Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

This time around, it seemed that the war effort was wholly outsourced to those few Americans who served in uniform. America tripped over itself to salute them, without seeming to consider the possibility that civilians, too, could accept some risk or pay some contribution into the cause of freedom. I thought again of the names on that Civil War memorial wall as it became clear that this time, the task of dealing with this conflict would be assigned to a class of professional soldiers, not shared by all of our society on an all-hands-on-deck basis. We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom. Truly grasping and defeating the logic of suicide terrorism was too much for our Congress or administration, which lapsed instead into simplistic rhetoric.

One of the more eloquent — and poignant — observations on post the post 9/11 disconnect that continues to affect service members, veterans, and their families.