Rev Christian’s words touched me deeply. As the pacifist wife of an active duty, career Marine, I’ve struggled for years reconciling my own beliefs about the evil of war with my deep and abiding love for a warrior; my repugnance for state sanctioned violence with my deep and abiding love for my Marine Corps family. My faithfulness to them has often left me feeling faithless to my own values…my reasonableness left me feeling unreasoned and unprincipled. But my Marine Corps family has taught me, as Rev Christian says it taught her brother, one meaning of faithfulness, of being there for one another, of sacrificing for another’s comfort, and of showing up over and over again. They have taught me the value of real community—the kind that will give each other the shirt off their back without a second thought.

I often say I love the Marine but detest the mission, and I often wish that Americans would demand that the mission was more worthy of their sacrifice—the economic exploitation of other countries’ resources for the benefit of elites not being worth a single Marine’s life (or a single civilian’s life) in my opinion. But sadly, with less than 1% of the population in uniform today, the burden of the physical and moral injuries of war fall on such a slim portion of Americans, that we no longer have a robust peace movement because barely anyone has any “skin in the game.” But even if we can tacitly say that we were not involved in these wars, they are fought in our names. The Marines belong to Americans, and (in theory) they exist to protect and defend our Constitution. I wish we held our representatives in government, and the titans of industry whose interests they actually represent, accountable for the policies they pursue while exploiting these service members faithfulness and sacrifice.

Thank you, Rev Christian, for being open enough to suspend your judgement and to embrace a lesson in sacrifice from an unlikely source. In this wonderful faith of ours, I have sometimes felt fellow UUs disdain for my husband’s service, but your article made me feel seen and understood. I am grateful.