Freedom Requires Perspective
A letter from an old Vietnam veteran has stuck with me for 14 long years as I've witnessed the "ugly" in the world firsthand
If you’ve kept up with my political work over the past three years plus, you know my Dad played a big role in making me who I am today – and that includes even my negative traits and tendencies. My father played a tremendous role in teaching me from a young age to understand the ugliness of the world and the driving forces behind the people who make it that way. He also taught me to appreciate fine and beautiful things, like baseball, history, and our own United States of America. As the son of an Austrian immigrant who was a staunch anti-Communist, he knew America’s freedoms were not the norm for the world and made every effort to help me realize hard work was required to keep them.
Time has proven him right. Shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer, he mailed me a note to Afghanistan I have to this day, dated 26 June 2010. I was only 25 years old, a First Lieutenant, and had arrived in Afghanistan only days before he wrote the letter and must have received it around the second week of July given how long it took to establish mail service at my remote base in the far western desert of that country.
It said:
Dear Son:
Glad to hear you are settled in at your new station. After a long trip like that it takes some time to readjust.
Exposure to some of the world’s great shitholes gives a man a new understanding of how much we Americans have and too frequently take for granted as well…
That’s how those old Vietnam veterans made themselves clear. There was no beating around the bush with my Dad - he went right to it. Some people who consider themselves to be cultured may criticize his seemingly barbaric view of Afghanistan and the people who live in it, but he is right. He was seeking to focus my perspective on what Americans have and should count as blessings, and while deployed, to take note of the horrific conditions those people have been forced to live in because the warlords who run the country do not embrace Western concepts of freedom that preserve the rights of citizens.
Human beings are still treated like property there, and in some areas, women are still stoned for learning how to read. Meanwhile, feminized Americans criticize free men for recognizing differences between the genders and promoting the traditional family and its interests. This is because they lack a true education based on experience and immersion in the ugliness of the world.
While I have been quick to criticize our endless military expeditions that lead us nowhere good, I am ultimately thankful for the needed perspective on how most of the world away from these shores looks. I am left with the following takeaways:
Four For the Free
1) Freedom is not the norm for humankind. Slavery and tyranny are. Seeing the malaise and despair in Afghanistan made me look at the engineering, infrastructure, and relative peace of America with all-new eyeballs when I returned home.
2) The ugliness we see, read, and hear about should help us reflect on things that are good and right.
3) We must use our ugly experiences to persuade others along the path of truth.
4) Fathers owe it to their children to pass on these lessons that are often obscured to contain negativity and despair. Children need to know what the world is like in nations that haven’t the slightest idea what freedom feels like.
Wow, the similarities between your dad and mine, (A WW2 P-51 pilot) are striking. He taught me the same way. He has been dead since 1996 and back then he used to say "the inmates are running the asylum". He should see it now. My father's (and to some extent) my mother's upbringing made me what I am today. Let us hope, and pray that the November election does not turn this country into a "shithole", as some parts of it are close now.