I learned about Midway in 2019. I had been an infantry officer in the 101st Airborne Division, deployed to Iraq at the tail end of the surge. Originally commissioned at the United States Air Force Academy and having received a pilot slot, I requested a transfer to the infantry. The army needed officers. Of all places, I read an article in the New Yorker about it. After graduating Infantry Officer School, Ranger School, and Air Assault School, I took my first platoon in Charlie Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Brigade of the 101st.
Several years after my return from Iraq I became a historian. I met Brendan, and we began to talk about the Battle of Midway. I came across the memoir of Dusty Kleiss, one of the most important of the Dauntless dive-bomber pilots. He recalled his thoughts on the night before the famous battle:“Would I die tomorrow?” he asked himself. His fear was sickeningly familiar to me:“I fretted I might not make it home to marry Jean,” he wrote. “My earlier reluctance gnawed away at me guiltily.” It was my experience all over again. Like Kleiss, I had gone to war without proposing, thinking it would be more responsible to wait. And, also like Kleiss, I found myself far from home, wondering what I’d been thinking, convinced I’d made a mistake. Like Kleiss, I survived. Also like Kleiss, the girl I sorely missed became my wife. But my sense of war as definitional, as a force that brings out the essence in men and women and in nations, has only strengthened.