How the Homeland Became a Combat Zone

During a dinner at the annual gathering of the Ciceronian Society on March 19, a glance at my phone profoundly changed the rest of the evening. It had been an intellectually stimulating day with fellow Christian thinkers, for which my wife and I were grateful to be part of. Something familiar caught my eye: the photo of a man I instantly recognized, Brandon Shah. We were part of the same staff group section within the larger U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 2019. Brandon never used X, so I was immediately curious why he was showing up so prominently on my feed. Immediately, the following words accosted me: “The victim of the terrorist attack at Old Dominion has been identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah.”

My pulse raced, followed moments later by sudden rage. My anger over how the political class has betrayed veterans of the so-called Global War on Terrorism rekindled. My wife could tell something was bothering me. “Are you okay?” she asked. I wasn’t. My focus on the planned presentation I was to deliver later broke, my mind hijacked by a kind of mourning I had avoided throughout 20 years in the military due to learning that a man I served with died in combat on home soil.

For decades, I’ve observed our politicians signaling support for the troops, thanking us for keeping the nation secure. “I’m making the future safer for my descendants” is the bargain I believed and accepted in exchange for missing significant portions of my sons’ young lives. Then they imported the very threat they sent us to neutralize. We veterans of the war on terror did our part. But the government failed to uphold its end of the agreement, an egregious betrayal for which no amount of hollow “thanks for your service” incantations can cover.

For decades, policymakers and commanders full of utopian dreams and desperate to cement their legacy engaged in open-ended missions to rebalance the scales of power overseas rather than defend our own homeland.