from Gettysburg. It is not just a destination we journey back to in order to understand our past, it is a place we carry forward, always bearing with us Lincoln’s charge: “it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Additional Resources:

You can learn more about the festival at its homepage here. It is an in-person experience and there are still tickets available for many of the screenings and other events.

You can see conversation from the 2024 festival that featured Ken Burns, Martin Sheen, Sam Waterston, and Jake Boritt here.

You can also follow the festival on Facebook and Instagram.

If you will be at the festival, please let me know!

Source: National Museum of American History.

The comic book stand was my first library. Day after day, I sat in my grandparent’s neighborhood grocery store, reading every comic I could: Marvel, DC, Archie, if they had it, I read it. And every Sunday, I poured through the comics section of the weekly paper my parents brought home after church. I did not know it at the time, but my childhood, the late 80’s and early 90’s, was a golden era in cartoon and comic strips, with artists like Bill Watterson and his “Calvin and Hobbes” leading the way. Yet amid all this, one comic strip stood out: “Beetle Bailey”.

Beetle Bailey was one of the only comics with a soldier as its main character and an Army base its primary setting.1 As someone not from a military family—my grandfather had served in the Navy in World War II, but like many of his generation, did not regularly talk about his experience—Beetle Bailey was my primary portal to the military.

Despite my unfamiliarity with the Army, Beetle Bailey was eminently relatable. The stories took readers into the military, but through plot lines more about goofy, irritating, and sometimes poignant human behavior than anything particular to uniformed life. Beetle Bailey could easily have been set in an office, hospital, studio, or any other organizational space; in fact, the first season of the comic put Beetle Bailey in college.

The setting still mattered, however. I was far from the only kid in America whose main interaction with the Army came via my weekly comic reading. The interplay between Beetle Bailey and his crew—Sgt. Snorkel, Gen. Halftrack, Lt. Flap, Miss Buxley, Private Blips, and many others—allowed me, and millions of other Americans, to take in the iconography and vocabulary of the military. For 68 years as a daily comic, Beetle Bailey served as one of the most frequently trafficked bridges between civilian America and the military. It continues to do so today.

We can thank its creator, primary author, and Army veteran Mort Walker, for this unique contribution to American art and civil-military relations. Mort was drafted in 1943 and trained at Camp Chowder in Missouri.2 It rained with such frequency and intensity that soldiers gave the base the name, “Camp Swampy”, which went on to become Beetle Bailey’s home in the comic strip. Following training, Mort served in Italy as an intelligence officer during World War II and was discharged after two years.

Statue of Beetle Bailey on the University of Missouri campus. Source: City of Columbia.

After attending the University of Missouri, Mort started cartooning. In 1950, he launched Beetle Bailey, with our protagonist set as a college student. After about a year of less-than-stellar sales, however, Mort had Bailey enlist and move to Camp Swampy. Sporting Army greens, Bailey found an audience.

Beetle Bailey was syndicated by King Features, a division of Hearst—it was reportedly the last comic strip approved directly by William Randolph Hearst. Readership expanded over the decades and new characters joined Camp Swampy. By the late twentieth century Beetle Bailey was a global phenomenon, reaching over 200 million readers everyday.

Over that time period, Mort launched several other comic strips, including “Hi and Lois” and “Sam & Silo”. He also focused considerable energies towards preserving cartoons and advocating for them to be taken seriously as art. He started the National Cartoon Museum in the 1970s and grew his own collection of comics to over 200,000 selections. In the early 2000s, he merged his collection with that of Ohio State University (OSU). OSU continues to be there home, with the comics available to the public at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Beetle Bailey turns 75 this year. Mort passed away in 2018. Over the years Mort and Beetle Bailey received numerous accolades from the Army, including the Army’s highest award for civilians, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award.

Laughter is a serious matter. A comic strip like Beetle Bailey helps the Army feel just a little more familiar to most Americans. The type of humor Mort directed towards the Army was one of familiarity and affection. Though at various times outlets such as Starts & Stripes banned the strip, it was for the most part massively popular with both service members and the general public. In 1990 when Mort Walker received a Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service from the Army, it emphasized that his, “ingenuity in portraying Army members in a humorous manner has contributed significantly to the morale of our soldiers as they provide for our national security.” Laughter, it turns out, is a national security asset.

It’d be nice to see more Beetle Baileys today. It’s hard to quantify, but the degree and type of comedy directed towards the military is an indicator of the health of civil-military relations. This is not scientific, as comedy can also be mean-spirited and a tool to demean and diminish, but the relative absence of military-oriented comedy today is due, at least in part, to the gap that separates most Americans from the military. Laughing together is like breaking bread together, it builds community, and we need a stronger sense of community between those in uniform and the broader society.

