My Grandpa Saved Civilization

On D-Day, he showed the kind of heroism we all need

Eighty years ago today, my 25-year-old grandpa braced himself against the bow of an unsteady landing craft as it plowed through rough Atlantic waters. Around him stood dozens of nervous soldiers and a communications sergeant who kept vomiting on his boots. A stretch of barrier-choked sand and rock code-named “Easy Red” loomed before them, part of Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, where the invasion of Western Europe began. His infantry company was supposed to be in the fourth wave of attacks, but many of the previous waves had drifted off course. My grandpa and his men found themselves among the first to hit one of the most fiercely defended and physically forbidding landing sites in all of Normandy.

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The funny thing was, he didn’t even have his own gun. He’d decided at the last minute to send his handgun over separately on a jeep, because he remembered how the salt water had wrecked it in the Sicily landings the previous year. This shows how experienced his division, the 1st Infantry — the storied Big Red One — was by that point in World War II. They’d already confronted the Germans in North Africa and Sicily, and they knew what to expect from combat. But it also meant that my granddad, who’d just made captain, only had any weapon at all because a soldier from another company had come down ill, leaving him with his rifle but no ammunition. One of his own men laughingly offered him a couple of clips just before embarking, so the new captain landed on Omaha Beach with just 16 bullets for a full day’s fighting.

He never saw the communications sergeant again, and never learned what happened to him. Easy Red was a shingle of pebbles and rocks backstopped by imposing cliffs, atop which sat pillboxes and machine gun nests. The defenses hadn’t been cleared out as intended by the Allied artillery barrages overnight, which instead sailed harmlessly into the countryside beyond. Undamaged 50-caliber German guns now tore mercilessly through the beach and men, reducing some units by more than half within minutes of landing. Somehow, though, my grandpa led his men off the beach and to their objective, up a draw between the cliffs. They were safer there for now, but France, the Battle of the Bulge, and, finally, the invasion of Germany itself all lay ahead.

It’s difficult to comprehend what my grandpa lived through that day and in the months that followed. Like a lot of World War II veterans, he stayed gruffly silent about the war and turned to alcohol to cope, alienating his family and leaving a legacy of pain that still resonates in our generation today. A little sheaf of his typewritten writings, terse vignettes really, is the only source I have for anything he saw or did. But leafing through those writings inspires frank awe. My grandpa was a deeply imperfect man, but he led a company of soldiers through the jaws of death across the European wasteland to help save civilization itself.

And that’s something to be proud of.

Reading Ishmael

I, on the other hand, was raised among hippies, not the most pro-civilization demographic. They tend to prefer what feels good in the moment over demands of propriety, wild patches of woods and field over malls and office parks. (I still share at least the latter of these prejudices, and often the former, too.) My earth-venerating mom was estranged from my grandfather for much of my childhood. Unwilling to share stories that could put his conservative militarism in a good light, she never told me that my grandad had been a war hero. The facts about my grandpa’s extraordinary life only came to light when, upon his death, a relative I’d never met generously photocopied the war stories she found in his office and sent them around to the cousins.

Partly thanks to the continued influence of the 1960s counterculture, civilization is a contested concept these days. The cultural historian Jacques Barzun warned about modern “primitivism,” the longing for a mythical state of primeval equality and leisure that, philosophers and poets believe, we used to enjoy before some dope invented farming. Primitivists, like hippies, aren’t impressed by hierarchical order and self-sacrifice. To them, the deaths in the D-Day landings were signs of civilization’s ills, not the price of freedom.

Primitivist distaste for civilization started among intellectuals, but it’s long since gone mainstream. When I was in high school, we read a novel in English class called Ishmael, where an eponymous telepathic gorilla (really) explains that farming and civilization are responsible for all the world’s problems. Civilization, the gorilla declaims, turns people into “Takers,” whose greed to store up food and resources for the future makes them inherently exploitive and selfish. Instead, we should become “Leavers,” trusting in Nature like innocent hunter-gatherers.

The book was pure, rehashed Rousseauian propaganda. But Thoreau’s ghost makes American teenagers uniquely receptive to the myth of the noble savage. Reading books like Ishmael gave me the thrill of feeling that I was in on a giant secret, one that normies couldn’t possibly understand. Civilization and all its accoutrements — flags fluttering above suburban homes, businessmen in suits, highway interchanges — were inherently bad for us. Why fight for them?

