CISA Director Jen Easterly’s Veterans Day Message

By: Jen Easterly, Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

I’m Jen Easterly, proud veteran and Director of CISA.  

As we mark Veteran’s Day, I wanted to say “thank you” to my fellow Veterans and your families.  In particular, I want to thank the 1,000+ veterans here at CISA who have chosen to keep serving our nation in a civilian government role, lending your leadership, your resilience, your steadfast commitment to the protection and defense of our great nation.  

A little over a century ago, in 1918 at eleven hundred hours on the morning of the eleventh day of November, the eleventh month, the murderous murmur of the Guns of August 1914 fell silent and the War to End All Wars ended. Nearly three million Americans served in-theater in that war; more than 50,000 were killed in action. The American men and women considered to have survived came home. But nobody really survives a war.

They came home, some dragging limbs, others with lungs seared by gas, many with their souls shattered by what they had seen, by what they had endured. Three of my Great-great Uncles served in that war: one, a cavalryman, drank himself to death. Another, a prominent local baseball player, never resumed his promising career. One who was gassed later died of tuberculosis. Before that, he taught my father to read. My dad would go on to serve in Vietnam. Most families have their stories.

These were our nation’s Veterans. They were not the first, or even the most: In the War to End Slavery some seven hundred fifty thousand died. The day the war in Europe ended was called Armistice Day and it was marked so until President Eisenhower changed it to Veterans Day. The change was fitting, after all. The War to End All Wars had not ended war; the armistice was broken, and in the Second World War more than 400 thousand Americans died, in Korea 33,000, and millions joined the distinguished ranks of the nation’s Veterans.

We say distinguished because a Veteran is a breed set apart from his and her fellow citizens. The Veteran is that person who signed the proverbial blank check, undated, to the American people, committing to pay any price, up to and including his or her life, to protect and defend their freedom.

The Veteran is that person who has been engaged in the great enterprise of keeping, however slowly, however painstakingly, the nation’s most compelling promises to itself and to history, to form, continuously, a more perfect Union.

The military was the first institution to end as an impediment to service the color of a person’s skin. Just in time, too. Those who have been transfused on a battlefield have no idea what mix of life-giving blood now flows in their veins; what race they are newly a part of. Closer to in time, the military is burying emotional discrimination among its troops: Who he or she loves, and how they love them, is nobody’s business, nor does it matter. What matters is how they love America.

The Veteran holds a position unique in our society: no person can justly pretend to it. The Veteran recognizes his counterpart, his reflected Other across the way: She cannot be fooled, He cannot be gulled: they know who they are. We know who we are. We know what we mean to each other.

The Veteran pays a price for this special place in the nation’s iconography. The perpetually whirling spin-off of war, she brings a piece of it home with her; it abides daily with him. Nobody completely survives a war. For some the debt is called sooner than for others. Every day it is estimated that somewhere in America more than fifteen Veterans take their lives. And our much-blessed nation today is defended by less than one percent of her people. On this special day, let all Americans think about that.

The Veteran is the Winter Soldier who asks no more of the nation but to serve her; to truly love her and her people and her possibilities. And when he is no longer a living presence among his people and goes to hallow and enrich some bit of earth with his remains, he goes knowing his immortality is affirmed in the lives and the given-back love of those he served.

God bless our Veterans. Thank you.