This Veterans Day brings us this meditation from a veteran, and a Jesuit, William Blazek, SJ, MD, courtesy the Washington Post’s On Faith section:

One thing that has always struck this veteran about those who serve our nation in the armed forces is the incredible generosity with which they care for each other, the incredible generosity with which they love one another. They do this in sharing meals, in giving burned-out comrades time to catch a bit of sleep, and in simple things like cups of coffee. Although I could not see it as clearly then, God was very present to us in such simple gestures during the First Gulf War. Now that I am a bit more practiced in looking for signs of Him, it is not too hard to figure out. To take care of someone is to love that person, and God is love. Therefore, we can find God’s love in our service members’ care for each other.

Among the many hardships of life in our unit’s deep desert days, one simple joy I found was having a nightly cup of coffee with my comrades-in-arms. Despite the burning heat, the nagging flies, and the ever-present tension of maintaining force protection, we had coffee anywhere we could. In an era before the stateside proliferation of Starbucks and its many clones, my family would mail us little red and white tins full of brown powder and labeled “Café Vienna.” One of our drivers used to call it “the good stuff.” More often than not, we turned it into “mocha,” dumping a pack of MRE cocoa into the mix. We drank coffee from aluminum canteen cups after the entire Brigade “stood-to” on alert in the early desert dawn. We drank it from paper cups while waiting in tactical chow lines, each soldier 20 feet apart “so one artillery round won’t get you all.” As we prepared in our battalion’s jumping-off point for the ground war D-Day in February of 1991, we drank it in a little mobiflex tent and rode out blinding sandstorms that the locals called “Shamals.”

On further consideration, maybe God was not so much in the coffee as in the conversation. While sitting on a collection of boxes and ammunition cans in our “mobi-hootch”, my buddies and I would joke by the light of a kerosene lamp about what we would do when we got back to “the world.” While some of that talk was none too wholesome, the friendship was heartfelt and would ultimately stretch far beyond the war. Telling stories about the girl back home or the most recent day’s adventures, we enjoyed an intimacy I have never found in other walks of life. We shared a lot of love in those hastily assembled coffee breaks. Of course, in a rifle battalion in the 101st Airborne Division, I do not think we would have labeled our relationship as “loving.” But nowadays I look back and see that it was true. We would have done anything for each other. There was real love there.

One time, our unit was setting up positions in a small gully on a ridge line near the Saudi border, rehearsing defensive scenarios in the early days of Desert Shield. A company Executive Officer, I’ll call him Lieutenant Keith, pulled up to our little forward Operations Center to requisition some supplies. The man looked like hell. He had a heavy growth of beard, and was caked in dust and grime. He had not slept in more than two days. Wobbling visibly, he leaned his rifle against a stationary Humvee, which promptly moved off to a covered position in the wall of the ravine. I watched in astonishment as the weapon was sucked into the loose and rapidly shifting sand in the vehicle’s wake. It simply disappeared. In the 2nd Battalion of the 502nd Infantry of those days, to lose a rifle would have been utterly unimaginable. A vision of 700 soldiers crossing the desert on line and at “extended interval” searching for an M-16 flashed through my mind.

Our Adjutant, then CPT Sean Scally, took matters into his own hands. While we retrieved the buried rifle, he ordered the weary XO to lie down and sleep for thirty minutes. Keith accomplished this still wearing boots, flak jacket and full combat gear. He lay on the sand floor of an open-air Command Post that was really no more than a camouflage net shading our mapboards and radios. When he woke, he was ordered to shave in some water that we heated in a canteen cup and to brush his teeth. Hygiene accomplished, we fed him an MRE and he was ready to get back to work. That is the way soldiers take care of each other. Keith, did not work for CPT Scally, and in the “rapid operational tempo” of the time, it took some courage to start ordering around another Company Commander’s Exec. It was a good call. I am certain Keith would have gotten himself or one of his men killed if he had kept going at that pace.

Looking back across the years, I can see love in the concern Sean Scally showed our friend. Even before the war, when I was early on in military training, the care we showed for each other in the service was evident. When I brought some buddies home on leave, my mother got a kick out of how careful we were about “securing” each other’s equipment. “Can you watch my gear?” was a constant refrain. Mom got such a laugh out of this that, to this day, she volunteers to “keep an eye on my stuff.” God’s love and care is reflected for me in the way service members watch out for each other in this fashion too. Most seriously, they don’t just guard equipment. They provide life-saving physical protection for their shipmates, aircrew mates and platoon mates. Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and coastguardsmen can count on each other, even when called upon to risk their lives. Their availability for service in the face of the possibility of total self-sacrifice speaks most strongly to me of God’s love. In this generosity, Christians can recognize a reflection of the self-giving love of Jesus Christ.

For any service member in harm’s way having a particularly rough time of it at present, I cautiously offer the following for your consideration. It is a suggestion my brother made during one of the hardest times in my life: “When things get bad, find one good thing in your day, no matter how small, and hold on to that.” It might be the fact that someone smiled at you, or that the sunrise was pretty. You could hold onto the countless prayers that are daily offered on your behalf by people at home. We love you and want you back safe and whole. On the other hand, maybe all you have to hold onto today is the possibility that someone might make you a cup of coffee. If they offer it, you may want to take it. Their care and concern is a sign of God’s love for you. Accepting it could be the one thing that will get you through this war.

Blessings upon you all and all those you love.

According to his bio: Dr. Blazek served as an Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. He now teaches health care ethics as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., while training for priestly ordination in the Society of Jesus.