Two veterans, two perspectives on Veterans Day
👋 Hello! We’ve returned with the Medium Newsletter
Issue #204: raking leaves and making things you actually love (even if no one else does)
It makes cosmic sense for Veterans Day to fall one week after Election Day.* Not only do many of us get a three day weekend to recover, but: After voting on the principles that will define U.S. politics for four years, we’re honoring the people who fight for them.
That sounds straightforward, but if you’ve ever met a veteran and listened to their stories, you know the truth: Not everyone “fights” (in the traditional sense) and the principles themselves are fuzzy.
Benjamin Sledge was deployed to Afghanistan from 2003–2004 and to Iraq from 2006–2008. He’s part of the 1 in 10 U.S. army veterans to actually witness combat (most, like J.D. Vance or Tim Walz, work clerical jobs or train domestically). On Medium, Sledge describes being shelled and not knowing where it’s coming from; interviewing civilians to figure out who the enemy even is; getting bored as you drink your two rationed beers a day.
Sledge has to get monthly ketamine infusions for chronic pain, and he’s still in PT… but the worst part of war isn’t physical, he writes. It’s not shame or PTSD, either. Instead, it’s “moral injury” — the feeling of doing things that live in the gray area between right and wrong. “We fear being viewed as monsters,” he says, “or lauded as heroes when we feel the things we’ve done were morally ambiguous or wrong.”
A story from Samantha Mazzotta showed me the other (more common) side of what it’s like to be a vet. Mazzotta was a military journalist, the same job JD Vance had. It involves running around the base with a notebook and camera covering trainings, ceremonies, and team-building events. Also, writing lots of press releases. It’s essentially a free journalism school sponsored by the government. I can see how it led to Vance’s career as an author, speaker, and VP-elect. Mazzotta thinks it’s lowkey one of the “best damn jobs in the military”:
I don’t know a single person who served as a public affairs specialist who didn’t love what they did. As a junior enlisted soldier, I had an almost unheard-of amount of freedom and discretion while out on assignments. While other soldiers languished behind a computer screen, I loaded film into a camera, grabbed a notebook, and went out to cover artillery training exercises…
— Harris Sockel
*This is totally coincidental. Veterans Day commemorates a pact that effectively ended World War I. And Election Day is on a Tuesday in November so farmers could spend a day (Monday) commuting to a remote polling location during an ideal time of year for them: the frenetic planting season (spring) and harvest (early fall) are over but winter hasn’t yet made roads icy.
🔥 Three stories, one sentence each
- A computer science student predicts every election since 1916 in just 91 lines of C++ code (as a way to prove why we should all be more skeptical of election predictions). (Harys Dalvi)
- Leave the leaves where they are (on your lawn!) because raking deprives your precious grasses of natural fertilizers like phosphorus and potassium. (Olivia Louise Dobbs)
- Yes, making something that does numbers is nice, but it feels even better when you make something you actually love first. (Wen-Hsiu Wang)
A good sentence I highlighted this week
“Life wants to adapt and evolve, to make mistakes and be inconsistent.” — Anna Mercury, Institutions vs. Evolution
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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