Conveniently, this sort of anti-civilization secular gnosis gets you off the hook for unpleasant duties like offering your life for your country. If the whole civilized order is merely exploitation and control, you can happily excuse yourself from the work of supporting it. Instead of storming the beaches at Normandy, you become a self-justified free rider, letting the unenlightened farm the earth and defend the borders while you write essays about how it all needs to come down.

Expressive Individualism Comes for Civilization

The sociologist Robert Bellah used the term expressive individualism to describe how postwar Americans prioritize the subjective self over outward rules or social norms. Expressive individualists, such as hippies, are essentially neo-foragers. Like hunter-gatherers, they prefer spontaneity, self-expression, and initiative over the duty, commitment, and delayed gratification that underlie agricultural civilization. You need patience and submission to authority to be a farmer or factory hand, but initiative and flexibility if you want to be a creative professional or a forager.¹

Because civilizations are almost universally based on farming and other repetitive tasks, neo-foraging values are pretty unusual when viewed in a cross-cultural lens. We Westerners have adopted them in part thanks to the Enlightenment’s strident emphasis on individual rationality and autonomy. You could see World War II as a gargantuan showdown between three ideologies that attempted to grapple with this Western Enlightenment legacy. Fascism demanded total allegiance to a secular state while suppressing older nested hierarchies of family, village, prince, and church. It was a twisted farming ethos grafted onto modern nationalism.

Communism was individualistic in the sense that it wanted the state to liberate people from those same premodern and seemingly oppressive loyalties. Both communism and fascism were selling a deceptively similar modern product, one radically egalitarian and the other hierarchical. With its exaltation of primitive freedom and noble savage mythos, communism was clearly a neo-foraging worldview.

The third side, liberal democracy, seemed to be the best bet of the three. It exalted individual freedoms while firmly rejecting totalitarianism. It countenanced, even encouraged, reasoned criticism of tradition while affirming the basic boundaries and parameters that ground a stable life. That is, liberal democracy balanced farming virtues with foraging virtues. This was the side my grandfather fought for, and eighty years on, I still believe it was the right side. The only side.

Totalitarian Democracy

But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the liberal-democratic bloc that triumphed in World War II has grown its own totalitarian streak. The West wields its cultural and economic power to champion defiant individualism to the almost total exclusion of farming virtues like discipline and self-control, tradition and hierarchy. Our neo-foraging ethos puts us at stark odds with the values of older societies. Liberal democracy — especially in American form — now seems to mean McDonald’s advertising, freedom from parents’ influence, and academic deconstruction of inherited values like duty, which we depict as tools of oppression. Paradoxically, it also means bombs, as America enforces this increasingly extreme version of liberated, consumerist democracy around the world.

The trouble is that this kind of empire undermines the very virtues that originally gave it life. Our Western expressive individualism is so uncompromising that it can’t convince young people to put their lives on the line for it. The US military is now missing its recruitment targets, often dramatically. Other Western countries, such as the UK, face similar shortfalls. American patriotism has collapsed to unheard-of levels, with fewer than 20% of young adults claiming to be “extremely proud” to be American.

People who aren’t patriotic don’t volunteer for military service. But it’s hard to be patriotic when messages from school and media depict sacrifice and obedience as forms of trickery, when prestige institutions like the New York Times deconstruct the very idea of American civilization as a worthwhile thing. How can a nation of expressive individualists find the gumption storm the next Normandy?

The answer is simple: it probably can’t.

By its very nature, our neo-forager American empire in 2024 is in no position to credibly ask for personal sacrifice the way America in 1944 could. Our leaders and teachers and thinkers have turned us into foragers, in outlook if not in lifestyle or skills, and foragers just don’t organize that way. They melt back into the forest when trouble brews. An empire that champions these values undermines its own self-confidence and patriotism. It can’t — and won’t — remain an empire for long.

