It? You know. That wrench at your heart made by the mixture of hope and sadness, the mixture of YUT! and “I don’t want to do this” that makes the profession of arms the strange thing it is. How not to be stirred by the music, the uniforms, the very youth of most of the men and women involved, their idealism and desire to serve? Yet at the same time, how to turn your face away from the increasingly grim headlines about our current war? How to put from your mind the “damn them all” broadside of Pat Tillman’s brother, just out as I write? -- Pat Tillman, killed by “friendly fire” (was there ever a more unfortunate euphemism?), the manner of his death papered over for weeks by the brass because they knew how unmotivational it would be to all concerned.

That’s the splendor and misery of the profession of arms in a nutshell. The individual can be valorous as an individual, a real hero -- and still die for apparently no immediate reason, or bad ones. Or as the result of someone else’s bad decision or even carelessness. We can control our own actions, but we’re ultimately prisoners to others’ actions, whether good or bad. In the military, both of these contradictory elements are much stronger than in civilian life: what’s demanded of the individual is more intense, but so is the powerlessness of the individual -- to a higher-up, a civilian politician, or to chance.

For me, as someone whose life’s work is in the English Department, enriching the mixture (as I put it) -- making them more able to articulate and analyze what’s put before them so they can address unfamiliar circumstances, this mixture of splendor and misery is best expressed in Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It’s about a cavalry charge in the Battle of Balaclava of October 25, 1854 in the Crimean War, a battle with an anniversary in autumn.

On one hand, the splendor of it all is clear. For Tennyson, these guys, doomed though they are, are heroes. They follow an impossible command to the death. “Half a league half a league,/ Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred:/ ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!/ Charge for the guns,’ he said.” And, hearing this (lawful) command, the men carried it out. As Tennyson puts it: “Boldly they rode and well.” And the last stanza of the poem asks, rhetorically “When can their glory fade?”  (the answer is: never). And then: “Honour the charge they made!” the poet enjoins us.

That’s the splendor. But the misery is equally clear -- and not just the fact that it’s, um, no fun to get a cannon ball in the face, or for that matter to receive a sword slash from a man on a horse, nor to engage in the hand to hand dagger fighting when you both fall to the ground. For in fact it seems that the charge was a horrible screw-up, perhaps actually in the wrong direction. And the worst thing is, apparently the guys on horseback knew it as they were doing it, though this did not damp their YUT! Tennyson gives us the command again, and then the soldiers’ reaction, their sickening knowledge that this meant death and was the wrong thing at the wrong time. “’Forward the Light Brigade!’/Was there a man dismay’d?/ Not tho' the soldier knew/ Some one had blundered.”

“Blundered” is the word that, according to reports, set Tennyson off when he read about this battle in the newspapers, so he repeated the word in his poem to make his scorn for the higher-ups quite clear indeed. “Blunder” is way too weak for what’s just happened. A blunder is a social mistake, asking after someone’s husband when everybody but you knows she’s just been through a nasty divorce. You probably don’t mean any harm, but it’s still “oops.” For someone on a horse on the hill, it was an “oops” -- a blunder. For the men on horseback, it was death. For military strategy, it was a travesty. What a waste.

In this poem Tennyson nails the strange combination of motivation and being utterly at the mercy of the system that characterizes the profession of arms. He gets into the soldiers’ heads. Do they get to question, or even (for that matter) understand the rationale behind the order of “Forward” that sent so many of them to their death? No. Of course not. Soldiers follow orders. That’s what they do. “Theirs not to make reply,/ Theirs but to do and die.” This line is much misquoted. It’s not “do or die” -- it’s “do and die.” 

That’s what I felt hearing the band play in the autumn air of the US Naval Academy. The military paradox (that cannot be resolved, I fear) between what’s expected of the individual who’s supposed to overcome his or her limits, and the so-strong limits in which that striving takes place. It’s the splendor and misery of the profession of arms.  It’s what we call the “human condition,” one we all share. But in the military the contrast is writ with a darker, stronger pen.

Which is why, with love and respect, I say: Happy Veterans Day.