America 250: The Quiet Greatness of the American Veteran

Look around a New Mexico diner, a high school football bleacher, a ranch in Lincoln County, or a machine shop in Clovis this week. Sitting quietly among us are men and women who once held the security of the free world on their shoulders, folded their uniforms into a footlocker when the job was done, and went right back to work without asking for a parade.

As we celebrate America 250 this Veterans Day, it is easy to get bogged down in the noise of modern politics and forget just how rare—and how genuinely great—this country actually is. If you want proof of American greatness, you do not need to look at Washington, DC. You just need to look at the American veteran.

An Oath to an Idea, Not a King

For almost all of recorded history, soldiers belonged to a ruler. They were conscripted peasants, hired mercenaries, or imperial legions marching to expand a monarch's map. Their oath was to a crown or a bloodline.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, America broke that mold forever.

The American soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Guardian, and Coast Guardsman does not swear allegiance to a president, a political party, or even a piece of dirt. Every single person who puts on the uniform raises their right hand and swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They swear their lives to a covenant of human liberty.

Think about how radical that is. In March 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the officers of the Continental Army were sitting in camp at Newburgh, New York. Congress was broke, the troops had not been paid in months, and a letter began circulating urging the army to march on Philadelphia and take control at the point of a bayonet. Every victorious army from Rome to Cromwell had done the exact same thing.

George Washington walked into the hall, stepped up to the podium, and pulled a pair of reading glasses from his coat—something his men had never seen him wear in public.

"Gentlemen," Washington said quietly, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country".

Hardened combat veterans wept openly in their seats. The rebellion vanished in five minutes. Those men went home to their farms, and in doing so, America's first veterans gave the world something it had never seen: an undefeated military that willingly bowed to the civilian republic it had just created.

From the 11th Hour to Every Generation

The holiday we mark on November 11 was born at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, when the armistice finally silenced the guns of World War I. A year later, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day, hoping the Doughboys had just fought "the war to end all wars".

History had other plans. Within a single generation, sixteen million Americans had to drop their plows, wrenches, and schoolbooks to liberate Europe and the Pacific from fascism in World War II, and then stand on the frozen ridges of Korea to hold the line against communism.

After World War II, an Alabama Navy veteran named Raymond Weeks walked in to see General Dwight D. Eisenhower with a simple proposal: Armistice Day shouldn't just belong to one war—it should honor every American who ever served in uniform. In 1954, President Eisenhower signed the law striking the word "Armistice" and replacing it with "Veterans," calling on the nation to remember the sacrifices of all who fought "on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom".

And pause for a second on what those American veterans did after winning World War II. For the first time in human history, a nation stood at the end of a global war with a monopoly on atomic power and the mightiest military on earth—and instead of conquering an empire, American service members handed the keys back to the liberated nations, fed their former enemies through the Marshall Plan, and came home.

The New Mexico Standard of Service

Nowhere does the tradition of service run deeper than right here in New Mexico. For generations, this state has sent its sons and daughters into the breach at rates far beyond our population:

• The Heroes of Bataan: In 1941, some 1,800 New Mexicans of the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery—National Guardsmen from Roswell, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Deming, Taos, Silver City, and small towns across the state—were sent to the Philippines. When Pearl Harbor was hit, they were the first to fire back in defense of the Bataan Peninsula, holding out for four brutal months without resupply before enduring the Bataan Death March and more than three years of captivity. Eight hundred and twenty-nine of those New Mexicans never came home.
• The Navajo Code Talkers: Young Navajo Marines took the language of their homeland into the bloodiest island landings in the Pacific—from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima—creating an unbreakable combat code that saved tens of thousands of American lives.
• The Long Watch: From the jungles of Vietnam and the Berlin Wall to Desert Storm, Fallujah, Kandahar, and the flightlines and missile ranges of Holloman, Cannon, Kirtland, and White Sands today, New Mexicans have never once hesitated when the phone rang.

What You Carry Home

Anyone who has spent years in uniform—whether four years or thirty—knows that the best part of the military isn't the ribbons on the chest. It is the people standing to your left and right.

In a country that sometimes feels divided by every possible category, the U.S. military remains the greatest melting pot on earth. Nobody in a foxhole, on a flight deck, or on a midnight maintenance shift cares what zip code you grew up in, what your parents did for a living, or what color you are. They care whether you know your job, whether you keep your word, and whether you will carry your buddy when things go sideways.

When veterans take off the uniform and come home to our communities, they bring that standard with them. They become the small-business owners, the linemen, the teachers, the sheriffs, the firefighters, and the quiet backbone of towns like Roswell, Las Cruces, Clovis, and Farmington.

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, we are still free because less than one percent of our neighbors keep raising their right hand to stand on the wall.

To every veteran across New Mexico and across this great country: thank you for standing the watch. Welcome home, and Happy Veterans Day.