Human civilization is always trying to answer questions about itself as it tries to understand and overcome enduring challenges. Throughout our collective and national histories, many of these questions have been about disease, trade, conflict, and religion, but identity, who a person or nation is, what they stand for and how dangerous or reliable they are, have always been at the forefront. In the last century and a quarter, we’ve seen monumental change at rates without comparison in the remaining aggregate of known history. Arguably, this has been driven above all else by the increasing speed with which we have learned to communicate ideas and information.

Events of the mid-twentieth century placed the United States at the center of much of this exchange, and many of the other most important elements of global advancement still revolve around her (to me she is always lady liberty). Perhaps, then, it is inevitable, given the monumental changes happening at the moment, that the ideological question the world is currently most focused on finding an answer to is “What, or who, is the United States of America?”

This question has no single or easy answer. It never has had. A diverse people will necessarily have diverse ideals, but for any nation to succeed at any scale, there must be a general consensus on the most fundamental elements of its identity. I would argue that most nations see themselves as some combination of just, powerful, good, successful, superior, reliable, or friendly. No national identity can survive over time as the antithesis of these concepts (unjust, weak, bad, a failed state, inferior, unreliable, surrounded by enemies). Such nations collapse, often within a generation or two. I would further posit that the most successful countries are seen by others the way that they think of themselves. Thus, an America which sacrificed its peace and prosperity to turn the tide of fascism during WWII soared to heights of collective success never before enjoyed by any single nation, at least in part because we not only reached a great height, but the rest of the world saw our combination of soft and hard power. Perception met reality. It would have been all too possible for the first nuclear power to take advantage in any way it wanted. Likewise, modern Russia, attempting to project unlimited power, but in fact showing incredible weakness, seems destined to fail in this current iteration of itself, just as it did in Soviet times. However, 80 years after WWII, America is now at an inflection point. Among many challenges, there is fundamentally too much friction between how its own people view themselves and their role in the world, and too much dissonance in the way in which the world views America.

So, what is America? The world is shouting at us to answer this; people, nations, allies, enemies, economies and so on are all desperate to find out. Many are cheering for us to fail, others need to know if they can trust us, and others just want to know so they can find paths to their own prosperity. Americans are also desperate to know; our collective success and identity depends a collective definition. Writers far more qualified than I am are churning out a plethora of pieces on this subject, and from every perspective. America is just or unjust. America is strong or weak. America is…America is... I, for one, certainly don’t have a definitive answer. America is, after all, the sum of its stories and perceptions. I have but one more perspective and one more voice. I have a story of what America means to me personally, and why. That is the story I want to tell. I hope, that in the sum of all our stories, we either reconnect with our former identity, or find a new iteration of one that reflects the best of what America can be.

I was born in 1981. For most of my life that didn’t feel so long ago, but that’s shifting quickly as my shadow grows longer. Both of my parents served in the US Air Force, my father as a career airman and my mother for a single enlistment, leaving the service when she gave birth to me. Most of my formative years were therefore spent on military installations. Jet engines, reveille, taps, the full palette of the color brown and security forces (think military police) were the background and foreground of my life. If I went to a movie, it started with the national anthem, and we stood so proudly with our hands on our hearts that we could have burst. In 1991, I was ten, we were living on Eielson Air Force Base in central Alaska, and my father was a crew chief for an A-10 Thunderbolt (basically a flying gatling gun with weapons mounts to which, perhaps as an afterthought, were added wings and a place for a person to sit). Little did I know at the time just how important that airframe was in the just application of force that was Desert Storm/Desert Shield. I had baseball cards like most American kids at that time, but the trading cards I valued and remember the most were the Topps set featuring every weapons system, Schwarzkopf, Powell, and more from that conflict. Outside of our 8-unit condo military housing, I was completely unaware of what most of the other kids my age were doing at that time, but my friends and I were playing soldier and, just the one time, getting in trouble for finding and caching army surplus in the woods and accidentally setting off a (fortunately projectile-less) 40mm round in my hand. There was a whole investigation (thank you security forces), and us kids had to go back to playing soldier via GI Joe and toy guns. I also clearly remember trying on my father’s uniforms and gas mask. My young self loved it, and it was a great way for a young person to live. I was surrounded by people who believe in something bigger than themselves. The ideas of duty and honor planted their seeds..

