What service asks

At the USS Arizona Memorial, nobody has to tell you to lower your voice.

I visited every year I was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base. The memorial spans the sunken hull. Names fill a marble wall. Beneath it, men who never came home remain aboard their ship, and oil still rises from the wreck a few drops at a time. At Hickam, some buildings still carry the strafing scars from that morning. They were left there so that people like me, arriving decades later, would have to live and work beside the evidence.

I had enlisted in Arizona. Standing over a ship named for the place where my own service began made it personal. But the longer I stood there, the less those connections seemed to require an explanation. There were lives beneath the water. There were names on the wall. Whatever anyone wanted to make of the history, the loss was already there.

When I was asked to write something for Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, I thought I would write about those men. I ended up thinking about my father, my grandfather, and a family whose habit of service I inherited long before I understood what it asked.

When I was a boy, my father was often away. Between active duty and the Air National Guard, he served for more than twenty years. He gave so much of his time to his unit and the mission he led that temporary duty somewhere else was an ordinary part of our lives.

I was proud of him. I assumed he was doing incredible and important things. American society says it values the people who serve, and a child takes that literally. I knew his absence meant something. I trusted the world to understand what it meant, too.

Nobody in my family sat me down and explained service. We did not discuss it as a principle we had chosen. It was simply what people did. You answered the need in front of you. You took responsibility. You gave your time, sometimes more of it than you had to spare.

It was less a value we held than the air we breathed. And like air, I assumed everyone had it.

I did not learn much of the family’s history until I was already in uniform. By then, I had made my own choice without knowing how many people had made versions of it before me.

In 1676, the second John Perrin advanced money for Rehoboth’s defence. Jesse Perrin kept the town’s records for twenty-five years (chapter one). Jesse’s son Lemuel served in the Revolution under Captain John Perry, whose Rehoboth minutemen marched on the Lexington alarm in April 1775 (chapter two). Glover Perin became an army surgeon, rose to Assistant Surgeon General, and gathered the family’s history so that the rest of us would have it (chapter seven).

Grandpa’s father Arthur and his uncle Keith were Marines in the First World War. Their mother Geraldine lived to write down her grandsons’ names when another world war came. Stanley kept the family’s story after her (chapter four). Grandpa gave his working life to the ministry (chapter nine). My father served. Then I served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The uniforms are easy to notice. The town clerk and the people keeping the records are easier to pass over. But twenty-five years of preserving a community’s memory is a life’s work, too. So is tending to people in a congregation. So is making sure the names survive when the people who knew them are gone.

Learning that history made my service feel more fulfilling. It gave something I had already chosen a depth I had not known was there. It also brought a disappointment I have struggled to name without sounding as though I am asking for applause.

I had believed that a world which praised sacrifice would know how to value the people making it. Instead, I began to see how much it depended on their willingness to go on without being valued at all.

I saw that inside the military itself. Again and again, the person who failed spectacularly and then recovered became the story everyone wanted to tell. A man who gave alcohol to minors and later cleaned himself up could receive more attention and praise than the one who had quietly done the right thing all along.

There should be room for people to change. What troubled me was how little room there seemed to be for the steady choice that had prevented harm in the first place. Redemption had a plot. Integrity often left nothing dramatic to report.

I had grown up assuming that doing right mattered even when nobody saw it. I still believe that. But I had also assumed the institutions asking it of us shared that belief in a meaningful way. Discovering the distance between those assumptions changed how I understood service.

It changed how I understood my father’s absence, too. As a child, I could see the importance of the mission. I had much less understanding of what it cost him, or what our family contributed every time he went away.

That cost does not disappear because the work is worthwhile.

We speak of family, faith, duty, and service as though they will naturally lead a person in the same direction. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the calling takes you away from the people you mean to care for. Sometimes obedience asks you to set aside a conviction you thought defined you. You can fulfill an obligation and still come home with something unresolved. The institution may consider the work finished long before you do.

A minister faces different demands from a soldier, but I recognize something familiar in Grandpa’s calling: the responsibility to lead, the discipline of an institution, the expectation that other people’s needs will come before your own. I believe the ministry asked of him much of what the military asked of me. I suspect my father would recognize some of it as well. I cannot know every compromise either man carried. I can understand how a life devoted to service might leave a person with questions that devotion alone cannot answer.

I would serve again. I hope my children find another way to serve. Both are true, and neither makes the other easier.

I am grateful that the work I did sat well with my values. I worked in places where integrity was paramount and where we truly meant to protect human life. That was a blessing. It does not settle everything I feel about having served, but it is something solid I can hold.

The family story I return to most offers even less resolution. In June 1755, Moses Rice was ploughing his field in Charlemont, Massachusetts, when he was shot from ambush and killed. His eight-year-old grandson Asa, riding the plough horse, was carried off to Canada. Asa eventually came home, grew up, and very probably became our ancestor (chapter six).

I think about the boy on the horse. Whatever the war meant to the people directing it, that was what it meant to him.

War reaches people who have made no promise to bear its costs. It reaches children, families, and people trying to get through a day’s work. Any account of service that leaves them out gives us too little to remember, and far too little reason to seek peace.

Pearl Harbor is not the only day I carry this way. I lived through September 11, 2001. My father was away on temporary duty, and for most of that day we could not reach him. I remember the fear, and I remember the anger that followed it.

Every year since, that day has been a time to reflect on my own service, and every year the anger has changed. In time it became empathy. I grew curious about how anger like mine turns into patriotism and rage, and I chose differently. As I grew older I came to understand that people of every nation and culture want and cherish the same things at bottom. Working in intelligence only deepened that understanding.

So I have come to believe that every day of remembrance is equally solemn, whichever morning it marks. Each one asks us to feel more than a swelling of patriotism and pride. It asks us to hold the service, the losses, and the insurmountable grief that made the day necessary at all, and to hold through all of it a desire for peace, and the will to see each other, always.

This is where remembrance matters most to me. With time, sacrifice can become easier to admire and harder to understand. An absence becomes a family story. A death becomes a name. A terrible morning becomes a source of national pride. We can grow very comfortable honoring what we would never wish on someone we love.

At the Arizona, the water interrupts that comfort. The ship is still there. The loss has not become an abstraction simply because we have had decades to arrange our feelings about it.

In 2016, a Japanese prime minister stood at that memorial beside an American president and offered condolences to the dead. Two former enemies grieved together over the same water. Their presence could not undo a single death. It could show the living that the history did not require them to remain enemies forever.

That is the possibility I want every day of remembrance to hold open.

I revere my family’s service. I do not take its long record as proof that we were better than anyone else, or that every sacrifice was wise, or that those who served came through it whole. It tells me that people kept answering needs larger than their own, and that their families lived with the consequences. I want to honor both parts of that inheritance.

My children will have needs in front of them, too. There will be people to protect, work to do, records to keep, and responsibilities no one is applauding. I hope they make those quiet choices. I hope the world gives them ways to make them without asking so much of their lives.

We cannot spare the dead what they suffered. We can take their suffering seriously enough to want fewer people to follow them.

When I remember Pearl Harbor, or September 11, or any of the days we set aside for the dead, I think of the names, the oil, the quiet. I think of my father away from home, a grandmother keeping a record, a surgeon doing what he could, a boy carried from a field. I think of how easily the cost can slip out of the story, and how deliberately we have to put it back.

The people who come after us deserve more than another moving account of what was asked of those who came before. They deserve our effort to ask less of them.

That, too, is service.

Aubrey Perin