This Wednesday, we celebrate Veterans.
Most of us will thank the people we know who served. Maybe we’ll fly a flag, attend a parade, or buy dinner for an old man in a Vietnam hat. All of that is right and good.
But it’s worth remembering what the veterans we honor actually swore to do.
The words of that oath are old and deliberate: “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
See, soldiers don’t swear loyalty to the president, or the party in power, or even the country as a piece of ground. They swear loyalty to the Constitution. A set of written ideas. When we send young people into harm’s way, we ask them to pledge their lives to the defense of the principles upon which this country was founded.
That’s deliberate.
The thinking is that a soldier’s loyalty should run to a principle, and not to whoever holds office that year. A new administration shouldn’t have any impact on how the military operates, or what it stands for.
But what happens when the enemy a soldier must defend against is domestic?
Billy Mitchell was about as decorated as an airman could be. He commanded American air units in France in the First World War, was the first American Army flier to cross enemy lines, and came home with a Distinguished Service Cross and France’s Legion of Honor. He was also convinced the country was already falling behind in the air, and he said so. He called out the Army, the Navy, and the White House by name. He told Congress that airplanes could sink any battleship afloat, but they kept cutting the air budget anyway. After an airship he’d warned about went down in 1925 (killing fourteen men) Mitchell accused his superiors of “incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense.”
They court-martialed him for insubordination and forced him out of the military.
He died in 1936, a few years before Pearl Harbor proved him right about nearly all of it.
This kind of thing still happens today.
A few years ago, near the peak of COVID mania, an Army lieutenant colonel named Doug Hague resigned his commission rather than carry out a vaccine mandate he saw as the politicization of the force he’d served.
He wasn’t alone, and officers like him had a lot to do with that mandate being dropped not long after.
Around the same time, a Space Force commander named Matthew Lohmeier was relieved of his command for writing a book that warned that the military was being turned into a tool of Marxist ideology.
(Remember, this was the same time period when the Pentagon had ordered its own ranks to “stand down” and root out “extremism,” with ordinary conservative and religious Americans treated as suspects.)
Lohmeier was reinstated under Trump, and is now the second-ranking civilian in the Air Force.
Edward Snowden took the same oath as a young intelligence worker, concluded that the domestic surveillance he’d discovered violated it, and gave up everything to warn us. People still argue over whether that made him a patriot or a traitor, but he treated his oath as binding even when it pointed at the very government signing his paychecks.
Thankfully, most of us will never be forced to sacrifice our livelihoods to defend the principles of liberty. Still, the Constitution is only as strong and binding as the number of people who know what’s in it and are willing to defend its ideas.
You can have soldiers willing to die for their country, and still lose the rights they swore to protect and defend if the citizens those rights belong to never learned they had them.
That learning happens in town halls and school board meetings, and around kitchen tables. It happens in the regular lives of free people, doing the work in their own homes and communities to safeguard the liberties vital to human prosperity and flourishing.
It’s a job that cannot be outsourced.
We make kids’ books to help parents in the vital work of teaching these ideas early to the rising generation. In our newest book, The Tuttle Twins and the Shield of Liberty, Ethan and Emily watch their town give its privacy away a piece at a time for the promise of safety, and learn that it costs dearly to try to get it back.
It covers what the Constitution actually protects, and why a right only survives when regular people are willing and able to defend it.
You can Pre-order The Tuttle Twins and the Shield of Liberty here.
So this week, go ahead and thank a veteran. But also, consider teaching your kids what veterans swear to protect and defend—and against whom.
That part of the oath belongs to the rest of us too. And history shows that we can’t just depend on others to do it for us.
— Connor