Our next duty assignment was to Hurlburt field in North-West Florida, home of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). C-130s of every variant, helicopters, Tactical Air Control Party (TACP), Combat Control, and Pararescue were the order of the day. My father had cross trained to Social Actions, ironically a pre-curser to the now taboo DEI that, as far as I understand it, dealt primarily with issues with racism and sexual harassment. Evidently the DOD thought there were some issues even before talking about the issues was cool… and then wasn’t. Unrelated, I found myself spending a lot of time in the base library and discovered that there was a rich collection of works on WWII that didn’t consist of films featuring John Wayne (my initial source of wonder). I was hooked. I studied aircraft, read the likes of Ryan and Ambrose especially, and eventually broadened my horizons beyond stories and hardware, moving on to cause and effect. There was no great meaning at the time; I just found it all very interesting. The rest of my life was mostly spent going to church Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. My life was family, school, military, and church, with some sports mixed in.

It surprised no-one that I joined the Air Force within a month of graduating from high school. I had been inspired in many ways to join the ranks of Air Force Special Tactics (Combat Control). That dream quickly dissolved, as many plans do upon first contact with reality. It turns out you certainly can be a writer and a warrior, but I was one and not the other. I quickly washed out and found myself learning about military power generation equipment and aircraft arresting systems (think hooks and cables, but for Air Force fighter jets). This was the summer of 2000. My first duty assignment was in Aviano, Italy. My first deployment was to Ali Al-Salem Air Force Base, Kuwait in December of that year, supporting Operation Southern Watch, the continuation of the Gulf War that maintained a no-fly zone over southern Iraq, effectively to keep Kuwait and Saudi Arabia safe from further Iraqi aggression. So far so good. I wasn’t thrilled to have become a mechanic, but I was committed to doing my job well. I was helping to maintain the generators that powered the radar system that made the whole operation possible; one of thousands of invisible but critical jobs in the military.

I was home in Italy when 9/11 happened. Of course, for so many people in the world, this was an event that can never be forgotten. We were all immediately locked down on the base, and everyone as low down in the chain of command as I was spent their time standing on a roof looking for signs of additional attacks. My next deployment was to a secret location. My orders didn’t say where, I just presented them at airport terminals and was told what aircraft to board and when. I ended up in a country ending in -stan, focused on power production for general operations and with a special focus on the expeditionary runway lighting this time. Elements of the 10^th Mountain Division and 101^st Airborne Division guarded our perimeter day and night. I slept within 50 yards of massive cargo aircraft that never turned off their engines, executing combat take-offs and landings. One day, I stood at attention and watched as fallen comrades were unloaded with ceremony on their way home after their C-130 crashed into a mountain. I was a fly on the wall when the A-10s came to exact our retribution. My greatest personal hardship was probably the food. Write the words “Unitized Group Rations” (UGR) on a menu, and your restaurant will be out of business by the end of the day.

Later, I deployed to Al-Udeid AFB in Qatar and maintained the cable system for aircraft conducting combat operations in Iraq. Another fly on another wall, this wall far hotter than the last. I was desperate to go to Iraq to stand shoulder to shoulder with the young men and women giving their lives in defense of freedom, but it was not to be. An older me with the benefit of hindsight cannot regret that fact. After I got out of the service, I would go on to spend 11 years in Kuwait and marry a Kuwait-American who, as a young girl, was a refugee of the Gulf War, and whose uncles struggled to live under Iraqi occupation until America came and liberated them. In spending that time in the Middle East, I would come to understand America from more than one point of view; I’ve since experienced over 55 countries, which is only relevant in so much as all this travel keeps me on the path of continually seeking to understand who America is to different people in the world.

