By Steve the Pilot | October 20, 2023

I’m sitting on my balcony overlooking the old Greek port of Chania on the island of Crete.  It’s been thousands of years since the ancient Greeks roamed this area but they had that idea of democracy and did so with the concept of honor.  Great democracies have risen and fallen with the value of honor or lack of it.

What is honor?  Honor is a virtue, a person who has honor strives to do things in the morally correct way and if things don’t work out, then takes responsibility for their actions.  Honor seems to be in short supply in our current society.  From our Presidents, to our government employees, to companies and those who are supposed to uphold it, it’s in short supply.

Our military is supposed to be the holder, the last bastion shall we say for honor, so what’s been going on at the top?

Many of us through the centuries have served our country honorably.  Millions have perished protecting the rights and freedoms in our founding documents honorably.  You see them buried at Arlington and Normandy, and you see them in the numerous national cemeteries spread out throughout this great land.

On one layover I was wandering about the old Presidio grounds in San Francisco, I came upon the San Francisco National Cemetery.  While it looked like any other national cemetery, except with a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge, it was a poem that was etched into the stones as you approached the entrance that really caught me.  It was by Archibald MacLeish, this has become the poem I read every Memorial Day.

The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak

Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them? 

They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say, We were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say, We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say, We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them.

They say, Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say: it is you who must say this.

They say, We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends the war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

What is that motivation to serve and put yourself in harms way?  There are families where generation after generation have served, honorably. As the West Point motto says, “Duty, Honor, Country!”.  An incredibly boiled down statement but it says it all.  I look at that statement as the three legged stool for being a good citizen.

Duty:  We each have a duty to serve for our fellow citizens, that can take many forms not just joining the military.

Honor: Well, that’s the focus here today…

Country: We need to keep our country and pass it on better than how we found it.  While it comes last in the words, we have nothing without it.

I’m not a writer, I write when things bang around in my head long enough that I have to just get them out.  I’m writing because I love my country, I love all our states (I’ve been to each plus many territories), I love its construct, its differences, those men 250 years ago were brilliant.  They devised a system to protect us from human nature’s bad tendencies or to at least slow them. A continuing issue has been the state of our military and the low recruitment of its citizens.

One of my favorite podcasts is Real Clear Defense “Hot Wash”.  They do a great job on all sorts of subjects connected to the military, from recruitment, history, POW/MIA, and so much more, I highly recommend it.  A month or so back they had an episode on the military recruiting crisis.  It brought back the issue of honor I’d been stewing about since the debacle of the Afghanistan pullout.  Recently I read General Milley’s farewell address.  I say, good riddance, long over due….

If you read my brother Bill’s Opa Octoberfest column you got the part about our dad. I’m the second generation but third in my family to join the military.

Our older brother was a Surface Warfare Officer, followed by an anti-submarine helicopter pilot in the Navy.  I was commissioned by my brother and received my first salute from my father, it was one of the proudest days for our family.

I went off to training and when Desert Storm came around, I ended up in Riyadh, my father was in Jeddah and my brother was on a ship at sea.  My mom was never in the military but there’s no doubt with a husband and two sons in harms way, she served.

So you do your time, you’ve given back to your country but once a military man it’s always in you, from hospital corners to gig lines it’s there.  As an officer, there’s that code, that code of honor, they instill it in you from day one and it slowly sticks.

Which brings me to the issue…

I have twins sons, Eagle Scouts, very sharp, sharper than me, so I wanted at least one of them to continue the tradition of our family serving our country.  As they were looking at colleges I got them started on the process of applying for a ROTC scholarship.  They started but really weren’t interested so I had to let it go.  I figured I would work on them again towards graduation. I’d have them go to Officers Training School instead of ROTC but we never got there.  The Afghanistan debacle happened, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley got in the way.

Honor, honor from our top leaders is the leg that is missing on that three legged stool.  Those two (Austin & Milley) either came up with that bad plan, implemented a good plan poorly or failed to convince the President that it was a bad plan.  Anyway you slice it, they implemented the failure, got our sons and daughters killed and if they had any sense of decency or “honor” would have resigned.  No one has been held accountable and they are responsible.  Austin & Milley will not look good in the history books.

Citizens see this lack of honor, they watch it and make decisions from it.  So it is not surprising that there are a lot of families who are now skipping a generation of service, there will be more….

I never brought up joining the military again to my sons.  I know what serving meant and did for me but I know it is the best course.  As I said in my first column, my boys are not experiments nor are they fodder for our leaders, they are “my” sons.  I did my best to raise them with honor and I would never hand them over to those who don’t have it.

God, Family, Country… in that order.

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Steve the Pilot was born and raised on Chicago’s North Side and raised his family there before they were driven out by crime and political indifference of crime on taxpayers.

He wrote about leaving the city he loved in a moving essay called “Anatomy of My Departure.”