Harris Voices: Matt Ryan, MSCAPP Class of 2024, on Stories that Serve

For Veterans Day, we asked members of the Harris Military-Affiliated Community to tell their stories. These are their opinions and perspectives, informed by their own life experiences and worldviews (and do not necessarily reflect the views of Harris).

A few weeks ago, I spent the morning at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library listening to the stories of a few dozen veterans. The event was one of 19 Vets Town Halls held across the country. Spearheaded by journalist Sebastian Junger and congressman Seth Moulton, these events seek to integrate veterans’ experiences with the public, for the benefit of both groups. The vet's town hall homepage puts it clearly: “For most of human history, trauma was both experienced and processed in groups – family, village, tribe. As a result, humans are amazingly resilient when part of a community, and amazingly fragile when they are not.” This approach is informed by Junger’s work on his book Tribe, in which he references cultural practices of First Nations People, particularly First Nations veterans after the Vietnam War.  

Our stories are tools, and as such are an underappreciated form of cultural technology. Useful stories are infrastructures that can be maintained and remade with a word. Sadly, we’ve stopping thinking of our stories this way, and have instead settled for the foolish idea that our stories are personal branding, direct messages from God himself, or threats from “the other.”  This Veterans Day, I encourage you to consider the stories we tell ourselves; about soldiers, patriotism, and service. Are these the stories we need? 

When I was a young officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, In the center of the atrium of our division headquarters building there stood a statue of Saint Michael the Archangel, depicted with sword raised in the moment of defeating Satan. Paratroopers like me who served in the division passed by their patron saint daily, and although we didn’t kneel or cross ourselves, the presence of Saint Michael was an artifact of a story about the Division, our history, and our purpose. The story said that we were protectors; dealers in vengeance against evildoers and victory for the American people. Many members of the Division, and the wider U.S. Army, Military, and even police and some civilians, view their personal role in our society in this light. The value of meting out justice is enshrined in the story that is told about American Paratroopers who liberated the concentration camps and defeated the third Reich.  It is also the story told and retold in unending broadcasts of war films, police dramas, and through the marketing of every military-adjacent product imaginable. Handsome, ripped, and moral hero puts ugly, dangerous evildoer in his place. Hell yeah brother. Battle won. Case closed. We can all go home, crack a beer, and tune in to the NFL’s salute to service, right?  

Stories like this are extremely popular in America. It’s understandable why; the world is a scary place, and evildoers are a near constant presence in the news. It’s also incredibly tidy and soothing to imagine that the decisive point of most or all conflicts will be socking the evildoers a good one, and crucially, not cleaning up the mess after. This difference is reflected in the distinction between the template “Phases” of doctrinal U.S. military operations; Phase III (Dominate) versus Phase IV (Stabilize). We are excellent at Phase III. Stabilizing? Not so much.  

Could we, given the passage of time, tell a slightly different story, one that retains some of the weight of Saint Michael’s appeal, yet bends towards a more productive and generalizable pursuit of stability at home and abroad? I think we can. Especially one that serves us all –military and civilian alike –more directly in our own communities. This new story I’ve been thinking about, that serves all of us is the King and his Hawk.  

The King and his Hawk is slightly more contemporary than the biblical story of the Archangel. It made its way to audiences through publication in a book called 50 Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin (No, not that James Baldwin). In it, a king stops to fill his cup from a trickle of water downstream of a spring but is thwarted twice by his companion hunting hawk. On the third attempt, the very thirsty and very angry king slashes his hawk as it dives to knock his cup from his hands, killing the bird. Having lost his cup, the king hikes upstream to drink but sees the carcass of a great and poisonous snake lying at the water's source. The king's hawk was protecting him, and the angry and shortsighted king rewarded the hawk's fidelity with an unjust death.  

What I like about this story, especially in comparison to the story of Saint Michael, is hard to keep hold of. But it has something to do with a change in awareness from an external enemy that most threatens us, to our own lack of knowledge, our own limitations, that pose the greatest threat. Mysticism around the story of the Archangel is about doing battle with Satan. Mysticism around the story of the King and the Hawk is about doing battle with ourselves. 

Lincoln echoed this assessment of the relative strength of threats from within and without in his lyceum address, in which he stated plainly that the greatest danger to the U.S. in 1838 was not foreign evildoers, but us: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”  

As someone who grew up with the cordite aftertaste of the Columbine High shooting, 9/11, and the Global War on Terror in my mouth, the instructive value of the second story grows the older I get. I'm hopeful that the King and the Hawk and stories like it can be repurposed into our cultural technology to strengthen American families and recast the role of public servants in the U.S. for the better. It is a story more nuanced than the avenging Archangel surely but serves to tell us that we cannot know everything at all points. It asks for a kind of humility that is absent in most American stories especially around Veterans Day. 

If this reflection interests you, consider becoming a cultural technologist this Veterans Day. Attend a vets town hall. Read and support veteran reporting and storytelling, at outlets such as The War Horse. Support substance abuse, mental health (such as through the Chicago-based Road Home Program), food insecurity, or any type of public services for veterans through volunteering, donating, or getting educated, and then expand that support to the general population suffering from these same destabilizing problems that harm us all. If you happen to live in Alabama, give your senior senator a call.  

I want to leave you with a story of my own, from the end of a deployment to eastern Afghanistan. On that deployment, I served as an Infantry Platoon Leader and later a Company Executive Officer in the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. My Battalion Commander was a guy named Jason Curl. What I learned from Jason Curl is hard to sum up. He knew that there were so many things out of his control that could go wrong (and often did), but he cultivated and enforced a disciplined, focused, and moral culture among the officers in the Battalion. He did this by telling and retelling a story about how everyone in the unit was first and foremost a Rakkasan scout. About how we had obligations to one another that were serious, and that we would be held to.  

Right before we came home, I had packed up my company shipping containers with most of our gear, checked and double checked the forms with all the serial numbers, gotten them signed. We were all ready to go home after 9 months. But the C-130 that flew out that night with our containers and 11 crew and soldiers crashed just after takeoff. Flipped over and fell on the Afghan side of the operating base and exploded, killing everyone onboard and three Afghans. They later found out it was a hard night vision case that had gotten wedged in some of the flight controls.  

This was a lot to deal with in the final weeks of the unit being there. But in Jason Curl's Battalion, it was a matter of course that you would move to mitigate and do what you could, where you were, with what you had anyway. There were investigations to help with, new flights to be coordinated, new load plans to be worked out. I have tried to take that steadiness and endurance into other areas of my life, as well as the knowledge that tragedy and misfortune are baked into assuming leadership roles, and you can't escape them entirely, only lead well despite them. In these situations, our stories could save us, if we insist on stories that serve.  

Matt Ryan is an M.S. CAPP student at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.