Last month, I visited Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery for the first time. It is where many of those killed in the Global War on Terror, our nation’s longest conflict, are laid to rest.
I left the Army in 2012 and had never gone. The reminder of what that war cost, for my friends and for the country, always felt like too much. When I finally walked the rows, what struck me was who was there. A Muslim Army captain lies near a Christian Marine corporal, just steps from a Jewish Navy commander. Their hometowns cover every corner of the country, and their names trace back to every continent.
They came from everywhere, and they served together because they believed they could accomplish something greater than any of them could alone. Their graves reflect a kind of democratic egalitarianism: people from different places, faiths, and ranks, laid to rest side by side.
And while Veterans Day is not the same as Memorial Day, standing in Section 60, it struck me that our community carries that sense of duty and equality with us long after we leave service.
I saw it in Iraq. My gun truck held a crew that only worked because we trusted each other and shared a purpose. My driver was an Ethiopian refugee. Our communications specialist was an American born in Egypt. I was the son of an Irish immigrant. Our gunner was a country boy from western Virginia. We did not share a background, a faith, or, I suspect, a political ideology. We shared a mission, and that was enough.
Veterans carry that lesson home, but our national politics has spent the past decade ignoring it. Our discourse has grown meaner and more divided, and we have walled ourselves off into separate realities. Ask Americans how they feel about it, and the most common answer is exhaustion. Exhaustion with a politics of contempt that has no vision beyond winning for the sake of winning.
Even politicians seem to feel it. On Monday, a reporter asked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whether she was considering a run for the Senate. Her frustration was obvious. The last thing people want to hear from any politician right now, she said, is talk about the next election. What they want to know is what their leaders will do to make their lives better now.
This Veterans Day should remind us that Americans do not have to agree on everything to build something together. The people in Section 60 proved it. And veterans, especially those of us who served in our longest war, can help the country relearn it by leading a civic renewal in the communities where we live.
How We Got Here
For a decade, U.S. politics have treated every disagreement as a fight to the finish. Opponents are cast as enemies to be destroyed rather than neighbors to be persuaded. In 2024 and 2025, that contempt turned deadly, from the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, to the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, to the killing of Charlie Kirk. Even where it stops short of violence, it drives good people out. Election workers, school board members, and local officials have quit rather than endure the threats.
When politics becomes total war, every abuse gets excused as necessary to stop the other side. That logic produced January 6th, when a mob tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power because the president would not accept that he lost. More recently, it produced an administration willing to fire thousands of civil servants and remove senior military leaders to prioritize personal loyalty over competence, and to send National Guard units and masked federal agents into American cities as a form of political punishment.
The past few years have felt like the nadir of American civic life, a stretch where cruelty became a strategy and accountability became optional. For veterans, it has been especially painful to watch. But a low point is also a turning point. The same years that tested our institutions showed how many Americans were unwilling to let them fail, and veterans were among the first to step forward.
A Bigger Tent
What most Americans want from their politics is not complicated. They want elections that are free and fair, with districts drawn for voters rather than parties, and results accepted by the people who lose. They want a civic culture where neighbors can disagree hard without treating each other as enemies. And they want institutions that work for them.
None of that comes from one party crushing the other. It comes from rebuilding the habit of working with people we didn’t choose, in what some have called “Big Tent Organizing.” This strategy brings together people who disagree on most things around a few shared commitments: every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, results are honored, and disputes are settled by votes and courts rather than threats. Faith leaders, labor, business owners, election officials, lawyers, educators, and veterans each bring their own networks and credibility. A big tent connects them, the same way a unit connects soldiers who would never have met otherwise.
What Civic Renewal Looks Like
Civic renewal is what happens when the people in a community take back the everyday work of self-government. It looks like poll workers who are neighbors and come back every cycle. It looks like residents who know their county election director by name and show up for her when she is threatened. It looks like school board and county commission seats contested by people who want to solve problems rather than build a following. And it looks like people who vote differently sitting down to dinner, talking honestly about what their community needs, and leaving without contempt for one another.
We have already seen the beginnings of it, and veterans have been at the center. Over the past year, through my work with The Chamberlain Network, I watched veterans step forward the way we were trained to: without waiting for orders, once the mission was clear. A retired master sergeant in Ohio, a former Navy captain in Pennsylvania, and an Army officer in North Carolina stood outside polling places so their neighbors could vote without fear. In Georgia, veterans sat at planning tables alongside election experts, pastors, and lawyers they had never met. Nobody coordinated it from Washington. These veterans took it upon themselves to meet the moment.
Through Project HALO, The Chamberlain Network and partners from every sector placed veterans like these outside polling places in five states. What surprised me was where veterans’ presence mattered most. Experienced groups already had election observation and voter outreach covered. What was missing was the connective tissue between them, and veterans supplied it. Because veterans know how to lead teams of people who did not choose each other, and because we are also business owners, faith leaders, lawyers, teachers, and first responders, we are already woven into nearly every corner of community life.
The goal now is to make it last. By 2029, every county in the country should have a standing table like that, one that meets regularly, with veterans helping hold it together. Such a table can speak with one voice across party lines when the hatred and othering of our neighbors we have seen over the last decade threatens to return.
Those tables have to be genuinely open, bringing people together across ideological lines so long as they share a few core commitments: free and fair elections, equal treatment under the law, a political culture that welcomes participation, and a government that answers to the people and respects its checks and balances. That kind of renewal cannot depend on which party wins the next election. It has to be woven into the fabric of our communities.
The Work Ahead
We have a hard road ahead of us but thankfully, the veteran community has the skills and the experiences to lead this country to a brighter future. Veterans can convene, bringing faith leaders, election officials, business owners, school leaders, and local law enforcement together regularly, so relationships already exist when they are needed. We can model disagreement without contempt and call out cruelty no matter where we see it, because that is when it counts. And we can speak plainly, regardless of party, when political power is used to hurt rather than help.
None of this asks us to agree with each other on everything. It asks our country to do at home what veterans did in uniform: show up for those next to us, and trust that they will show up for us.
The Americans in Section 60 showed what people from every background can accomplish together. Those of us who came home carry that lesson with us. On this Veterans Day, the country does not need us to look back. It needs us to step forward and build something brighter.
