Fathers. And you who would be fathers. On this day I bring you no new words. What I must say to every man who still feels the old fire in his chest, I would have said yesterday and will say again tomorrow. But upon this field of battle forming before us, I will speak it plainly now.

Honor them now. All of them, yours and his and his, all the way back.

Honor the fathers who stood shield to shield in the shieldwall, who swung the axe at Hastings and lost, yet bent the Norman storm to the old ways and made the conqueror speak their law. Honor the fathers who fought through the Wars of the Roses, English blood on English steel, a family quarrel that tore the land apart and yet birthed a stronger order. Honor the fathers of the Civil War who, in a foreign fueled and funded bloody brothers war, nearly ended what their fathers had wrought. Honor the fathers who crossed the gray Atlantic with nothing but that seed and their own two hands and planted it in new soil, where the Common Man, great and small alike, became the living foundation of nations.

Honor the fathers who bled on a hundred fields from the Somme to the Ardennes, who stormed the beaches of Normandy, who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, who held the line at Kapyong and Khe Sanh. Honor the fathers of the long Cold War, who stood the watch through decades of shadow and proxy, in Berlin and Korea and a thousand places that never made the history books. Honor the fathers of the Global War on Terror, who put on the armor again after the towers fell and fought in the dust of Fallujah, the valleys of Kunar, the streets of Sadr City, who came home in flag-draped coffins or with invisible wounds, and whose sons now wear the same uniform.

And honor, too, the fathers fighting today’s near-invisible wars—the men of law enforcement who walk the thin line in our own streets, who wear the badge while their families pray they come home, who face an enemy that does not mass on a border but hides in plain sight, organized crime and those radicalized by ideologies that hate everything we are. Honor the men of counterinsurgency and intelligence, the fathers who cannot tell their children where they go or what they do, who fight the quiet, grinding war against those who would hollow us out from within. These are not separate struggles. They are one war, stretching back to Alfred’s marshes, and the men who wage it have always been fathers, or the sons of fathers who taught them what it costs to be a man.

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