The priceless gift of freedom

Merry Christmas.

I have never not been with family on Christmas. All of my 45 December 25s have been spent with those I am the closest to.

So I don’t have an inkling of what it is like to be a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine today, deployed in Afghanistan, one of its neighbors, or floating on the Arabian Sea. There are tens of thousands of such men and women, and I hope this column gets to some of them as my thank you.

There are hundreds of thousands more soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines scattered around the globe. In Japan and South Korea, throughout Europe, in every embassy compound where the U.S. flag flies, and on ships in every ocean, Christmas is spent on duty and on guard. My thanks goes out to them as well.

Most Americans are aware of these troops in this year of surprise attack and war. But these troops have been in these places every year. For decades at a time, civilians do not give them a second thought. And then, suddenly, they are the most important people in the world.

I do not know as I write this whom Time magazine has selected as Man of the Year, but I would have selected the American military and my cover would have featured that soldier on horseback riding near Mazar-e Sharif with the anti-Taliban Mujahedin. We are still vulnerable to attacks from terrorists. But thanks to the American military – well represented by this modern calvary man – we are a whole lot less vulnerable than we were on Sept. 11.

The victory in Afghanistan underscores the central fact at the beginning of the new millennium: Ours is the best-equipped, best-trained and, thus, most-lethal military in the world. Every calculation of every leader around the globe must begin with this fact. The American military, if directed to do so, can destroy any regime it targets. It is that simple.

There are many sources of American strength. We have been blessed with tremendous resources and a great population of hard-working and generally easy-going fellow citizens. Though our elected class holds some real bozos, these politicians are generally of good intent, though some are exceptionally wrong-headed on various issues. It is the greatest country – not just on the globe today, but in all of history.

And it is allowed to be that way because of its soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Christmas is a sentimental time, but there is nothing sentimental about sleeping outdoors in the Hindu Kush or flying through winter gales toward a carrier landing in a stormy sea. There is very little sentimentality in 12-hour shifts and six-month deployments.

So I hope you will join me in a very unsentimental – but genuine and greatly deserved – thank you to these men and women. It is a great thing to be an American, and the necessary condition of our continued happiness is that front line stretching around and to every corner of the globe.

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