Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly, who would later become President Trump’s White House chief of staff, had every reason to express devastation when he delivered a Veterans Day address to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis in Missouri on Nov. 13, 2010. Kelly’s son, Marine 1st Lt. Robert Kelly, had died four days earlier, killed by a buried improvised explosive device as he crossed an irrigation ditch in Afghanistan’s Sangin District, in restive Helmand Province.
A consummate warrior, Kelly did not succumb to his grief but rallied the troops.
Nine years later, Kelly’s words remain an important reminder of the myriad reasons we have to celebrate the men and women who so selflessly serve our great nation.
Afghanistan in 2010
In early 2010, 30,000 surge forces had been inserted into Afghanistan, where they found themselves in a hard battle to procure a victorious end to a nine-year war.
During the previous year, 2,139 Americans had been wounded in Afghanistan. By July 3, 2010, the total of wounded Americans already stood at 2,000. The remainder of 2010 would be no less bloody.
Kelly’s battalion, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment (3/5), had taken over the Sangin battlespace in early October. The 3/5’s predecessor, 3/7, had lost five Marines, with an additional 150 Marines wounded, during their deployment.
By Nov. 10, 15 Marines from 3/5’s 800-man battalion had been killed, with an additional “40 amputations and over 70 others wounded,” as Bing West describes in One Million Steps, about 3/5’s time in Sangin. At the end of a seven-month deployment, 3/5’s losses would stand at 25 Marines dead and over 200 wounded.
In both Sangin and nearby Marjah District, 15 Marines from 2/9 lost their lives between July 2010 and January 2011. Others, including Medal of Honor and Purple Heart recipient Kyle Carpenter and his friend Nick Eufrazio, were severely wounded.
Carpenter received his wounds while leaping atop a grenade to save Eufrazio on Nov. 21, just weeks after Kelly’s speech. He would initially recover at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. As Carpenter describes in his recent memoir, You Are Worth It, “So many casualties were coming in weekly at the end of 2010 and in early 2011 that [Bethesda] briefly ran out of rooms and had hospital beds lining the halls.”
Kelly rallies the troops
In a conflict zone connected by the internet to the world back home, Kelly’s morale boost was certain to aid beleaguered U.S. forces. It would also prove a salve to their concerned families, and to those who had lost loved ones.
Kelly first reminded his audience of the deadly attacks of Sept. 11, and of the heroes whose response to those horrors was to undertake “a commitment to protect the nation … to their deaths.” Kelly spoke frankly of the nature and inclinations of our terrorist enemy, who “fights for an ideology based on an irrational hatred of who [Americans] are.” That enemy, he explained, “will stay forever on the offensive until he hurts us so badly we surrender, or we kill him first.”
The narrative of the wars that followed Sept. 11 has been muddied by “media elite” who set off a “chattering class” of cynics “offer[ing] their endless criticism” though they “have never themselves been in the arena.” “America’s warriors,” Kelly stated, “have never lost faith in their mission, or doubted the correctness of their cause.”
Kelly spoke with contempt of attempts by that “chattering class” to make victims of service members. “No, [service members] are not victims, but are warriors,” he explained. “And warriors are never victims regardless of how and where they fall … They live to fight for you, and they never rest because there is always another battle to be won in the defense of America.”
Kelly detailed the everyday backgrounds of those “good and decent young men and women who … have performed remarkable acts of bravery and selflessness to a cause they have decided is bigger and more important than themselves.” America’s uniformed service members, he stated, are “as good today as any in our history.”
In closing, Kelly shared the story of a pair of Marines in Iraq who were standing post at a security station in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2008 when a vehicle filled with 2,000 pounds of explosives barreled towards the gate. The Marines spent their last seconds on earth standing their ground, unloading their weapons at an enemy hellbent on destruction, and protecting the 150 Iraqi and American service members beyond the gate they guarded.
These “very brave young men,” Kelly said, are “the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight — for you.”
Those service members, according to Kelly, also represent hope for the country’s future. He explained the United States “will forever remain the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ so long as we never run out of tough young Americans who are willing to look beyond their own self-interest and comfortable lives, and go into the darkest and most dangerous places on earth to hunt down, and kill, those who would do us harm.”
Assessing the speech in the present
Nine years later, Kelly’s words hold value in part because our atmosphere of conflict is little changed.
Our enemy has not given up, but rather developed new offshoots. While a Pew Research Center poll from 2018 found that 73% of American adults believed “defending the country against future terrorist attacks should be a top priority” for American leaders, the “chattering class” often minimizes our enemy’s savagery and belittles the efforts of the less than 0.5% of Americans on active-duty service who fight him.
Just weeks ago, the Washington Post published a headline referring to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the brutal leader of the Islamic State who for the past five years was the FBI’s most wanted terrorist, as an “austere religious scholar” after Baghdadi died on Oct. 26 in a well-executed U.S. special operations raid.
Kelly’s Veterans Day speech will stand the further test of time, however, because it offers meaningful, well-earned praise to the post-Sept. 11 service members and veterans who “are the finest of their generation.”
On Veterans Day, a return to Kelly’s speech will remind all Americans why those who fought, and continue to fight, for our nation have earned our undying gratitude.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
Correction: A previous version of this piece mistakenly referred to the “deadly attacks of Sept. 1.” It has since been corrected to say “Sept. 11.”