Army 250 is a passion project celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday in 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with your networks. If you are a new reader, please subscribe below.

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Lifting up Army writers on Substack

This week we look highlight another Army writer, . Rich served for 22 years in the Army. He is the host of The MisFitNation podcast, where he lifts up a ton of incredible stories. He writes on Substack about leadership, faith, overcoming adversity, and the military. Rich is also a motivational speaker. Check out his Substack below:

Rich’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Rich LaMonica

Additional Resources:

1. I am not aware of a group that focuses on supporting Army cartoonists, but the nonprofit Armed Services Arts Partnership provides art and comedy classes to folks in the military, military families, caregivers, and veterans.

2. It would feel wrong to lift up Mort Walker and Beetle Bailey and not highlight one of today’s most prominent military-oriented comedic outlets, Duffel Blog. A satiric news site “devoted to the U.S. military and national security community”, Duffel Blog has wide readership among the military community and regularly makes fun of just about everything in the national security apparatus.

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If you’d like to write a newsletter post, share an educational resource about the Army, or lift up an opportunity for people to connect with the Army (e.g., an event, story, etc.), please contact Dan (dan@army250.us).

“the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic, perhaps the romantic, in early 20th century America.1 He gave name to the Jazz Age and through his writing captured interwar America in a way unlike any other writer: its beauty and passion, excess and superficiality, boundless optimism and deep-seated fears. He set out, in his own words, to capture “the story part of my generation in America” and succeeded far beyond anything even he could have imagined.

Millions still read his works every year. The Great Gatsby alone has sold more than 25 million copies, been translated into more than 40 languages, and produced four different cinematic versions (most recently in 2013). Though very much a voice for his generation, Fitzgerald still speaks to Americans of all ages today. As leading Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III put it, with the The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald produced "a national scripture. It embodies the American spirit, the American will to reinvent oneself."

Yet as talented as he was, Fitzgerald’s success and impact came only through his partnership with his wife Zelda. And it was the U.S. Army that made this unique union possible.2

F. Scott Fitzgerald the soldier is not a well-known story. His military experiences show up only occasionally in his writing. It was his friends and contemporaries, most notably Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the great American war novels of this period.3 But Fitzgerald’s time in the Army proved critical as it brought him to a country club in Montgomery, Alabama where he met one Zelda Sayre.

F.Scott Fitzgerald in his Army uniform. Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald Archives

An Impediment to His Writing

Dreams of glory and romantic notions of duty moved Fitzgerald to volunteer for the Army soon after America entered the war in 1917.4 Though he initially considered Army aviation, as it seemed to him the modern equivalent to the cavalry in the Civil War, he ultimately chose the infantry. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry October 26, 1917 and after outfitting himself at Brooks Brothers, reported for training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.5

The Army did not come as naturally as writing did to Fitzgerald. To put it bluntly, he was a pretty poor soldier. He had a habit of sleeping during training, which is bad enough in any situation, but even worse when the trainer you fall asleep on is Dwight Eisenhower, future Supreme Allied Commander. It’s unlikely Ike’s opinion mattered too much to Fitzgerald, however, as, in the words of his biographer Matthew Bruccoli, “he regarded the army as an impediment to his writing.” And write he did.

“Every evening, concealing my pad behind Small Problems for Infantry, I wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination.”6 Fitzgerald felt such urgency to write, perhaps on one level out of a desire to escape the Army, but more meaningfully, because he felt his perspective on life would change so greatly due to the war that he had to capture how he felt now, before he shipped out. “I’ve got to write now, for when the war’s over I won’t be able to see these things as important—even now they are fading out against the back-ground of the map of Europe.”

During his Army training, Fitzgerald produced a full novel, “The Romantic Egotist”, largely based on his own life. Publishers rejected his submission, but this writing experience, scribbled while pretending to learn small unit tactics, proved enormously influential on his career. The rejected novel formed the basis for his breakout book, This Side of Paradise, and in the process of corresponding with Scribners, he connected with Maxwell Perkins, an editor who went on to champion Fitzgerald and propel him to greater literary acclaim.

But the most important moment from his time in the Army was a dance in July 1918 at the Country Club of Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre. Zelda wrote of this moment in her book Save Me the Waltz: “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.” Though they both dated other people in the following months, the chance encounter lit a spark never went out.

