Dear Mr. President,

 

Dear Mr. President,

I understand that you have some questions about why people serve and what's in it for them. Well, I can't speak for anybody but me, but perhaps my first-hand experience can offer you some insight, if not true understanding.

I served 4.5 years on active duty in the US Coast Guard and when I left active duty to go to college, I remained in the active reserves. In November 1990, to my utter surprise, I was involuntarily activated for Desert Storm in the midst of my Fall Semester of my senior year in college.

My initial orders were for 90 days, which I served in Galveston as a Small Boat coxswain. Our boat crews provided security to cargo vessels traversing the Houston Ship Channel loaded with military equipment and supplies headed for the Persian Gulf. It was the very antithesis of exciting or dangerous.

As my involuntary orders were winding down, I was asked to volunteer for a brand new Port Security Directorate that the Coast Guard had formed in response to the war. These Port Security Units (PSU)s were meant to be comprised primarily of reservists. The first Units had already been deployed to the Gulf, but they were due to be rotated out in a few months and the Coast Guard was experiencing critical shortages of qualified boat coxswains to fill out the next group of boat crews. Would I volunteer since they couldn't, at that point in time, extend my involuntary orders or compel me to stay with a new set?

If I accepted, I would be sent to intensive training in Florida, to include a crash-course in combat and chemical warfare, and then we would be deployed to the Gulf by spring. Because I was a woman, I would also receive training in specific protocols I would be required to follow once in theater to protect me from having acid thrown in my face, or other attacks by "friendlies" - the people we were there to "protect" - who were hostile in particular to women serving in uniform.

Finally, our mission once in theater was to essentially be the first line of defense from suicide bombers or other attacks from the water on US forces, whether underway or in port. Our primary purpose was to get between the enemy and our naval vessels to slow down attackers long enough for our forces to man their guns and open fire. In the worst case scenario, that we constantly trained for, we were essentially cannon fodder, encouraged to run for cover once our forces were in position but absolutely expendable if we couldn't get out of the line of fire fast enough.

Let me just say that I joined the Coast Guard at 18 over all other branches of the military because, as I've so often said, I wanted to learn how to help people, not kill them. I have no illusions of being a hero. I don't know that I am particularly brave when given enough time to think things through. There were plenty of times on search and rescue (SAR) missions that terror and panic nearly overcame me and it was only my training, and my crew, that held me together.

A secondary mission involved Law Enforcement (LE) in fisheries and drug interdiction, but I was never as comfortable with the LE parts of our job as I was with the SAR. It is somehow in my nature, still to this day, to want to like people and assume that people want to like me. The idea that someone would consciously and deliberately want to harm or kill me was always unnerving. When it came to LE, I worried that I would hesitate when faced with the "shoot don't shoot" option or fire too quickly, and I didn't know which would be worse. And though SAR ops are inherently dangerous, the "rescue" part meant that, unlike in LE, all parties involved were focused on the same happy ending.

So when the Coast Guard asked me to volunteer to go overseas into a war zone where nameless and faceless people would be on a mission to indiscriminately kill me - or to throw acid in my face simply because I was a female in uniform - I wasn't especially enthusiastic. The night I was grappling with the choice to volunteer or not, US Forces invaded Iraq, marking the official start of the Persian Gulf War. I stood on the beach in Galveston that night and wept. Had I known at that time that the War would be over so quickly thereby ensuring that I was never deployed, the decision would have been easy. But at that moment, all I knew was that I was being asked to go and kill people or be killed myself.

Only about 20% of the US population has ever served for any period in any branch of the military, and perhaps because of a lingering shame about how returning Vietnam vets were treated by civilians and their own government in the 60s, 70s, and even into the 90s, it is now nearly mandatory, to give lip service anyway, to honoring those who served. We're supposed to thank them at the least for their service.

Many people have thanked me and I can tell you, it always makes me uncomfortable. Overall, I enjoyed my years of service; even the hard parts; even the unjust parts; even the tragic parts. I am certain that I got far more out of the experience than it ever cost me, even though that cost included sexual assault and relentless sexual harassment. I would still join and serve, even knowing that cost, because what I got from my service is worth the price I paid, regardless of how unjust the cost was.

