What it means to be a Veteran

This past Friday, I was the guest speaker for a Veterans Day program at a local school, 33 years running and a fixture in the Fox Valley community. Today, as we celebrate Veterans Day and mark 100 years since the end of WWI, I'm sharing my remarks here.

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Good morning, esteemed guests, faculty and students of J.R. Garretts Middle School. I am delighted and honored to be here today. A special thank you to Mr. Scholz and Mrs. Kane for giving me the opportunity to join you as we observe Veterans Day, a day recognizing each of us who have served this great nation in our Armed Forces.

I’ll begin by asking: what do you think it means to be a veteran? Very literally, it means a person who has served in a military force. And, of course, there are many different branches of the military and ways that one can serve in the armed forces. Beyond the dictionary, though, what does it mean, deep down and in the fiber of who I am? The answer to that question is found in the beginnings of my military service, in the formative years I spent at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It’s likely hard to imagine what four years of college is like at Army; my best advice is to imagine everything you think is going to be fun and awesome, and then think of the exact opposite. Ha! In truth, the four years I spent on the Hudson River in New York are absolutely the reason I am who I am today, in character, in experience and in accomplishment. The intensity of academics, military training and expectations of physical fitness excellence showed me I could do more and that I could be more, but I had to work for it. No shortcuts, no half efforts. All in, all the time.

The mission of the United States Military Academy is to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army. More than twenty-five years have passed since I first raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, bearing true faith and allegiance to the same. In my mind, though, I can flash back to that day when I donned the uniform and stood at attention, and I feel the same swell of pride now that I did all those years ago on that summer day. For the first time, I looked upon the flag of the United States of America and saw it as something more than a symbol; it held greater meaning for me as something I would honor and defend.

One of the interesting things about being a veteran is that lessons learned in your youth come into focus and more clear, your earliest days in uniform becoming even more of who you are than they were when first learned. From day one at the Academy, you begin to learn how to live “Duty – Honor – Country,” and your commitment to something bigger than yourself begins with the Cadet Honor code. “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.” In the stress of that first summer – Cadet Basic Training, or Beast Barracks as it’s so affectionately known – I just remember trying to memorize everything thrown at me, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about the words and what they should mean to me. These important rubrics, though, become the foundation of your cadet life and one of the many threads that will always bind you to the Long Gray Line, as the collective body of West Point graduates is known. They are repeated over and over, then taught to the new cadets that come after you, until you own them and guard them as a sentinel for the Academy and the Army way of life.

As plebe year (that’s freshman in West Point speak) turns to yearling year, then cow and firstie year quickly follow (yes, that’s actually what they’re called – no freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors at West Point!), you see that the binary choices of lie/don’t lie, cheat/don’t cheat, and steal/don’t steal, are simple. The greater challenge, though - of being the best you can be, exemplifying the highest standards of ethical and moral living - is better described in this excerpt from the Cadet Prayer: Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won. Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.

I spent four years living up to the expectations of the code, trying to meet the aspirations of the Cadet Prayer. Frankly, sometimes I got it right, and sometimes I didn’t, but what was always true was that I had the desire to be better, the willingness to be formed in the crucible. I learned to submit to discipline and rigor, and how to get in formation and march before being the one to give orders. Becoming an officer in the United States Army meant doing the hard things, and finding satisfaction in both the victory and in the struggle. It meant sacrificing much of what was a “normal” college life in a willingness to live a life of selfless service to the nation. And always, as I went through the daily rituals and routines of cadet life, ever present and a seamless part of our day, the American flag was a beacon of that greater meaning. We began our day with the call of reveille and saluting the raising of the flag; we saluted it as we passed in review during a parade; in the evenings, we stopped whatever we were doing and came to attention at tattoo, when the bugler sounded the lowering of the colors.

Upon graduation and commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, I let go of my cadet gray uniforms and changed to the Army green, finally heading out into the “real” Army. The lessons I had learned at West Point stayed with me, ingrained in me as my lighthouse, my guideposts, as I navigated my time as a platoon leader at Ft. Stewart, Georgia. When I deployed to Kuwait in 1998, I found that the pressure of the redeployment of a brigade of soldiers and working jointly with a Take-off and Landing Control Element unit from the Air Force was not dissimilar from figuring out how to juggle the priorities and demands of my daily life at school. Assuming command of a Movement Control Team that supported a battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, an assignment that required sometimes being on 24 hour recall in preparation for deploying some of the most elite soldiers in the world, couldn’t intimidate me, because I had learned that with focus and discipline, I could do the hard things. When on 9/11 I stood with my husband – also my West Point classmate – in our quarters at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, both of us Captains at the time, and watched the plane hit the tower of the World Trade Center, I knew that whatever we were called upon to do, we would do our Duty. When we arrived at Ft. Hood, Texas, to a fundamentally changed world of concrete barriers, barbed wire, and armed gate guards, we called on courage born of loyalty to our Country.

I spent five and a half years on active duty, eventually making a decision to join the civilian world and a new path. In and out of uniform, my commitment to the ideals of West Point and the Army has never wavered. Duty – Honor – Country is woven into the fabric of my life. Though I no longer wear the uniform, I am forever a veteran and I serve my community in ways large and small. I volunteer; we support charities; we teach our children respect for others. We demand of ourselves the same high standards we learned as Cadets and as officers in the Army. We Honor the service and sacrifice of our friends, those who have risen through the ranks and are poised to lead Brigades of soldiers, and those I have lost over the years on the battlefields of the Middle East. Seeing the flag, folded with precision and carefully given to the grieving families, it has taken on even more meaning for me, honoring it as a symbol of what I can be, the greatness of our nation, and more than ever, the sacrifices our veterans are willing to make in service to America.

I will close with some of my favorite words, those spoken by GEN Douglas MacArthur in a speech at West Point. “Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.” On this Veterans Day, I ask you to think deeply about what being a veteran means, and who a veteran is. Think of all of the men and women, officers and enlisted; those who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam; Ft. Hood, Ft. Stewart, Ft. Bragg; soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who deployed to an active war zone and those who kept our nation safe in years of peace. Aspire to live above the common level of life – honor America’s veterans by mirroring their values, doing your Duty, with Honor, and serving our Country in your own way, on Veterans Day and every day.