Swords & Plowshares
He is shouting commands to his adolescent peers. He wants his company to be the sharpest in the battalion. The young men shout their loyalty to the first sergeant, their voices rising together, a kind of chorus. He is eighteen years old.
I was just a boy—sixth grade—when my parents sent me away to a military preparatory school, at a time when the Vietnam War was still unfolding. Though I did not yet understand it, the war was already finding its way into us—into our posture, our language, our sense of what it meant to be a young man. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what moved my parents to make that decision. It felt like a sudden and disorienting turn for a boy shaped by the gentler rhythms of church life, the Boy Scouts, and public school classrooms. Perhaps they believed that one more layer of discipline—structured, unyielding—might steady me for whatever future lay ahead.
Looking back, it’s hard not to see how much of that world was already being shaped by the war itself. It hovered in the background of our lives, forming a generation of young men long before any of us were old enough to understand it. We absorbed it in ways both obvious and subtle—in the language of command, in the quiet pressure to be tough, in the unspoken expectation that we might one day be called to step into something we could not yet name.
The war drew to its official close on April 30, 1975, just a year before I graduated from high school. With the fall of Saigon—North Vietnamese forces entering the capital—something ended, at least on paper. But it never felt like a clean ending. There was no real sense of resolution, only a lingering weight, a quiet reckoning with all that had been lost.
One of my clearest memories from those years is not of the classroom or the drill field, but of the breakfast table. Morning after morning, the news would carry the latest count—the number of U.S. soldiers killed the day before. It was delivered plainly, almost routinely, as if it were just another statistic. And yet, something in me registered the gravity of it, even if I couldn’t fully understand it at the time. The war was not only something happening far away; it had found its way into the most ordinary moments of our lives, shaping us in ways we would only come to recognize much later.
Though this story unfolded in a particular time and place, its deeper pattern feels almost timeless. It has appeared before and will appear again, wearing new names, shaped by new grievances, sustained by familiar fears. The settings change; the language shifts; but the underlying currents remain. Today, young people may not be sent off to military academies in the same way, yet they gather for hours in virtual battlefields—Call of Duty, Hell Let Loose, Total War—where the lines between play and formation, simulation and conditioning, can quietly blur.
Each conflict carries its own name, its own justifications. But beneath the surface, there is often a familiar human story unfolding: the pull toward certainty, the seduction of righteousness, the ease with which fear hardens into cruelty, and crowds become convinced of their virtue. These dynamics are not confined to distant battlefields. They can surface anywhere—in the rhetoric of nations, in the unrest of cities, even in the quieter, more insidious spaces of online exchange.
And so it seems important to remember this deeper, archetypal pattern—not with despair, but with clarity. Even in societies that prize order and civility, the undercurrents of violence, tribalism, and judgment remain close at hand. To recognize this is not to give in to it, but to become more attentive to the choices before us.
This is where your voice matters. Not as noise added to the chorus, but as something steadier, more grounded. The work of restraint, of compassion, of refusing the easy path of outrage—these are not small gestures. They are, in their own quiet way, acts that preserve life.
In this spirit, the call to peace—echoed in the teachings of the current pope, Pope Leo XIV, and rooted in the prophetic vision of Book of Micah—still calls out to us:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.
It is an ancient hope. And perhaps, even now, a necessary one.
