Why I Serve

MAJ Tim Stewart
Student, Command and General Staff School
U.S. Army Combined Arms Center
Fort Belvoir, Virginia

I have spent the better part of fourteen years posted in faraway countries. I have been several time zones and several hundred, even thousands of miles away from my family and my friends. The time away was exemplified for me when last fall I flew back to the U.S. from Yemen for my grandmother’s funeral, and I saw members of my extended family who had not only entered grade school while I was away, but were now graduating from college, and on the verge of getting married. To those who saw me for the first time in over a decade, I was something of a mythical beast--talked of at times yet never seen. At that point, I was again forced to review (and answer repeatedly) a question that I had often thought about in the dark quiet hours of the morning staring out over a foreign land, while a foreign people slept nearby—why do I do it?
Why do I serve my country? What has caused me to spend all of my adult life in locations where I consider myself fortunate if I can see either my brother, or my mother, or my father for a Thanksgiving or a Christmas? For me, the answer lies in the definitions of my chosen vocation, the profession of arms.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary (www.M-W.com) the term “arms” can either mean it can mean military service, or open hostilities. In my career I have had the privilege of one, and the misfortune of the other. Indeed, the questions I was asked after the funeral were almost entirely from those two veins, vacillating between fear, and bordering at times on awe.
For me, the decision to serve my country was simple. One simply does not take without giving back, so I naturally gravitated towards the profession of arms that I have selected as my career. The sacrifices that I have endured and continue to endure are firmly rooted in the definition of ‘arms’ pertaining to military service. For me, my job, indeed my entire adult life has been focused on military service to my country and the attached ethics and culture surrounding it. In many ways, I think it was the culture that drew me towards the military, as opposed to some other service to the nation. I desired to serve with honorable people, who had a sense of service greater than of self, and were willing to make great sacrifices towards the noble end that service was focused on. I wanted to be able to say that I was one of those people that rarely walked past a mistake, that I was a brick in the wall that let others sleep the night away in peace, and that I was connected by tradition and experience with those great patriots who went before and sacrificed in order to provide me with the opportunity for the education and childhood that I enjoyed.
I think the professional aspect of military service appealed to my analytical side as well; the ethics of the American soldier are well understood by not only most Americans, but most of the world, although most would be hard pressed to articulate them. They are centered on protecting the innocent in an honorable manner. They are about tempering violence with compassion, and the U.S. military takes as much pride in its pictures of sandbagging for hurricanes as it does with pictures of engaging insurgents. I would argue that often we take more pride in the sandbags.
There is another definition to arms, and that involves hostility, both in dealing with it and producing it. This is the root of the fearful questions from half-remembered relatives, who somehow saw my last decade and a half of absence as a whirlwind tour from one conflict, one battle to another. For them, military service consists of only what they see today on the news: combat, violence, loss and death. The irony becomes that while this is the state for which most of my time in service has been focused on, preparing for, and dealing with—it is not the creator of the things that leap to mind first when I look back over the course of my career to date. It has been a shaping aspect of my life, but not a defining one. For me, the periods of violence were not as memorable as the people I knew at those times and shared those experiences with. For all the time away from family and friends, and for all the time spent in either remote locations, “sub-optimal conditions”, or both, I have met some of the finest people I could hope to meet (not all of them American), experienced events that I would not have thought possible, and enjoyed more than I would have hoped for.
I think my answers have taken me back to where I began. For me, there was no option on “if” to serve, only with whom, and it is the culture and the people in the U.S. military to whom I was drawn who make it possible to remember the good in the face of overwhelming bad. I have looked on in joy at a comrade’s newborn baby, I have handed a folded American flag to a grieving set of parents as we laid their son to rest. I’ve watched soldiers fall asleep standing while in the middle of a conversation from exhaustion, and I’ve seen them rally at a friend’s house after work to help them move yet again. In the end, I serve because I’m with the best people I know doing the most important thing I can think of, providing the opportunity given to me, to others.

The views expressed in the blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Goverment.