I'd Die for My Country, Not My Government

Why Men Fight: The Difference Between Loyalty to a Country and Loyalty to a Government

If we were to look at it from a political standpoint, if I was to serve our country, it would not be to defend our government, it would be to defend our country and most importantly, the other men that are there serving.

Those are three different things and most people stack them into one pile, which is why the conversation about service always gets stuck in arguments about foreign policy and who happens to be in office.

Start with the government, because it is the easiest one to see. A government is a set of people holding positions for a while, making decisions, and then leaving. It changes every few years. It can be wrong, it can be corrupt, and it often is.

Then there is the country, which is older than any administration and outlives all of them. It is the set of ideas the whole thing was built on, the agreements about how people are supposed to treat each other, the thing that keeps existing after whoever is currently in charge is gone.

And then there is the man standing next to you, who is the most concrete of the three and the only one you can actually see.

The last thing I'm thinking about is, oh man, I can't wait to win this war so the US government can prevail.

That has never been the emotion for anyone who has actually been in the position, and if you talk to men who have served, they will almost never tell you they were thinking about policy outcomes when things got bad.

What I care about is making sure that I'm keeping the dude to my right and my left safe so that they can go home and see their family.

That is the whole mechanism. Loyalty does not scale well to abstractions, because a man cannot sacrifice for a concept in the moment the sacrifice is actually required. He can only sacrifice for a person he knows, and that person then does the same for him, and the two of them together hold a line that neither one of them would hold alone.

The bond is the unit of function. Not the flag.

But that does not mean the larger thing is meaningless, and this is where men who reject government usually overcorrect and reject everything above their immediate circle too.

And I believe that this country, despite the fact that the politics and the corruption that we're seeing emerging over the last 10 or 20 years is becoming increasingly more disgusting, the tenets and the values the United States were built on align with who I am as a man.

The values came first and the government is the thing that is supposed to administer them. When the administration drifts, the values do not drift with it. They sit exactly where they were, which is why you can look at what is happening in politics, find it genuinely repulsive, and still hold the underlying thing as worth protecting.

That distinction is what keeps a man from becoming a cynic. The cynic collapses all three layers together, decides the whole structure is rotten because the top layer is rotten, and walks away with nothing left to be loyal to.

So the practical move, whether or not you ever wear a uniform, is to know which layer you owe something to. You do not owe your loyalty to whoever currently holds office. You owe it to the principles you actually agree with and to the specific people around you who depend on you showing up.

I believe that good men fought and died for this country and if I'm asked to do the same, I'll happily do it.

A man who only serves when he agrees with the people in charge is not loyal. He is just aligned at the moment, and alignment breaks the first time an election goes the other way.