William H. McRaven

A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas, will be livestreamed.

In September 1862, General George B. McClellan, the general in chief of the Union Army, had just repelled the Confederate advance under Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Antietam. But, as Lee’s battered army retreated across the Potomac River, McClellan failed to pursue him—leaving Lee’s army mostly intact. Abraham Lincoln relieved McClellan that November for his failure to be aggressive on the battlefield.

Wheeling the old warriors
off the Honor Flight plane
with flags and banners,
people calling their names.
From Chosen to Kabul,
from Baghdad to Hue,
after all these years
today was their day.
Oh, the burden they carry,
I heard one woman say.
I wonder if our children
would serve today?
But not far off
another plane left,
with soldiers and sailors,
their solemn duty kept.
Nearby, a young wife,
two children at her side.
It’s the burden she carries
as the plane took flight.

I remember the heat.
A dry, suffocating torrent.
The blazing, burning sun
baking the tarmac.
No clouds, no trees,
just a furnace of hate.
I feel the hate.
I remember the heat.
I remember the dust.
Filling our nostrils, caking our mouths.
It rained from the sky
and rose from the ground.
With every turn of the tire
and step of the foot there was dust.
Dust, everywhere dust.
I remember the heaviness.
The helmet pressing on my head,
the armor squeezing my chest.

The Atlantic has often channeled the resources of poetry—its charged and immediate patterns of language—to mourn and memorialize the war dead. The earliest years of the magazine spanned the Civil War, during which the editors published dirges, elegies, and ballads that told stories to console, to heal, to hearten. An elegy for Rupert Brooke took the sonnet into a new, modern vernacular at the time of the First World War.

This poem is dedicated to all the men and women, regardless of faith, who made the ultimate sacrifice for this nation.       I have stood before the crosses
as we laid a soldier down.
They cast a simple shadow
upon the upturned ground.The bugler sounds taps
as each cross its witness bears
to the journey of a soldier
released from earthly cares.