By Giancarlo Sopo
Monday, May 25, 2026
I did not expect to be disarmed by a postcard.
Last week, the fine folks at Focus Features and the USO (United Service
Organizations) invited a few of us to Fort Campbell, where the 101st Airborne
Division, the “Screaming Eagles,” is based. The USO is the nonprofit that,
since 1941, has kept American troops connected with home, to family, and to the
country they defend. We’d seen Pressure, the D-Day film, set to release on May 29,
the night before. (It is gripping; more on that later.)
The base tour came the next morning: military working
dogs running their drills, a Chinook we were free to climb aboard, a command
brief from Brigadier General Travis McIntosh, and a turn at the Sabalauski Air
Assault School, where I leaned out over the rappel tower and my arms promptly
filed a complaint: this is a young man’s game.
It was boyhood make-believe with real helicopters. What
moved me was smaller.
I enjoyed a barbecue lunch with a table of soldiers at
the USO center on base, the eldest of them 20 years my junior. I kept waiting
for the swagger the movies promise. It never came. What I found instead was
decency — unhurried, unguarded, almost old-fashioned. They addressed me as
“sir” and asked about my daughter. They talked about theirs. They had taken on
a duty the rest of us are free to forget, and they wore it without the faintest
air of having done anyone a favor.
Before the meal, Ann Jarvis, who directs the USO’s work
across this region, told us a story. A mother once couldn’t make it to welcome
her son, a Marine, back from deployment. So Ann picked him out of the crowd
from the only description she had: handsome, gold-rimmed glasses. Then she
FaceTimed his mother so she could watch him come through the gate. That is the
USO in a sentence. It carries things home: a soldier’s voice to a child who
misses him, a returning son to the mother who couldn’t be there, service
members back across the hard border into civilian life.
It is hard to watch all this without reaching for
Scripture. Saint Matthew teaches us to see the face of Christ in our neighbor,
to treat the person before us as we would treat Him. It is among the hardest
things we are asked to do, and most of us manage it only in fits and starts.
The good men and women of the USO do it for a living. Quiet, constant,
unglamorous, their work sanctifies a fallen world.
By late afternoon, I had experienced one of these acts
myself. At a reception in the new Tennessee Wings of Liberty Museum, whose
galleries detail actions from Normandy to the Global War on Terror, the USO had
laid out postcards. I wrote to my 15-month-old daughter waiting for me at home,
a few lines that she cannot yet read. Ann took the card from me and promised
she would see it mailed herself. I believed her.
We set aside Memorial Day for the dead, and rightly so.
But the fallen were once like these young men at my table, somebody’s child,
fed and prayed over and written to, sent off . . . not all returned. The USO
has spent the 85 years since tending the living end of that bargain, the part
we are too often tempted to look past.
What I wrote to Lucia was a kind of promise: that I trust
she will grow into a life worthy of what these men and women have laid down for
her. That hope is gratitude extending into the future.
William F. Buckley Jr. once noted that we owe our country a debt, and that repaying it
is “the purest form of acknowledging that debt.” Gratitude is not finished
until it is given back. He made the point through the Anatole France parable of
a monk who had nothing to offer the Virgin but his juggling, and so juggled at
her altar, because it was all he had.
That is the only gift the USO needs from the rest of us. The USO is sustained less by any
federal appropriation than by the generosity of ordinary Americans, many of
whom will never wear the uniform. The USO’s people have made it their mission
to see our soldiers home for nearly a century. We can help them keep that promise.
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