The Coast Guard grew me up in ways I badly needed, and it taught me important things about myself that I might never have learned otherwise. It exposed me to the best - and yes, sometimes, the worst - of people, though there were far more of the best. For a time, it was a family that I desperately needed.

I still feel a sense of gratitude to the people who served alongside me, trusted me, and put their lives on the line alongside mine when shit got real. There is nothing - nothing - that compares to that feeling of being part of a group of people - a team - working together to achieve something greater than yourselves - something that could cost you everything and yet you know that the ultimate goal is far more important than your individual life. That includes knowing that your life is worth risking for the lives of the people you serve with. When you are in those moments when your success and your life are not assured and death is a palpable entity standing at your shoulder breathing down you neck with baited breath, it elevates you in a way that nothing else in my life has ever done before or since.

Obviously, not every mission or ever experience in the service was like this. But once you've experienced that, once you become bonded with people like that - even people that you otherwise can't stand once you take your uniform off in the evening - you live for it. And you will die for it.

I love the ideals enshrined in our Constitution that describe the United States of America and the nation it is supposed to be. Nearly my entire life, from the time I learned the pledge of allegiance at 4 years old in school, the phrase "and justice for all" has resonated in every cell of my being.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave -this was the country I lived in! When I donned my uniform and traveled in public, I felt a pride like nothing else to represent those ideals to the rest of the country; to say to them: I am here to ensure that we remain free! That justice prevails!

My loyalty has always been first and foremost, to those ideals. For me, to be an American is not to be born here, within its geographical borders, but to embrace those particularly American ideals in our Constitution, that define America. Like the Rule of Law, which ensures justice for all because it demands that every single one of us submit to the law. And the concept of Freedom, which people often like to say isn’t free, and I agree, but not because people have to die to defend it, but because being free means not dying to force your freedom down my throat. It means giving up the freedom to have your way all the time so you can live in peace with others who want to live their freedom differently.

The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave was never meant to be a country obsessed with being “safe” and protected from every possible threat. It was meant to be a place where we were willing to risk everything to preserve one thing: freedom. It takes courage for freedom to reign not because it requires our lives sacrificed on foreign soil, but because my freedom has to willingly end where someone else’s begins, and figuring out where those boundaries are and should be takes personal sacrifice and moral courage, not dying in rich people’s wars.

But I digress. Honestly, in the end, it wasn't any of those ideals that inspired me to ultimately say yes. As idealistic as I am, I am also not so foolish to think that the Gulf War was about anything but oil. I understood that by volunteering, I was not serving as part of some grand fight for "Freedom" or "Justice for All." This was not a battle for liberty or democracy. This was a battle for capitalism; nothing more, nothing less.

So even though I was genuinely terrified by the very idea that I would be going into a war zone where people who didn't know me and would probably never lay eyes on me were going to try and kill me, along with all the crap that is particular to being a woman serving in the military and in that particular arena, I, after a lot of thought and a great deal of hesitation, said yes.

I didn't say yes for Freedom, or Justice or even our Constitution, as much as those words and ideals still mean to me. I said yes because of the people I would serve with. Because not everyone gets to serve, and not everyone should serve, and not everyone who serves does so honorably, but if there is one place where you are going to have the best opportunity to meet the best of us, the bravest of us, those of us who are all that we, as Americans, should aspire to be, that place is in the US Armed forces. And it was my greatest honor to serve alongside them and I would have died for any one of them because that is the best death I can imagine.

So, Mr. President, THAT's what was in it for me. That's the kind of sucker I am. I'm not a hero, but at least I understood what it means to serve and why. And it is no surprise, or accident of fate, that in all my years of service, there was no chance I would ever meet you there, serving alongside America's heroes.

To all of you who have served, whether you consider yourself a hero or not, you have my undying respect for your willingness to be one or, like me, to just serve alongside the true heroes. And for all of you who are worried that this is the end of the America that our Founders envisioned and placed in our trust, remember: So long as those ideals survives, America survives. Learn them and live them, and for the love of this country, and the ideals in which it is rooted, VOTE.