Zelda Fitzgerald. Source: Library of Congress.

A few months after meeting Zelda, Fitzgerald shipped north, his unit set to deploy to France. But on November 11, the warring parties signed an armistice and the deployment was canceled. He was disappointed to not go overseas.

Although Fitzgerald only had a few months left in uniform, he continued his pattern of less-than-soldierly behavior. He had to be confined to a base, Camp Mills, for example, to keep out of trouble, and he briefly went AWOL (absent without leave) to New York City when his unit was ordered back to Montgomery. Fitzgerald and the Army finally parted ways in 1919 when he was discharged.

Finding the Right Side of Paradise

Fitzgerald’s post-Army experience was challenging. He was working a job he didn’t care for at an advertising agency; his relationship with Zelda was rocky; and he felt like the literary future he dreamed of was slipping out of his grasp. So he moved back home to Minnesota.

Remarkably, this did the trick. Within a short period of time he produced This Side of Paradise, a novel based largely on the draft “The Romantic Egotist”. Scribners accepted the book and it proved a hit: its first year (1920) it sold more than 50,000 copies and made him a national sensation. During this same time period, Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald and the two wed in April 1920, a week after his novel hit bookshelves for the first time.

From here it was an epic and chaotic journey. Their only child, Frances, was born in 1921; they lived in Paris and took part in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; The Great Gatsby was published in 1925; and so much more.7 The full weight of artistic output and the total mass of his and Zelda’s unique partnership are beyond the scope of this article to describe, but it’s fair to say they were among the most influential writers and artists of their generation. The New York Times obituary for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in December 1940, captures this enormous, if tragic, influence:

Mr. Fitzgerald in his life and writings epitomized "all the sad young men" of the post-war generation. With the skill of a reporter and ability of an artist he captured the essence of a period when flappers and gin and "the beautiful and the damned" were the symbols of the carefree madness of an age.

Some of those sad young men that appear in his stories can be traced to Fitzgerald’s time in the Army. In The Beautiful and Damned, published in 1922, the protagonist, Anthony Patch trains at an Army base in Georgia and becomes involved with a local girl—it does not go well for Anthony. Similarly, Jay Gatsby is an Army veteran who fought in the Argonne offensive of World War I and won a medal when his unit was surrounded by the Germans, a story Fitzgerald based on “The Lost Battalion” of the American Expeditionary Force. But his genius lay not in bringing readers to battlefield, but in capturing the worlds veterans of the Great war returned to.

Ineffable Symbols

In his short story, The Offshore Pirate, published in 1920, we find perhaps the most revealing anecdote about Fitzgerald’s relationship to the Army, and to America more broadly. In this story, we hear of a young man who served in the military during World War I, but as a band leader, far from the front lines. This young man tells us: “It was not so bad—except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him.”

Those ineffable symbols are familiar to anyone who has served in the military. Veteran Ben Kesling writes about serving in war as the crucible through which soldiers become “members of the club”.8 For Fitzgerald, “the club” is just part of the story however; it is not just in reference to other veterans that he feels inadequate, but to the tranche in society, the aristocracy, whose acceptance he yearned for, yet felt he never secured.

We all have our own ineffable symbols. Much of life is in how we deal with these symbols, the ones we give weight to, the ones we cast aside, and the ones we come to terms with. This process, of interpretation and attempts at reinvention, is at the heart of Fitzgerald’s work, which is why his stories still ring true long after the music stopped for the Jazz Age.

Author’s Note: I’d like to thank Jim West, a retired English professor at Penn State University, for his help developing and reviewing this newsletter. I’m grateful that he responded to a cold email and served as a terrific resource for this post.

Lifting up Army writers on Substack

This week we look highlight another Army writer, . Rob served in the Army for nearly 30 years and now runs an extensive coaching and leader development company. He writes on personal leadership and the state of leadership in the workplace today, provides tutorials and lessons for leader development, and offers a range of resources for how to lead yourself and any team.

Make it Personal!

Battle-tested knowledge, practical tips, and personal insight into becoming a people-centric leader from the desk of retired Army Colonel Rob Campbell.

By Rob Campbell Leadership

Additional Resources:

1. You can learn more about F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum here.

2. Army veteran Colin Halloran wrote an interesting article on Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up Essays”, that were published after Fitzgerald’s death.

Be Part of Army 250

If you’d like to write a newsletter post, share an educational resource about the Army, or lift up an opportunity for people to connect with the Army (e.g., an event, story, etc.), please contact Dan (dan@army250.us).