Ideas and Society

There are days when words feel small, when even the richest vocabulary cannot hold the weight of gratitude. Veterans Day is one of those days.

Every freedom we enjoy—the right to worship, to speak, to raise our families in peace, to gather in our churches, chapels, mosques, synagogues, and temples—was purchased at a cost that can never be repaid. The men and women who have stood between us and danger, who have carried the flag into battle, who have slept in deserts, jungles, frozen fields, and storm-tossed seas, have given us the greatest gift a free people can receive: the right to remain free.

Maurine and I have spent our lives traveling the world, and the more we see of other lands (and we love them too), the deeper our love for these United States becomes. We love this nation—not because it is flawless, but because it was founded upon principles of liberty that trace directly to heaven itself—and there is a striving within the true heart of our nation to adhere to those principles. We love our Veterans because they have defended those principles with courage and blood and quiet, unheralded sacrifice.

Whenever we are in an airport and see a soldier in uniform, we make a point to stop. We shake hands. We say, “Thank you for your service.” Sometimes they smile shyly and say, “Thank you.” Sometimes they simply nod. And sometimes their eyes say everything words can’t. Those brief encounters always leave us humbled. Because before us stands someone who has written, in essence, a blank check payable to the United States of America—for any amount, up to and including his or her own life.

The Cost of Freedom

It’s easy, in times of comfort, to forget that liberty and freedom have never been free. They were bought at Valley Forge, where frostbitten soldiers wrapped their feet in rags because they had no shoes. They were bought at Gettysburg, where boys who had barely learned to shave met eternity on fields of wheat and rock. They were bought on the beaches of Normandy, in the coral atolls of the Pacific, in the jungles of Vietnam, in the dust of Fallujah, and in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Nearly 1.2 million Americans have died in uniform since the founding of this Republic. Each left behind someone who loved them—a mother who prayed, a sweetheart who waited, a child who grew up with an empty chair at the table.

Every flag that waves above a soldier’s grave is a sermon without words. It whispers the truth that freedom always carries a price.

A Farm Boy at Omaha Beach

Years ago, while researching an article on World War II, we ran into a historical posting about Harold Jensen, who had been part of the wave of soldiers storming Omaha Beach in France. He found his best friend’s helmet lying beside a torn medic’s bag. He filled it with sand and water, then cleaned the blood from its rim with his sleeve. He sat cradling it for nearly two hours, whispering names they once joked about giving their kids. When the sun set, he placed it upright, facing the ocean. He later said, “I wanted it to watch the tide. He never got to.”

Harold never received a medal. He never sought one.

His tenderness and care at that moment are part of the essence of heroism—not grand speeches, not glory, but duty and love for his fellow soldiers. Harold Jensen’s name may never appear in history books, but in the book of heaven, it’s written in gold.

Nurses in the South Pacific

How many army nurses with common names like Mary and Sarah, and Molly, served in the South Pacific in the hottest part of World War II? They were young, and perhaps they thought they were invincible, but they learned quickly that freedom had a price tag.

How many nurses held the hands of dying soldiers—some barely eighteen—as they perhaps whispered the Lord’s Prayer to them in the sweltering nights as they were dying? So many sure promised they would report to their mothers that they were brave.

How many nurses (and soldiers) thought in the midst of the hardest battles (and most of the battlefields we will never know): “God is still here. Even in the dark.”

The Quiet Veterans Among Us

Most of the Veterans we meet today don’t see themselves as heroes. They say, “I just did my job.” But they did it with discipline and honor.

There’s the retired Air Force pilot in your ward who still stands a little straighter during the national anthem. The young Marine sitting in sacrament meeting with scars on his hands and humility in his eyes. The Army medic who now blesses the sacrament with those same hands that once bandaged the wounded.

They are all around us—ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things. They returned home, built families, served missions, taught lessons, raised crops, and mended fences. They keep serving—just in quieter ways.

Freedom and Faith

As Latter-day Saints, we understand that liberty is not political; it is spiritual. The war for freedom began long before 1776. It began in heaven when the Father’s plan of happiness and moral agency was defended by Michael and the followers of the Great Jehovah.

Every Veteran who has ever worn the uniform stands symbolically in that same tradition: defending the right of all God’s children to choose. That’s why the gospel and the Constitution are intertwined. One safeguards the soul; the other safeguards the soil where faith can grow.

President Ezra Taft Benson said it simply:

“The fight for freedom is God’s fight.”¹

And Elder D. Todd Christofferson once reminded us, “It is God’s will that we be free men and women enabled to rise to our full potential both temporally and spiritually.”²

Our Veterans have preserved that sacred space of choice—where families can worship, missionaries can preach, and pastors, ministers, priests, apostles, and prophets can speak without fear.

