A Soldier's Life

"Come back with your shield or on it." Words for a departing Spartan solider. It isn't untrue that Spartans were a warrior class. Strong, raised to withstand great pain, and taught battle skills from a young age. To our soldiers we say, "Come back." Not much more, not much less, our Spartan's are asked to endure the battle and the life long after the battle has past. So whose soldiers are stronger? Those that survive the battle or those that live with the memories.

Does it take more strength to go to war knowing you'll likely not come home, or knowing that you'll have to live the next 50 years with everything you saw?

Of course our current values wildly differ from those of Sparta and we don't raise our children with the notion that them must die nobly in a war, but we do raise soldiers. Families with long traditions of service, military or civil have the same expectation for their offspring and often teach them to endure to harden themselves to pain and trauma. So maybe we are not as different as we think.

Maybe the difference lies with the mother. A Spartan mother almost never expected her son to live to 80 years old with children and grandchildren to love. That life was reserved for a different kind of man. Our lifespan is too long for most of our ancestors to even begin to want to live.  And we wholeheartedly expect our soldiers to have the luxury and I would say, burden of a family after war. They will come home, get a job, go back to school and integrate into a whole society that may only half respect them for their service and certainly never understand the sacrifice of it.

I say that is where their strength lies. That is how I can compare a Marine to a Spartan. It is not enough to have lived through a war and it is not enough to come home and survive everyday with what you have seen. The strength of our soldiers is in the life they lead now. The ability to continue to enjoy, to find happiness, and peace again, with more knowledge then most men would ask for. Remember the next time you meet a veteran not to just marvel at the story that they have to tell, but to marvel that despite themselves, despite what logic would dictate, they can live well.