Clicks, clicks, clicks

I’m a Naval Academy graduate, an Emergency Room doctor, a Harvard Medical School grad, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, a competitive boxer, a father, a husband, a foster parent, a refugee charity founder, and a political actor who’s stood up to Trump with videos that have generated millions of views. I find it interesting as hell that very few people care about any of that.

But if I write something about being a Navy SEAL, it blows up.

That says something about America, and it’s not good.

We are a country that claims to love peace but is enthralled by war. We say we respect industry, but what we really worship is violence wrapped in virtue. It’s in our best-selling movies: Kill Bill, Memento, Gladiator. It’s the theme in our greatest television: The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. And as for me, I know it’s the Navy SEAL, not the doctor or dad, that y’all care about.

There is nothing Americans love more than “justifiable” violence.

When I talk about medicine, about the reality of modern emergency rooms, the opiate crisis, the bureaucracy of care, or what it means to see death every day, there’s polite applause and then silence. When I talk about combat, people lean forward. They want blood and brotherhood and the mythology of danger. They slide into my DM’s. They ask about BUDS and swim times, and what I think about other Navy SEALs who have done public things. America wants to be reminded that it’s still a place where men fight monsters and come home, and if we bathe them in glory, it’s some sort of virtue signal that matters. It doesn’t really want to hear that the fighting often isn’t noble; it’s an obligation rooted in decisions we made in high school, when we grabbed a brochure from the guidance counselor’s office.

I understand it. Combat is simple to understand and impossible to forget. I’ve yet to meet another combat veteran who doesn’t look at combat as, if not their zenith, some sort of moment in their life where the seconds were as important as anything they’d ever do. It has stakes. It’s cinematic. It’s the final exam for courage. Blah blah fucking blah.

What we miss, as a society, is that the quieter forms of courage, the ones that come afterward, or never make it to film, are harder. It’s one thing to run toward gunfire; it’s another to stand up and tell your tribe that they’re wrong. The former has a Last of the Mohicans soundtrack; the latter never gets greenlit. HBO doesn’t do miniseries about standing up to peer pressure, but find someone who wore a Trident and wrote a screenplay where they straight up lie about their service (I was in Kabul for Red Wings and Fallujah with Chris Kyle, so yes, those movies are lies), and you have to swat away the Marky Marks of the world who want to play a hero on the screen.

In America, we love symbols of toughness, but we’re deeply uncomfortable with endurance. We want the moment of heroism frozen in time, but not years of quiet integrity after. We celebrate the man who charges the hill, but not the man who simply exists, trying to honor his view of right and wrong, regardless of personal benefit. No one makes a movie about a cop who keeps his gun holstered. The irony is that the second one, the one who exists with quiet integrity but won’t speak out for fear of rolled eyes or haters online and in their life calling them a pussy, is failing when their country needs them most.

When I left the military and entered medicine, I thought I was leaving behind the part of my life that people found most interesting. I was wrong. It wasn’t the discipline or the mission that people responded to; it was the violence. America loves its warriors but struggles to love anything else. We pretend they’re the same thing when it suits us“frontline heroes” during a pandemic, “angels in scrubs” when the cameras roll, but then we turn away when the blood dries or someone asks us to do something easy, like wear a mask around old people.

There’s a reason “Navy SEAL” is a brand and “Dad who shows up” is a footnote. We’ve become a society that wants to consume courage as content. We want to feel inspired without having to do anything courageous ourselves. And so we fetishize combat as a shortcut to meaning, forgetting that service doesn’t have to involve a rifle to count.

And while I’m at it, if you can’t move on from what you did when you were 24, give it a shot; you might find there’s more out there.

I sometimes wonder what it says about us that the most resonant stories are about men killing other men. Maybe it’s because those stories confirm something primal in us; that there’s still such a thing as right and wrong, enemy and ally, victory and defeat, even if it was never that clear.

But clarity isn’t always truth. I’ve seen courage in hospital hallways that rival what is found in combat zones. I’ve seen more endurance in single mothers than in soldiers. And I’ve seen more real service in those who never wore a uniform than in plenty who did.

If America wants to survive its current sickness, our addiction to spectacle, our nihilism, our worship of the strongman, it’s going to have to learn to admire a different kind of strength. Not the loyalty to a tribe, but to a principle.

So while I’m at it, the SEAL Teams are a shortcut to Special Operations (one I took advantage of); be tough for 6 months, and you too can coast forever off of what you did before you had your first grey hair.

Being a SEAL will always get clicks. I get it, I know it. I’ve taken advantage of it when I thought the juice was worth the squeeze, like when I wanted to hurt Trump’s electoral chances. The mythology is too strong, the movies too good, the archetype too clean. But if we want a country worth defending, maybe we should take a look at the parts of life that aren’t cinematic. The parts where no one’s watching. The parts that take more than courage, they take character.

Because war, for all its horror, contains valuable lessons for the individual and the society that sent them. But one of them shouldn’t be that being a Navy SEAL is a lifetime pass to be an asshole.