As I teach my courses at the university, I am persuaded that few, if any, of my students understand what it costs to be free. Between ready supplies at fast food restaurants, the relative leisure of college life, and a plethora of other distractions delivered by iPods and Xbox’s, life in America is far too comfortable to elicit deep thought on the price of freedom.
Even as adults, we have to force ourselves to stop and think about how we’ve reached the points we’ve reached and why we enjoy a bounty of liberty unequaled in the history of the world.
The answer is easy: A military that is second to none, and which consists of men and women in all branches willing to trade their movies, video games, and trips to the fast food restaurant for the honor of defending liberty here and abroad.
It behooves us, in the midst of our comfort, to remember that while we sit in our easy chairs, American soldiers stand on guard in the sands of Iraq and the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. These are men and women in uniform who are risking their lives every second of every day for our sakes and for the sake of this country.
When we take our summer trips to the white sandy beaches of Mississippi, these soldiers will be lying prone in the hot sands of the desert, or holding a defensive position behind a rock, or calling in bombing coordinates from behind the only wall that separates them from insurgents bent on killing infidels.
Many of our Marines will also be facing the enemy instead of facing the camera for the family photograph in the Colorado Rockies this year. And some of these Marines are among those who departed for Afghanistan in December 2009, just as the Christmas season was hitting its homestretch. In other words, as families were preparing to come together to celebrate Christ’s birth, many of our men and women in uniform were boarding military planes to travel to the front lines and defend the nation whose motto remains, “In God We Trust.”
ABC News covered the pre-Christmas departure of many Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and reported that when the military buses pulled up to take them away from their families and countrymen, one mother standing in the “nighttime chill” could only say: “I wish they were getting off [the bus] instead of getting on.”
Complimenting these soldiers and Marines are our Special Forces, who’ve had boots on the ground in Afghanistan since days after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The covert nature of their work guarantees that they will not only be away from their families, but that their families will not even know where they are. Among these Special Forces are fathers, husbands, and brothers who did not hear the carols their children, wives, and siblings sang amidst the smell of evergreens last Christmas, and who may not see the myriad of bottle rockets their friends and families fire into the sky this Fourth of July.
Many members of the Navy who man submarines and ships that remain at the ready all day, every day, are even now within striking distance of the enemy, carrying more firepower on water than our terroristic foe possesses on land. That they are remembered by their families is simply not enough — they must be remembered by us as well. For they too preserve the life of liberty accessible to everyone blessed to live in this great country.
And many members of our Air Force are thousands of feet in the air over Iraq and Afghanistan as I type, engaged in bombing and surveillance missions too important to forego for the fleeting and often superfluous matters that characterize our daily routines. They too deserve to be remembered while on the warfront and thanked with handshakes and hugs upon returning home.
Thus, as another summer in America unfolds, and the celebration of our Independence Day draws near, take time to pause and remember that we are not free by chance. Rather, we are free because so many among us have not only heard but accepted the call to go and fight for something bigger than themselves; something bigger than all of us combined.
And that something is freedom.
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About AWR Hawkins, PhD
Dr. AWR Hawkins is a columnist for HUMAN EVENTS, a writer for Pajamas Media, and a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. military history from Texas Tech University (“Wreck ‘em Tech!”), where his studies were focused on the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe.
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Our troops have a hard, risky job that is unimaginable to most of us, and one that has often been very much worth doing. You’re right that we take for granted many of our comforts here in the US.
But I really don’t see what the troops are doing to defend our freedoms in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.
Sure, they’re defending the freedom of many Afghanis and Iraqis, especially safeguarding the rights of Afghani and Iraqi women that might scarcely otherwise be respected there; but that’s not the same thing.
It’s simply not plausible that their ceasing to fight in either Afghanistan or Iraq would have any effect on Americans’ own freedoms. They could all come home this very year without affecting our freedoms one whit. It’s not as if the Taliban or the supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr have the power to invade the United States and set up sharia law, or that they would gain that power if we weren’t in Afghanistan or Iraq.
So don’t simply parrot the line that the troops are out there fighting for our freedoms. If there’s no plausible scenario where our freedoms would actually be affected if they weren’t fighting, then they are clearly fighting for something else. Perhaps it’s the desire by our leaders to not appear weak or to admit that they were wrong. Perhaps it’s to maintain control of resources perceived as being key to the American economy. But whatever it is, it’s not our freedoms here at home.
It strikes me that our freedoms here at home are more in danger from the actions our government takes to reduce civil liberties while being in a constant state of war, than from anything the Taliban can do to us.
We could do with some real peace here in this country for once. That might do more than anything else to safeguard Americans’ freedoms here at home.