My battle-seasoned grandpa was ambivalent at best about the Vietnam War. It made him furious, though, to see the way the soldiers were treated, sacrificing everything for their country yet being spat on upon their return and told it was all in vain. He was even more outraged about the wasteful and unjust wars that followed September 11, 2001. But I doubt either would hold a candle to the fury he’d feel at the slow, inexorable destruction of our basic sense of duty, of the farmer virtues that once tied our institutions together. He fought to save civilization only to have civilization turn on itself.

That You May Live Long in the Land

I never got to know my grandfather well. This wasn’t just because my mom had a chip on her shoulder. He died in 2005 with three living children and at least six grandchildren, but I was the only descendant to attend his military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Cousins and aunts assembled for the eulogy and gun salute, but all his children and other grandchildren skipped it. He’d driven them all away, or they’d never connected with him at all.

But I’m glad I stood there with my extended family, most of whom I’d never met, that sunny October day in Arlington. I looked like the child of hippies, long hair and vegetarian frame, travel-battered from two years of indolently teaching English abroad. I was ignorant of military life, too immature to even fathom racing into a hail of bullets while looking out for 200 men. Yet I was nearly the age my grandpa had been when he did just that in Europe. Sixty years of expressive individualism had done their work to separate me from him.

In the biblical Book of Exodus, the reasons for all but one of the Ten Commandments are either missing or vague. The only commandment to be given a specific justification is the one to “honor your father and mother, so that you may live long in the land.” Take the Lord’s name in vain or covet your neighbor’s spouse, and who knows what might befall you. But fail to honor your father and mother, and the consequence is crystal clear: you will lose the land.

We’re failing to honor our fathers and our mothers, not in the sense of blindly adhering to tradition and obeying arbitrary authority, but in valuing their sacrifices and preserving their best virtues. We’ve been molded into neo-foragers whose strengths — flexibility, opportunism, spontaneity — are compatible with living in the deep forest or in mall-choked consumer culture, but not anywhere else. When it comes time to sacrifice deeply for our land in the future, we might not live up to the challenge.

This isn’t an academic speculation. As the last great war recedes beyond living memory, storm clouds are once again gathering. Flashpoints from Israel to Ukraine to Taiwan bespeak restive challenges to American leadership. But the next big war, if it arrives, probably won’t be like my granddad’s war. Most wars are morally ambiguous at best. World War II was truly an exception: there was a clear right side, and he was on it. What threatens now is a reversion to the mean.

Such a war would have plenty of bad guys, from thuggish regimes in Russia and China to non-state military actors I don’t even want to think about. But I don’t think America will reprise its role as savior. It now exports a toxic brew of irresponsible, society-killing ideologies. We’ve twisted the inherent human yearning for self-determination and autonomy into a liberationist ethic so extreme that it’s literally incompatible with civilization, by design. Any country that follows our lead risks becoming like us. No history, no home.

Sacrifice Makes Civilization

Eight decades ago, my grandfather was willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. He helped liberal democracy achieve a victory so total that our way of life now dominates the globe. But we’ve used that power quixotically to try building a world without the need for sacrifice. In our hearts, we know it’s impossible. America is losing credibility because of it. The war to come, if it comes, may end up being a kind of awful referendum on the anti-sacrificial worldview of the modern West, prosecuted by some of the least admirable characters and governments imaginable. If God intervenes inscrutably on the side of good during human wars, this one he might sit out.

But as the terrible engines of history grind back into gear, I now understand what my grandpa was up to. Laying down your life for your friends or your country — for the good cause — isn’t just a dumb thing for warmongers to brag about. It’s what makes civilization possible. And since that October day in Arlington, I guess I’ve been converted to civilization. I can admire the spontaneity and individualism of hunter-gatherers all I want. But this ship called civilization is mine. If it goes down, I know I’m going with it.

I’m probably a little old now to worry about being drafted in the next big war. (Or maybe not — if World War III really comes, all bets might be off.) But if my moral equivalent of the Normandy invasion arrives and I find myself gazing up at deadly cliffs, choosing between safety and duty, I hope I’ll have my grandpa’s courage. I hope I’ll be able to honor him and his fellow soldiers so that I — or the ones I leave behind — can live long in the land. A civilized land.

1. Cross-cultural psychology finds that both foraging peoples and upper middle-class inhabitants of WEIRD societies (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) think more analytically and more individualistically than farmers or factory workers.