Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
That’s how Robert Frost begins his poem, “Mending Wall.” A poem about fences, sure, but also about rituals and repetition, about stubbornness and inheritance and the things we say when we don’t know how else to think. And lately I’ve been thinking there’s something in me that doesn’t love a parade.
On Saturday, I watched a military parade in Washington, D.C. Tanks rolled through the streets. Paratroopers floated down through the muggy June air. The 21-gun salute cracked across the National Mall. Fighter jets roared overhead. President Donald J. Trump called the U.S. military the fiercest fighting force in the world. The announcers called it a celebration. I watched with clenched teeth.
I wanted it to fail. I wanted the tanks to stall, the sound system to cut out, the crowd to stay home. I was angry—not in the hot, flash-flood kind of way, but in the deeper, tectonic kind of way that builds slowly over years. I don’t regret being angry. I think what President Trump is doing to the military—what he is doing to Los Angeles, to democracy, to the federal government, to our allies—is selfish and dangerous. But there is something else, too. Something in me, maybe always in me, that can’t help but bristle when I see a parade. Even one without all the political baggage. Especially one with it.
Because I fought in a war. And we lost.
It is strange, the things you carry home from war. I carried home anger, sure, and guilt. But I also carried home confusion. I came back to a country that hadn’t paid much attention. That made movies about us, thanked us at baseball games, called us heroes, but didn’t really want to hear the stories. Not the real ones. Not the complicated ones. They wanted us to be symbols. And I think that’s what a parade is: a symbol. But symbols can lie.
I watched that parade and thought about the poppy fields and the canals in the Fishhook region of the Helmand River valley of Afghanistan. About the smell of cordite. About laughing with other Marines in moments of grim absurdity. About funerals. About how little any of it seemed to matter in the end. Not because it didn’t matter to us. But because it didn’t seem to change anything. And then we came home. That was 13 years ago. And now, after Kabul has fallen, as we are arresting and deporting the allies who fought alongside us, the Army is playing “Fortunate Son” over a tank column in the nation’s capital, and I guess I’m supposed to feel honored.
What are we doing?
I don’t mean to be glib. I know the Army was celebrating its 250th birthday. I know ceremonies matter. Ritual matters. Morale matters. And there were moments that did matter—moments of connection. Of earnestness. Tank turrets propped open with soldiers smiling and waving. Tributes to the Transport Corps, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Little Rock Nine. For a few hours, our Army reminded the country it is still full of young people trying to serve, trying to do right. It didn’t feel like a show of authoritarian strength. It felt like the Army doing what it always does—showing up and trying its best to make it work.
I was a Marine, though. And we care, sometimes too much, about the small stuff—creases, cadence, the tightness of a rolled sleeve, if a sheet cover has been ironed. Watching the Army march, I’ll admit something old and prickly in me stirred. That noncommissioned officer voice. The one that scans a formation for sloppiness. That watches the columns and points out who’s out of step. That finds a kind of grim satisfaction in correction.
It is not the kindest part of me. But it used to be one of the most useful. As an N.C.O., you had to be that guy sometimes. Pride and precision aren’t just cosmetic. They can be the difference between a sharp unit and a sloppy one, between cohesion and chaos. The Marine Corps drilled that into us. It works. It turns kids into something else—something that can be professional, even heroic, under fire.
But the part of me that used to relish finding those flaws—that thrived on being the hard one, the corrector, the authority—woke up during that parade. And it made me pause. Because that voice isn’t Christlike. It doesn’t default to charity. It doesn’t assume a person is doing their best. It assumes they’re not.
Maybe it’s a survival instinct. A way to feel powerful again, when the world feels adrift. And right now, the world—this country—feels deeply adrift. What we are watching, day after day, in the slow decay of our institutions and the corrosion of our civic norms, makes me feel powerless. And maybe slipping back into that old uniform of critique and control was a way to pretend I wasn’t.
I still believe in standards. In leadership. In pride. But I also believe in grace. And if that critical voice is a muscle built for war, I have to ask what it’s still doing here, years after the war ended. I have to ask if that part of me helps me love my country—or just lets me feel superior to it.
Maybe instead of looking at the troops and asking who’s out of step, I should be asking what’s out of step in me. And maybe in us.
Parades are about remembering. About honoring. But honoring requires truth. It requires reflection. Without reckoning—without confronting what those wars actually meant, what they revealed about us as a nation, and who we became as a result—we risk mistaking ritual for meaning. Without facing what is happening to our country right now, the slow erosion of our institutions and the fights over what we stand for and who we are, we lose sight of the altar on which those sacrifices were made. If we can’t answer that, if we don’t know which god we served, then the rituals that are supposed to sanctify memory can end up flattening it into spectacle.
I’ve read the academic work on civil-military relations. I know the theories. I know what it means when the commander-in-chief uses the military as a backdrop for domestic threats. I know the language: norm erosion, norm inversion. I believe those scholars.
The parade placed active-duty troops, in uniform, in a politically charged environment. It celebrated not just the military but—let’s face it—a particular man, at a moment when that man is under multiple indictments and calling into question the legitimacy of democratic institutions. The president’s remarks included references to domestic protestors, to restoring “order” to “liberal cities.” That’s not a neutral ceremony. That’s political messaging draped in camouflage.
In functioning democracies, the military is not just nonpartisan—it is seen to be nonpartisan. That’s why we have rules about uniforms at political events. That’s why we draw lines around the campaign season and government resources. Because once the public begins to see soldiers as political actors, trust corrodes. Legitimacy erodes. And even if this parade didn’t cross the line, it got dangerously close. It asked us to blur the distinction between loyalty to country and loyalty to a man. And that is not a line you want to play near.
But my primary problem with the parade wasn’t just that it broke a norm. My problem is that it reminded me how easily we tell ourselves comforting stories instead of asking hard questions. How quickly we reach for applause instead of reckoning.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Frost’s neighbor says, again and again. He says it because it is what his father said. Because it is easier than thinking about why the wall is there or what it keeps out or what it keeps in. I think America has its own version. We say: Support the troops. We say: Greatest military in the world. We say it because we’ve said it for so long. But I wonder if we say it to avoid having to say something harder. Something about what we lost. About what we did. About what we became.
Something there is that doesn’t love a parade. Maybe it’s the part of me that still hasn’t made sense of the war I fought in. Maybe it’s the part that wants us to go further as a country. To look behind the slogans. To tell the truth, even when it hurts. Maybe it is the part of me that still hopes we can be more than our myths.
I watched that parade, and I didn’t feel proud. Not because I don’t love this country, but because I do.
