The best writing often starts with paying attention. A recent concert experience, combined with the annual observance of Veterans Day, inspired me to explore how a simple moment—standing alone during military songs—could become an essay about service, community, and civic engagement in modern America.
As the Navy’s Commodores played their final notes to a packed auditorium, I stood proudly for “The Army Song” and “Anchors Aweigh,” honoring my father and both grandfathers. But looking around, I saw only a handful of others standing. In a room of 250 people, we were islands of military connection in a sea of civilian life.
But a growing military-civilian divide isn’t about fewer people standing for service songs. It represents a shift in how Americans understand sacrifice, duty, and collective purpose. When my father and grandfathers wore the uniform, invisible threads knit communities together nationwide. Factory workers’ sons stood alongside ranchers’ sons, city kids alongside farm kids. A shared language—from understanding military time to knowing what “watch your six” means—bound together Americans who otherwise had little in common.
I’m not trying to romanticize military service here. If given the choice, my father and many others might have reconsidered going to war. Trauma and sacrifice shouldn’t be glossed over with patriotic platitudes.
As these connections fade, we lose more than cultural literacy about military life. We lose the visceral understanding of what it means to subordinate individual desires to collective needs. We lose the experience of being part of something larger than ourselves, where your squadmate’s background, politics, or social media posts matter far less than their reliability when lives are on the line.
Yes, there are ways to serve society—teaching, volunteering, civil service—and these are vital to our social fabric. But military life asks something unique of us:
What would I risk my life for?
What does it mean to put the welfare of strangers above my own?
Could I trust people whose beliefs radically differ from mine in life-or-death situations?
When I see calls to expand national service programs or create new forms of civic engagement, I wonder if we’re addressing the right problem. The question isn’t simply how to get more Americans serving their neighborhoods—though that’s important. The deeper question—one I can’t fully answer in this essay and won’t try to—is how to maintain our capacity for collective sacrifice and cross-cultural trust in an increasingly individualistic age. Perhaps these particular bonds of service are gone forever; perhaps something new will take their place.
Standing in the concert hall, I realized that what we risk losing isn’t merely military tradition—it’s a shared understanding that some things matter more than our differences, that we’re capable of putting others before ourselves, that we can still trust across the divides that increasingly define us. And that’s something worth standing for.
Barbara Basbanes Richter founded DIYBook, an affordable and easy-to-use book writing program. She also founded In Ink Ghostwriting, a full-service ghostwriting firm helping politicians, pundits, scientists, CEOs, professional athletes, and others get their stories into print.
Under her own byline, Barbara’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The Vineyard Gazette, Humanities, The Sewanee Review, Fine Books & Collections, Literary Features Syndicate, High Country News, Ravishly.com, Westchester Magazine, and other outlets.
Barbara is a fluent French speaker, and her translation from French to English of Mademoiselle de Malepeire was called a “clever, inspiring gem.”
