Sacrifice and Victory

Three-Hundred.

Seven-Hundred.

The headlines start like a faucet dripping into a hollow steel sink.

One-Thousand.

Then a dull roar invades your head.

One-Thousand, Eight-Hundred American Soldiers Dead.

The roar gives way to pained screams wracking your brain - ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

We've all felt it. It's the reaction any decent person is supposed to have, and that sense of decency is precisely the target. After all, Americans are essentially a peaceful, isolationist, decent people. It is in our history, in our myths, and practically in our blood. We can be excited beyond that, of course, but, just like an electron, it takes a good deal of influence and energy, and we tend to fall back to our natural state rather quickly.

But, just like an electron, as we fall from that excited state, America gives off Light. The late President Reagan spoke of America as being a Shining City on a Hill; that was no mere metaphor. Throughout our brief history, America has risen to great energy and industry only a handful of times. Each time, while slow to light, America has done no less than save a significant portion of the humanity, time and again, by undertaking, and accomplishing great feats, spending our blood, toil, sweat and tears from Gettysburg to Normandy to Fallujah. And each time, after accomplishing these victories, Americans have simply gone home. In doing so, Americans have exchanged that energy to light the way for those we'd fought, showing them that this is what Free and Just people do, and giving them the well-lighted room in which to be Free and Just themselves.

Those dark and morbid headlines are not the stuff of American history. In merely accounting the numbers, they are derelict in telling the true story - stories of battles won, towns freed, and murderers captured. We, after all, don't refer to "almost 2,500 dead near Shiloh Church" or "over 20,000 killed in the Ardennes Forest," yet those were surely battles from which the death tolls were quite newsworthy. Why do we insist on referring to re-taking Fallujah or sweeping terrorists out of Hadithah in such language?

The implied purpose, of course, is that when enough decent Americans say "enough," perhaps we'll come home, once again. Now, given that, in this view, the requirement to come home isn't Victory, but rather the sheer numbers of American soldiers killed, to dangerous and insidious outcomes result. The first is obvious: things that would have been required for victory will be left undone, and the light of our departure will as likely be used to burn the country down as it will be to set men and women free. The second, less obvious, and thereby far more dangerous result is that each and every brave American soldier, sailor, airman and Marine who gives his or her life in the ultimate cause of freedom becomes but one more decibel added to that screaming voice, and one more nail in the coffin of the victory they paid so dearly to gain and the liberty they fought so bravely to protect. Dying for one's country is no longer one's "last full measure of devotion," but rather it has become nothing more than abject defeat.

Think about that for a minute.

Perhaps in the cold, black recesses of your post-modern-conditioned mind, thoughts of what that possibility means to the morale of our brave men and women, concerns about how your worries honor or dishonor their sacrifice, and the shame of your failing in the face of mere numbers, while they, in the face of bullets and roadside bombs, and in spite of those numbers, continue to accept their mission of victory, perhaps those thoughts will drown out those Headlines of Defeat, like a march, conquering a dirge.

Hear that march. Hear the honor of being an American, the honor in risking everything you have only to share the spoils of victory with the defeated. Eighteen-hundred? God Bless Them. Perhaps Two-thousand? For them, and for those who continue to still, we can win, we will win, and we must win.

Perhaps in another dry, dusty corner of your mind, one with a flag, neatly folded, next to an old picture of a smiling relative in a uniform, you hear another voice. This one echoes out of a history so deeply-instilled in who you are, it's like an American gene, perhaps passed down from the relative in that picture:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 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. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - 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. –Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Hear that voice, yet recall the darkest days of what seemed like our utter defeat. We are stronger now. We have come farther than we dared dream. Yet we still have much farther to go; we will not be deterred. Let yourself be lifted up again, from that easy state of peaceful isolationism into the excited state of action, because much remains to be done. We've been here, in these days of sorrow and doubt, before. And, as before, we will leave them again, and press home the victory. To the hands of brave and free men and women, Victory must not be denied.