What Have We Done

I awoke to a cloudy day with the promise of much needed rain, at least spotty showers. I am waiting to make plans for the day while enjoying my cup of coffee on the patio. As I look at the July flowers surrounding the patio, I am pondering the words I wrote yesterday, after celebrating our republic's 250th birthday.

It was the summer of 1998. My wife and I had just moved to Perry, Iowa, to start our lives after graduate school, and I convinced her to go see a movie about World War II. I remember exactly where we sat, in the orchestra pit along the aisle, in that old theater in downtown Perry. I had no idea what I was in for. I just knew the movie was about World War II. Then it started.

What followed is now famous, that brutal, unflinching scene of butchery on Omaha Beach, directed so well by Steven Spielberg. Twenty-four minutes of horror, of gore, of the chaos that landed on that beach on June 6, 1944, and twenty-four minutes of an audience in a small Iowa theater sitting mesmerized, unable to look away and unable to keep watching either.

I was 27 years old, a new Ph.D., standing at what should have been the start of the prime of my life, and I wept like a child in that seat. Afterward, walking to the car, I turned to my wife and asked her, "What have we done? What have we sacrificed? What have we done to justify the sacrifices of that day back in 1944?"

Almost 28 years later, the day after our nation's 250th birthday, I found myself back in the same question. I had spent the week watching documentaries about the founding fathers, watching clips of heroism from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the first and second World Wars, and there it was again, waiting for me, the same question I asked walking down a quiet street in Iowa as a young man. What has my generation done to pay for the sacrifices of others? Whether it's the first to fall as conscripts in the Revolutionary War, or the ones who never got their names remembered at all.

That question isn't abstract for me. I can put names to some of it.

Luke May, David Bruch, Abraham Depew, Samuel Cole, and Alexander Sloan, five of my ancestors, served in the Revolutionary War. None of them sat in a room in Philadelphia arguing philosophy. None of them wrote a clause into anything. Their voice in "the consent of the governed" was a musket and a long march, not a vote or a seat at the table.

But one of those five, Luke May, is where the line gets harder to look away from. His son, Calvin May, fought in the War of 1812, a war most people forget was fought at all. And Calvin's grandson, James W. May, my great-great-grandfather, was wounded in the Civil War, lying somewhere in Georgia, a long way from home, paying for a piece of a country he'd probably never see whole.

Three generations of the same family, Revolutionary War to 1812 to a battlefield in Georgia. Grandfather, son, grandson, each one handed the same hill in a different century. Something interrupted their lives every time. War took a piece of their twenties, or their health, or their name from history altogether. They didn't get to just live. They got handed a hill and told to take it, and mostly they did, without much say in the matter and without any promise of being remembered for it.

Here's the honest confession sitting underneath all of this. Some part of me, sitting in my comfortable home, looking out at a farm and a family and a life I've built without much interruption at all, has felt a kind of disappointment in myself. I never had my own Omaha Beach. I never laid wounded in a field in Georgia. My sacrifice has been, by comparison, minor. Unremarkable. A life lived rather than a life given.

But I've come to think that wanting the dramatic sacrifice is its own kind of arrogance. It mistakes the point of what they did. Luke May and Calvin May and James W. May bleeding in a field in Georgia weren't fighting so that their descendants would one day earn an equally dramatic story. They were fighting so their descendants wouldn't have to. If I never have to lie wounded in a field, that isn't a failure to live up to them. That's the mission succeeding. A quiet life isn't the absence of honoring their sacrifice. It might be the fulfillment of it.

So maybe my tribute isn't a guilt I carry, replaying every Fourth of July and every anniversary of a beach landing I never saw. Maybe the lament itself isn't the wound reopening. It's a bell that rings, a bugle call, the same kind of shout a captain once gave to take that hill, except the hill being called out to me isn't a beach or a field in Georgia.

My hill is to remember. To celebrate. To learn more. To share.

That's what the genealogy work has become for me, tracing Tobias Hagenbucher's path from Sulzfeld, Baden to a Chicago dairy route, following William and Sophie Smith out of Württemberg, and piecing together how Luke May's great-grandson ended up wounded in Georgia three generations and three wars later. It's not for an audience. Most of what I write reaches a small blog in 2026 that not many people will ever read. But they didn't fight for an audience either. They didn't know they'd be remembered. Doing the quiet, mostly unseen work of making sure they aren't forgotten is its own kind of standing at the top of a hill nobody else is watching you take.

The lament still comes around. It'll come around again next Fourth of July, and the one after that. But I don't think it comes to punish me anymore. I think it comes to walk me around my own life once a year and make sure I'm still paying attention to what it cost to get here. Full circle, not a spiral. A reminder of them, and an honest look at what I've done with what they gave me.

Maybe that's the whole answer. Not a beach. Not a field in Georgia. Just a life lived on purpose, remembered out loud, and passed on.