For Love of Country: Learning About Our Veterans Through Books

With the exception of 9/11, the United States has been blessedly free of war on its own soil in this age of turmoil, yet we’ve dispatched several million men and women across the oceans into battle. They fought and died in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Every year on Memorial Day we pay homage to all those who sacrificed their lives for our country, while on Veterans Day we honor all military personnel who have served or are serving their country.
Fortunately, there are authors blessed with these gifts of imagination and knowledge who have given us books by which we may remember and honor our veterans.
In this 1968 novel, Myrer, a Marine and Purple Heart recipient in WWII, gave us Sam Damon, a maverick Army officer who serves his country from WWI until his death in Southeast Asia. Damon’s story provides readers with an excellent introduction to the principles of superb leadership, to the rigors and horrors of combat, and to 20th-century American history and culture. We find in this character a man of principle, intelligence, and devotion to honor and duty—the sort of officer under whom anyone would be proud to serve.
Another author is veteran James (“Jim”) Webb. He’s a Naval Academy graduate who fought as a Marine in Vietnam, won the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, was appointed Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, and served one term as a Democrat senator from Virginia.
“Mister Roberts” is a 1946 novel that became a Broadway play and then a hit movie. It takes us aboard the USS Reluctant, a Naval supply ship in the Pacific far removed from combat and sailing from “apathy to tedium.” Here the enemy isn’t the Japanese so much as the small-minded dictator who commands the ship: the captain. Under him is the executive officer, Mr. Roberts, who seeks again and again to leave the Reluctant and join a fighting vessel. He does his best to defend the crew against the captain’s heavy-handed and often nonsensical policies. This humorous yet ultimately heart-wrenching classic gives us a work-a-day side of the military that other storytellers rarely address.
To these worthy proposals and acts of gratitude we might consider adding one more salute for their service. To honor all who have served in our military, from the Revolutionary War up to the present, we can pledge to learn more about our American past, especially about our military history, and teach those lessons to our children and grandchildren. We can read, and we can encourage others to read, books about these citizen soldiers. Their gifts of sacrifice have helped preserve our Constitution, our republic, and our way of life.
In the American Legion Hall of my hometown of Fort Royal, Virginia, which I visited just before Memorial Day this past May, there’s a mural depicting a uniformed man and woman saluting our country’s flag. Inscribed beneath is a sentiment so familiar that it borders on cliche: “Freedom Is Never Free.”
Becoming acquainted with the stories of our veterans breathes new life into those four words.