My ideals at the time of my military service, as I understood them, were simple: faith, family, and country, layered in with the Air Force’s core values of integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do. In retrospect, so much of my worldview and my view of my country at that time, were based on my understanding of America’s role in World War II. I understood intuitively, not because my schools taught me anything about ‘social justice’, that America has a tainted past. We learned our history, and among our successes were tragedies. Like practically all of the most noteworthy people and civilizations in history, our nation is defined not solely by the sum of our sins, but by those sins when weighed against our accomplishments and our contributions to peace and prosperity, as well as our ability to learn. Do we have to be apologetic? Perhaps not, but we should at least be introspective. The same nation that embarked on nearly a century of genocide and would eventually fight against itself to end human slavery, would be the same nation that ultimately grasped the most important lessons of the gilded age, World War I and the great depression. That nation would then rise up during the single darkest time in human history to sacrifice its people, treasure, and potentially its future to do the right thing, then to stand in the gaping voids of post-war Japan and Germany to do the hard work of rebuilding. This was precisely because we had learned the consequences of disengaging from our collective global interests. We proved to the world that we didn’t just understand soft power, we actually understood that human habitation and civilization on this planet require the majority of us to be working toward the same basic goals in concert, not in isolation. In doing so, we bought so much good will in the world that, for the most part, other nations stood by us and even fought with us in future conflicts, whether we succeeded or failed. They forgave us our folly because they in large part understood how difficult it is to possess such hard power without occasionally misusing it and they knew that in the biggest of fights, it pays to have big friends. We were valued for the sum of our parts.

The collective crisis of identity and ideology we are experiencing now is in many ways a slow train wreck. When the engines and the cars at last stop moving, we will have to figure out which parts can be salvaged, in which order, which ones are still coupled, what parts are worth fixing, and which parts need to be replaced. For me, the train came off the tracks when it became clear that the premise for the invasion of Iraq was not just a pretext for invasion, but a smoke screen for war profiteering. The human cost was enormous, both for my comrades, and to a much, much larger extent, the people of the region. Our fumbling tore open the fabric of society, created the cauldron from which ISIS was borne, and caused a level of suffering which I find impossible to fathom. If the US wasn’t over extended, could the Arab Spring have succeeded, at least in places? Could Assad have been kept from his campaign of mass-murder of the peaceful and beautiful Syrian people? We will never know, but certainly our actions had consequences. For the people of the region, those consequences were death and misery. For many Americans, our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the endless lies told by many officials at all levels of government (we need more money, we need more time, we need more troops, we have a better strategy) were not just symptoms of folly, they were categorical betrayals of trust and, more importantly, treasonous to the ideals of who America is and what part she plays in the world. But for all her strengths, America has never been good at taking a cold, hard look in the mirror. We evade, we deflect, we hide behind power and patriotism, we bait and switch real problems with culture war issues, and we far too often fail to remember who we are.

America today appears to be focused on money and power. Those things have long been a part of who we are, but at least in my story, they never really defined us. We got our original meaning from often brave but deeply flawed men who said a government has to be by the people and for the people, who held the truth that all men are created equal to be simply self-evident (that means stupidly obvious), that we were endowed by our creator with unalienable (things that cannot be taken away) rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are nice sentences, excellent prose in their original English, but they are fragments of the literature they gave us to help us define ourselves as something unique in the annals of governance. They gave us a system meant to grant us meaning we could all cling to and ideals we could all strive toward. They argued exhaustively and created a system that allowed us to argue and disagree about policies until we came up with plans, but they also tried to make it clear that we are all on the same team. America itself is our project, not any single party, oligarch, or interest group.

By the end of my military service, I was not the same person who had raised their right hand and swore an oath to the constitution of the United States of America. I had joined to serve my nation, I did so with honor and some distinction, and I have no regrets. But my view of the world has expanded and evolved to understand both our cultural self-image and cause and effect. In learning more about the costs of our actions and inactions, I began to deepen my understanding of our country and allow space in my heart for both love of country and critical examination. Over time, I came to see America not as I had when I was young, as a Camelot on a hill, almost unimpeachable, but as she truly is, the sum of her complicated, wonderful and sometimes deeply flawed parts. I for one, am willing to look into a mirror of introspection and learn the lessons it seems like destiny has foisted upon us. If America is exceptional, we all have to work together to keep her so. If that era is simply gone, we have to do the hard work of reimagining what else she can become.

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