Why We All Must Fight

My grandfather, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Edward Api Lovell, fought in Korea during his 18- year career in the military, before being killed in action in the Vietnam War on Dec. 28, 1965, a little over four months into his tour of duty. My dear friend and mentor, David Caplan, the vice chair of City Year New York, lied about how young he was to enlist underage as a pilot in World War II, and went on to fly valiantly in many perilous firefights. And now my little brother, Andrew Lovell Gregory, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is on the cusp of signing up for the Navy. 

I do not invoke these connections to glom onto my loved ones’ courage or lay claim by extension to their self-sacrifice, as politicians so often try to do in recounting the service of their family members and friends. I bring them up to illustrate how all of us, regardless of whether we realize it, have intimate ties to the men and women in uniform who defend our country and advance our ideals abroad, and to point out how addressing the plight of our veterans is not a faceless policy discussion but a deeply personal battle that all of us should take upon ourselves to wage. 

And it is a plight. Following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, America will have approximately 2.5 million new veterans—an astronomical number our federal government, through such travesties as the nation’s V.A. hospitals’ recent scandals, has already revealed it is ill prepared to provide the care these service members are owed and deserve. Our veterans return home with myriad struggles that are a direct result of their time in combat: grievous injuries, societal alienation, post-traumatic stress and suicidal depression, to name but a few. 

While every elected official in the United States is quick to profess his or her commitment to honoring our veterans, our government has failed them so far because the nature of the challenge is precisely the type it generally fails to meet. The executive branch and Congress tend to take action only to tackle short-term crises that are too pressing for them to get away with ignoring without facing retribution from voters. Large-scale problems such as climate change, our country’s crumbling infrastructure and income inequality, which require enormous vision, staggering investment and colossal effort to address, they conspicuously avoid because they will more than likely not see the dividends of expending their political capital to solve them. By the time these profound challenges are finally overcome, if ever, those in office now will have long moved on or perished, and they will never get to issue the press release patting themselves on the back and declaring “Mission accomplished.” 

Our veterans must not be forced to suffer for the shameful myopia of our politics. Regardless of our opinion of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we all must pressure our elected officials to fulfill our obligations to our veterans, and to treat them with dignity and compassion. We must always remember that these veterans are not simply soldiers: They are our friends, our neighbors, our family. 

“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation,” wrote the 19th century American preacher James Freeman Clarke. It is high time that our elected officials stop playing politics, and step up to become statesmen.