An America cramped by defensiveness

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-america-cramped-by-defensiveness/2013/02/01/ab0eff36-6c8d-11e2-bd36-c0fe61a205f6_story.html

A week before I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, my wife and I volunteered for a few hours at our daughter’s elementary school. As we left, her teacher told the students that I was an officer in the Marine Corps about to leave on deployment. “A nation does not survive,” he said, “without men like that.”

It was a heartfelt statement. I thought of it often while in Afghanistan; it felt most poignant when my detachment of transport aircraft flew each one of the 119 bodies out of Helmand province between June and December 2010 to make their final trip home. Near the end of our deployment, I asked my fellow Marines to always remember the fallen. I asked the living to honor the sacrifices of their dead. Not by mourning forever, nor by seeking vengeance, but by honoring their comrades’ sacrifices in the choices and actions of their own lives. I asked them, in the words of Oliver Stone’s movie about another war, to find a meaning and goodness in this life.

Since I returned home, a darkness has grown in me as both I and our nation have failed to live up to the sacrifices of these young men and women. I had no expectation of “victory” in Afghanistan or Iraq, whatever that would mean. Nor did I expect some epiphany of strategic insight or remorse from the nation’s brain trust.

I just found that I could not square the negativity, pettiness and paranoia in the discourse of our country’s elders with the nobility and dedication of the men and women I had seen and served with in Afghanistan.