Many of my friends felt the same way, and three of us decided to reach out to the campaign to see if we could be helpful by taking a few days off to knock on doors. As a result, our trio spent the days around New Year’s 2008 in south-central Iowa, working in towns not very different from the small communities I knew in rural areas around South Bend.
One thing I hadn’t expected was how big a role the Iraq War was playing in these one-stoplight towns with grain elevators for a skyline—not as a political football but as a kind of local issue. The Iraq troop surge was winding down but not yet over. Afghanistan, mostly out of view, was simmering. Yellow ribbons were everywhere, and more than once I would knock on a door and get into a conversation with a young man who told me he would love to go to the caucus on Thursday and vote, but couldn’t because he was packing up for Basic Training.
In fact, it seemed like every other teenager I met was signing up for the Army or the Guard. I was only twenty-five years old, but these freckled young Iowan recruits looked like children to me. And I began asking myself how it could be that whole communities in this part of the country, just like those in rural Indiana, seemed to be emptying out their youth into the armed services, while so few people I knew had served at all. Warming up in a diner after a day’s canvassing, Ryan and Nat and I tried to construct a list of people we’d known at Harvard who had gone into the military. You could count them on one hand.
It wasn’t just us, and it wasn’t just Harvard. In their book AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer examined the record and found that the Ivy League college with the most 2004 graduates going to the military was Princeton, with all of nine students going into service. Much had changed since the days when the names of over a hundred Harvard men made their way onto the wall in the transept of Memorial Hall. Some combination of social stratification, Cold War campus politics, and changing norms around elite universities meant that service had gone from standard to rare.
For my grandfather’s generation, military service was a great equalizer—something that Americans (at least, American men) had in common across race, class, and geography. Indeed, for some prior generations the rate of loss in war may have been higher for the wealthy than for the working class, because service was so close to the heart of elite culture. There was nothing unusual about Lieutenant Junior Grade John F. Kennedy, scion of one of the most prominent and well-connected wealthy families in America, risking death aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. The wealth and fame of JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., made it more, not less, natural that his sons would enter the service. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s path to the presidency was cleared only by the death of his older brother, Joe Jr., the one thought destined for high office until that naval airplane explosion in 1944.
The entire campus of the elite prep school Phillips Andover was in uniform throughout World War I, so it was hardly shocking that the outbreak of World War II would motivate a young George Herbert Walker Bush to enlist on his eighteenth birthday and find his own way to the Pacific. A year after Kennedy and the men of PT-109 were rescued from the island where they had washed up, another Navy operation would rescue young Bush out of the waters of Chichijima where he had been shot down during a daring strafing run.
NO LESS REMARKABLE, for men of such privilege, was the fact that they would have been interacting on more or less equal terms with people from other walks of life, regions, and backgrounds. As an enlistee Bush, whose father would soon be a senator, might have taken orders from the sons of farmers or laborers; Kennedy’s fellow officers aboard PT-109 were from Ohio and Illinois.
In 1956, a majority of the graduating classes of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton joined the military. But in the decades that followed, the once-diverse makeup of our military shifted dramatically. Especially after Vietnam, America saw a growing share of service members coming from places like Mount Ayr and Creston in Iowa, or Fulton County in Indiana—and far fewer from places like Harvard. The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.
As I reflected on it, I realized that my arrival at Harvard coincided with the near-disappearance of my own childhood interest in serving. At a younger age, when I had hoped to be an astronaut or a pilot, service in uniform was very much on the table. Indeed, on my mother’s side, it was a family tradition.
One of my heroes growing up was a relative I had never met: my great-uncle Russell Montgomery, an Army Air Corps captain who died in a 1941 plane crash. My grandmother’s house had a large painting of him on the wall, in the house where she and my grandfather settled after he retired from the Army at Fort Bliss in El Paso. In the painting Russell is seated, in uniform, his cap on one knee, a bookshelf behind him and a painting of a dog on the wall over one shoulder. Beneath a generous brow, he gazes forward with blue eyes that look commanding and serious, yet self-possessed and approachable.
After my grandmother died, the painting found a new home on the wall of our South Bend living room. Since we weren’t a paintings-of-ancestors-on-the-wall kind of family, I once asked my mother how it came to exist. She explained that during World War II my grandfather, still grieving the loss of his brother, encountered a German officer in a prisoner-of-war camp in New Mexico who knew how to paint. Even in war, there was a gentlemanly understanding between officers of different countries. Using two photographs—one of Russell and one of his favorite dog—the young German officer was able to create the portrait, which my grandfather bought from him. It was the only painting in our house that hadn’t been painted by my grandfather himself, or by my mother.
Besides the painting, the family had another treasure of Russell’s: his logbook. The tiny, leather-bound notebook contained a log of his flight hours, but also little anecdotes about the life of an officer and pilot in those still-freewheeling days of early Army aviation. In it, he writes about hops across the Midwest to build up his flight hours, usually in the company of a fellow officer, and punctuated by football games and visits with girls. The entry for October 24, 1931, is characteristic:
Flew to Pittsburgh, Pa. with Lt. McAllister in BT-2B. Thru rain all the way but last 15 min. Left Dayton at 8:00 A.M. Arrived Pittsburgh at 10:05. Met some wonderful people. Saw Purdue wallop Carnegie Tech 13 to 6. Had lunch at Univ. Club. Went to Dance at Athletic Club with a very good blind date. Saw lots of fraternity brothers. Flying time, 2 hrs 5 mins. Flew back next day Oct 25 to Dayton. An awful head wind and air was terribly rough. Was initiated into air-sickness, an awful feeling.
As far as we know, it was taken from his remains after the crash, and I used to thumb through it with wonder as a child, a family relic even more unique and special than the painting. The paragraph-long adventures were as engaging as a novel, but also may have added to my sense that military service, like war in general, belonged to a different time and place than my own.