A Gold Star Wife

Years ago, you may remember, Maurine and I attended the funeral of Lt. Nathan White, a Latter-day Saint pilot shot down over Iraq. We had been to Arlington Cemetery many times before that day, and we had always felt grateful to all these soldiers buried there, but sometimes seemed far away from our everyday existence, where things really hurt—people of another time, or another place, or another sphere of steadfastness and integrity.

Yet, on that bright, clear Thursday morning in spring, it was impossible to be casual. All ideas that a soldier’s sacrifice in the cause of freedom is merely an abstraction, something that can be kept mentally safely distant, were removed, blown away by the pained faces of those who loved Nate.

His absence that morning was huge because he was all they were thinking about. He was too much to lose. If this had been a film or book, you’d denounce it as terrible for making the hero so handsome and winning, and then letting him die. This ending would have been unacceptable. You’d demand a new edit, a rewrite.

Nate was the All-American boy whose presence filled the room when he entered. He was a storyteller who captivated his friends; their memories of him abounded with his wit, his pranks, his honesty, his keen mind and abilities, and his love.

Nate’s friends and family gathered at Arlington’s chapel. White lilies and yellow chrysanthemums decked a gold cross on the altar, but the organist was playing “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning,” “A Poor, Wayfaring Man of Grief,” and “Come, Come Ye Saints.” Nobody sang the words, but everyone could hear them: “And should we die before our journey’s through.”

It seemed the world should have wept on that morning, but springtime in Washington brings flowering dogwoods and vibrant red tulips and a sky that’s deeply blue. The 624 acres of Arlington Cemetery rolled and spread with brightness as the morning sun painted the edges of white markers. A sacredness hung over all.

Watching his wife, Akiko, and their three children, Courtney, Austin, and Zach, in their tears that morning makes Veteran’s Day, for us, more than just an abstract remembrance of generic men and women who serve our country. We have never forgotten the feelings of that morning, April 24, 2003—and we remember them again this Veteran’s Day. We are filled with gratitude for Nate and for so many others who have died, AND for those who yet live who have defended this great nation.

Every Gold Star family understands that sacred cost that Nate paid. They live every day with an ache most of us will never comprehend. Yet they carry themselves with quiet dignity, determined to honor the sacrifice their loved ones made.

Gratitude Is Not Enough

How do you thank someone for giving you a lifetime of freedom? How do you repay men and women who have faced terror so that you might face tomorrow? You can’t. But you can remember. You can teach your children to stand at attention when the flag passes. You can pause on November 11th—not just for a moment of silence, but for a lifetime of gratitude.

Veterans don’t ask for much. They ask us to remember the fallen, to care for the wounded, and to live in such a way that their sacrifice means something.

The Light on the Hill

The Prophet Joseph Smith once declared, “If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a Mormon, I am bold to declare before heaven that I am just as ready to die for a Presbyterian, a Baptist, or any other denomination.” He understood that this nation—imperfect though it may be—was prepared by the hand of Providence to cradle the Restoration and was willing to stand up to defend the Constitution and to seek the rights afforded by it for our people as well as all others. Our prophets today teach the same principles and stand firm in defending the freedoms upon which our nation was founded.

Every Veteran who defends that Constitution becomes, in a very real sense, a defender of faith. They are part of a divine continuum stretching from the pilgrims who sought liberty to the soldiers who still guard it today.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he said he looked for the source of our greatness in our harbors, our fields, our commerce—but found it in our churches. “America is great,” he said, because America is good.”

Let us remain good—grateful, prayerful, and vigilant—so that those who died for liberty will never have died in vain.

In Their Honor

So today—and every day—let’s look around and see the quiet heroes among us. The elderly man wearing his old Navy cap in the grocery store. The young woman in fatigues boarding her flight. The flag folded neatly on a mantle.

If you see them, say something. It can remind a weary heart that the country they served still remembers.

We often say in our family that freedom is not free, and it survives only when gratitude keeps it alive. Gratitude is what turns Veterans Day from a date on the calendar into a holy day of remembrance.

In Closing

America has always been more than a place. It is an idea—born of heaven, defended by heroes, and sustained by faith. On this Veterans Day, Maurine and I invite you to pause, remember, and give thanks.

To every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, and guardian—past and present—we say with all our hearts:

Thank you. We love you. We honor you. We will never forget you.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

— John 15:13

Footnotes

1 Elder Ezra Taft Benson, General Conference, April 1967.

2 D. Todd Christofferson, “Free Forever, to Act for Themselves,” General Conference, October 2014.