A Marine's view of love

I was never in any branch of the service, let me start off by making that clear. I've been a lifetime civilian.

But D has a lot of interest in the military as an "alternative lifestyle" and so she reads a fair bit about it. Somewhere around a month ago, she sent me the following:

Dearest Hosea,

.... [Day-to-day news snipped] I actually sat down to send you the best piece of writing on love I've been fortunate to read in a very long time. It is worth sharing because so much of it applies to families, including you and the boys. I realize the next few months are likely to be very difficult, and you will find yourself depressed many times and relatively cheerful on other occasions. Throughout, I will love and support you.

This passage comes from Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood, an unsparing book about fighting in Iraq. The writer is Donovan Campbell, their platoon leader, and graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School. I have shortened it slightly because some of the examples are only relevant if you have read the book, and I'm interested in his understanding of love for us outside the military.

"...I think I understand a bit more about what it means to truly love, because for my men, love was something more than emotion. For them, love was expressed in the only currency that mattered in combat:action - a consistent pattern running through the large and small, a pattern of sacrifice that reinforced the idea that we all cared more for the other than we did for ourselves. For them, love was about deeds, not words and...a thousand small acts came to mind....

As time went by, these small acts - so many of which I either failed to notice or simply took for granted - created something in Joker One that was more than just the sum of all of us. In fact, these acts gave Joker One a life of its own, a life that wove all of us inextricably into itself, until the pain and joy felt by one was the pain and joy felt by all. And that life grew so vibrant and so powerful, that my men practiced the ultimate extension of love - laying down their lives for one another - nearly every single day.

For me, loving Joker One - something I so desperately hoped that I did - meant much more than simply feeling I cared. It meant patience when explaining something for the fifth time to a nineteen-year-old who just didn't get it. It meant kindness to a Marine who had made an honest mistake while trying his hardest; mercy when deciding the appropriate punishment. It meant dispensing justice and then forgetting that it had been dispensed, punishing wrong and then wiping the slate clean.

Love was joy in the growth of my men, even when it diminished my own authority. It was giving credit for our successes to the team while assuming all the responsibility for our failures on myself. It was constantly teaching my men, sharing everything with them until I had nothing left to give, with the expectation and the hope that they would become greater than me. It was making myself less so that they might become more.

Love accepted the Marines for exactly who they were and never believed that it was all they ever would be. Love demanded more, demanded their best, every single day; it cut through all the rationalizations and excuses. It constantly celebrated the good in my men and refused to condone the natural selfishness that dwelt within us all.

Love told the honest truth when lying would have been much easier or would have made me look much better; it admitted to the men that sometimes I had no answers. It confessed my mistakes and asked for forgiveness when I had wronged, and it moved past those mistakes when forgiveness had been granted.

Love hoped that things would be better someday, maybe in this life, maybe in the next, but it didn't deny the reality of the pain and suffering that surrounded us day in and day out; it didn't dishonestly rationalize them or explain them away. Love didn't try to make sense of the senseless; it simply offered a light to run to....even when faith and hope had left me, and I despaired, I learned that love somehow remained. Slowly...it restored the other two."

Have a great afternoon. I look forward to hearing from you. And always, I love you, ... more each day.

Take care, be well.

xxxoooxxx, D