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As Veterans Day approaches, I am reminded that the hardships of military service provided me with the most valuable lessons of civics.

In the days after driving off the battlefields of Iraq, I faced a personal epiphany about the fragility of civilization and the value of our republic. I wish every American understood what I saw — it would change our politics and bring us closer to the hopeful words of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, “we are not enemies, but friends.”

I went to war at 28, an old soldier, having spent a decade preparing for it. I was a single infantry captain in the division specially trained for desert warfare. I was happy to go to war.

Soldiering is supposed to be hard, and late summer in the Saudi Desert certainly was. During that long stretch from August to January, I was surprised by the enemy’s idiocy. To this day, I remain shocked that Saddam Hussein didn’t leave Kuwait and keep the oil fields in the north. That is the first lesson: Tyrants — unconstrained by legislatures, courts or voters — do crazy, damaging things.

But, it was direct combat and its aftermath that really opened my eyes to the need to hold civilization tightly.

In the days before Desert Storm launched, I watched an entire Saudi city evacuate on a two-lane road. Cars piled with belongings moved slowly around the clock for two days. The haggard looks of children staring through dust-covered windows haunt me.

That second lesson was that the failure of a tyrannical government reaches far beyond the battlefield.

From the start of Desert Storm on Jan. 17, 1991, until I returned to Saudi Arabia in March, I didn’t change clothes and ate only two or three hot meals. Letters and news of the world stopped coming as we endured the early, and largely unreported, fights on the border with Iraq.

These weeks included possible chemical attacks that set off our alarms, forcing us to don gas masks for long periods. It’s best not to dwell too much on how we determined it was finally safe for everyone to unmask.

The lesson: Nothing an imaginative mind can conjure matches the reality of a failed nation and the horror it unleashes.

Then we attacked. The ground war — 100 hours of constant movement — remains sketchy in my mind. I slept no more than two or three hours each night. Riding behind the lead armored battalions, we moved so fast that each battlefield was still full of Iraqi soldiers, living and dead. Most were still armed but wisely chose not to continue the fight against us. The living stared blankly at us, no doubt having their own epiphany about their civilization and its many failures.

On the last night of the war, we drove down a highway outside Basra, directly behind the lead tank battalion. The dead clustered along the roadside, spilling onto the highway and under overpasses. They hung across burning tanks, trucks and personnel carriers. The smoke from these fires hung low in deep layered blankets, fueled by the corpses of the enemy.

We were far too tired to retch at the smell, yet the real lessons of the failure of tyranny were still ahead of us.

After the ceasefire, civilians and deserters descended upon us. Our medic delivered a baby in the midst of this filth. Throngs of enemy soldiers walked toward survival — most eagerly, some unwisely still trying to fight.

Civilians — families weeping — walked or drove through our lines. We fed them and offered water, yet surely filled them with the deepest fear. I shudder to think on their plight. Imagine your family car stopped by heavily armed men in chemical suits, then being questioned by an officer (me) so covered in filth that days later he was forced to burn all his clothing before being allowed into a field shower.

This lesson: Liberty is a gift — traveling without harassment from armed men, living openly in a free society, expecting decency and tolerance.

I served in other places, too. I was in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. I served in peacekeeping missions along the Egypt-Israel border, and I served along the border of North Korea. In all these places, something we take for granted was missing.

Our Republic endures because we expect much of citizens and give them much in return. Our founders made clear that, to survive, we had to do the hardest of things. We had to leave behind us the failings of our past civilizations — mostly European — and make something new, unlike anything before it.

Here we judge you not on who your father was, but on what your sons and daughters might become. Our founders made clear that freedom was for all of us, not just those of us who spoke the same language or worshipped at the same church. And, quite wisely, they acknowledged that these freedoms were beyond the dictate of government — they were gifted by the Creator.

Believing these truths is among the hardest of human tasks; living them is even harder. We learn most by outlining our points of failure.

If you hate Jews, Muslims or Presbyterians, you fail this test of American civilization. If you deny the inherent human dignity of transgender people, you fail the test of our Constitution. If you call yourself a Christian Nationalist, you are neither Christian nor American in the truest sense.

There can be no such thing as a Heritage American — we left that behind us.

I cherish my military service for many reasons, chief among them this: It taught me that the highest calling of an American is attending to citizenship. The greatest thanks you can give a veteran is not for their service, but by honoring the Constitution we fought for.

Michael J. Hicks is professor of economics and the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. He previously served on the faculty of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management and at research centers at Marshall University and the University of Tennessee. His research interest is in state and local public finance and the effect of public policy on the location, composition, and size of economic activity. 

The views expressed here are solely those of the author, and do not represent those of funders, associations, any entity of Ball State University, or its governing body. Also, the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.