It didn't matter where you came from. It mattered where you were standing when the firing started.
The Army works for one simple, undeniable reason: nobody gives a damn about your backstory in the heat of the moment.
You might have come from the manicured lawns of the suburbs, a broken home in the rust belt, a dusty farm, or the concrete jungle of the inner city. It didn't matter. It was irrelevant. What mattered was that when the mission started, and the friction of chaos set in, they had your back, and you had theirs.
It worked. It was ugly, it was hard, and it was loud – but it worked. And looking around at the current state of our union, our country could learn a hell of a lot more than "a thing or two" from that dynamic.
The Great Equalizer
People from anywhere in the world don't divide us like we divide ourselves. When we step onto foreign soil, the locals don't care what kind of neighborhood we grew up in. They don't ask if our ancestors were Irish immigrants, Italian stonemasons, or West African farmers. They don't care if we were raised baling hay or hailing taxis.
They see us, and they know immediately: American.
Personally, I wore that label as a badge of honor. But the truth is, we have a certain way of carrying ourselves – a swagger, a volume, a presence – that the rest of the world sees as instantly recognizable traits. We are the only ones who don't see it because we're too busy staring at our differences under a microscope.
I guess that was the true benefit of basic training. We would get absolutely broken during the transition from civilian to soldier. In that process of being torn down, you forgot how to give a shit about your actual feelings. You were too tired, too hungry, and too stressed to nurse a grudge. Therefore, it was easier to not care about anyone else's "feelings" either. You cared about their survival.
The Blender of Backgrounds
It didn't matter where you came from. It mattered where you were standing when the firing started.
Every platoon was a blender of backgrounds. Most of us hadn't really ventured far from the area of our kid years. Suddenly, you're standing in formation next to a guy who has never seen a skyscraper, and on your other side is a guy who has never seen a cow.
It truly was a smorgasbord of personalities all thrown into a kettle to cook some infantry stew. We fought, cried, showered, stretched, farted, ran, ate, and slept within inches of each other daily. And this was just in basic training.
The fighting happened because, let's be real, it's hard to drop the 'tough-guy' act you spent 18 years building before this adventure. But at the end of the day, when the Drill Sergeants backed off, we all celebrated at graduation.
Well, most of us.
There were these two bums who went AWOL in basic training, and I never quite understood the logic of going through the hell of reception and the first few months only to quit. I doubt it worked out for them at the end of the day. They wanted the benefits of the title without the sacrifice of the brotherhood. But who am I to judge? Maybe it saved their lives. Maybe they weren't built for the "we," only the "me."
Through that time, we did eventually learn about each other's former lives. But notice the timing: that was after we already had a taste of hell together. The shared suffering made the past less significant than the present. We found out that most of us didn't fit the mold of whatever stereotypes supposed to divide us.
Sure, there was always that one guy who probably had no business joining; we won't talk about PVT Anderson, every group has an Anderson. But the vast majority of us got along even after some of us went to blows over shit that didn't even matter. We fought, we bled, we shook hands, we moved on.
The Mission is the Boss
In the military, if you are given a lawful order, you are expected to do it. None of the other stuff – your political leanings, your opinion on tax codes, your feelings about the weather – made a difference in whether or not you were going to execute the mission.
Orders are followed, regardless of the world's politics. We all knew what we got ourselves into.
The enemy certainly didn't care about our inner fighting either. The patch on our shoulder was all that mattered in battle. When the rounds start flying, they don't selectively just shoot the Democrats or the Republicans. All Americans were their enemy. They hate us equally. (Probably more than you hate the other tribe).
Maybe that's why I never gave a shit about PVT Anderson's background. If he could hold a rifle and point it in the right direction, he was my brother.
He struggled with that too, though..
The Algorithmic War
America, we have to stop fighting about made-up differences and start recognizing that we are still on the same team. We are currently fighting a different kind of war, and the casualties are our unity.
The algorithms have us ready to kill each other. This isn't accidental. It's a business model. The systems we use to communicate are designed to feed both sides hate-filled propaganda because anger keeps you scrolling. It keeps you clicking. They are monetizing our division. We are basically pointing digital rifles at our neighbors because a computer code told us they are the enemy.
I feel like I say this all the time but: Wake the hell up, America.
The differences we have with each other are what used to unite us. I can get on a bus and ride with people from ten different countries sometimes. America is supposed to be that melting pot metaphor.
But let's be honest: We aren't a melting pot anymore. Now, we are a bag of Chex Mix. The melting stopped a long time ago. Everyone has their own flavor, they stick to their own kind, and they refuse to blend. The Rye chips stay with the Rye chips, the pretzels with the pretzels.
Ronald Reagan, quoting an anonymous letter writer, said it best:
"You can go to Japan and live but you cannot become Japanese… You can go to France and live, but you will not become a Frenchman… You can go to Germany or Turkey and not become a German or a Turk. Anyone can come to America and be an American."
That used to be true. We need to make it true again.
The Way Forward
The goal of all of us should be to make the country better. If that's not your goal, you need to go. There are far too many people that we consider "leaders" or "influencers" who actually hate America. They profit from the demolition of our shared values.
We may not always agree on the methods of how to fix the country. You might want to fix the road with asphalt, and I might want to fix it with concrete. But we must find the compromise that helped build this nation, rather than arguing until the road washes away completely.
We've let the enemy (Russia, China, etc.) into our living rooms through our screens, and they only want to create distrust between Americans. They know they can't beat us on the battlefield, so they are trying to beat us at the dinner table.
Shared goals are more important than tribal politics. When we are all facing the same direction, we can get more done. Some elected officials in this country are only in office because of their hate for the other side, and that's ridiculous. That's not leadership; that's cheerleading for the apocalypse.
Wake. Up.
Remember, the mission is to make America the best damn country in the world. That starts with YOU. These elected officials are our reflections. If we are hateful, they will be hateful. When hate starts to rule the day, we all end up losing.
Instead of fighting it out in the comments section or pointing fingers like toddlers, let's figure out ways to fix the actual problem.
Fall in, America. We've got work to do.
