CDR Salamander - A long chain renews each year

America has its Memorial Day, yes, but I have always preferred the Commonwealth’s concept of Remembrance Day. I’m an American, so I’ll form up.

I almost posted something today that has been sitting in my drafts for the last few years. It might be more appropriate for Memorial Day…maybe. It is a bit dark and angry, and it may not work then either. Heck, I don’t like the post at all, so I may never publish it. I’ll need to ponder that some more.

I feel that, with some of you having been here with us for two decades or more, I owe you the willingness to publish even the things I’m having second thoughts about. But I don’t know. I’ve got another half-year or so to think about it.

Instead, what I’d like to do today is offer a reminder about a new generation of veterans coming online.

The youngest of them were born the year President Obama was elected to the highest office in the land. The First Battle of Fallujah was already four years in the past, and the attacks of 9/11 had happened seven years earlier. USS Freedom (LCS-1) had just been commissioned.

I first put on my Midshipman uniform in 1984. The assassination of Kennedy was as relevant to me as 9/11 is to the new batch of Midshipmen and Recruits coming online this year. Heck, probably even less so. Twenty-five years before I put on the uniform, the Eisenhower Administration was coming to an end.

Some of these people will serve only a couple of years. Others will serve for a few decades. As time goes on, more and more of them will want to know not just what they are being asked to do, but why. The arguments, justifications, and references many of us still rely on are no longer useful to them.

Our nation is going to ask them to do things they never imagined would be asked of them. Things will happen that no one expects. The only way to ensure these young men and women can meet those challenges as we would want them to is to insist on forward-looking perspectives and an unceasing effort to ensure they have the absolute best weapons, leaders, and thinking behind them.

For those of us who are older veterans, that should be our focus as well.

Not a reserved parking space. Not a discount. Not an extra percentage point on a VA disability rating.

No. Our obligation, especially for those in positions of power and influence, is to look at these new volunteers coming online with the same sense of mission, support, and concern that we would have wanted from those who came before us when we first put on the uniform.

The past has a greater obligation to the future than the present has to the past.

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