DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY & LIFE

A collection of speeches and poems by the noted Navy SEAL, retired four-star admiral, and author of Make Your Bed (2017).

First, the poems: With stanzas like “I hope those we saved will remember us, / and the innocents we harmed will forgive. / But to those who bore arms against us, / may you regret each day that you live,” Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell have nothing to worry about. The speeches are another matter. A fluent, inspiring speaker, McRaven revisits themes that both evoke the military academy motto of his title and insist on the need to more than rise to each occasion, as he exhorts the MIT graduating class of 2020, “Go forth and be the heroes we need you to be.” Perhaps the best-known of the speeches gathered here is from another graduation, this one at the University of Texas in 2014, in which he urges his audience to make their beds first thing in the morning, so they’ll “start each day with a task completed.” (besides, he notes, doing so “will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.”) A constant critic of President Trump (though he doesn’t mention the name anywhere here), McRaven speaks at several points to the nation’s best ideals: “We must ensure that we open our doors to those yearning to breathe free”; “We need to have men and women who uphold the standards of everything we hold dear”; “If we want American democracy, not Chinese communism or Russian authoritarianism, to lead the change, then we must arm ourselves with the smartest citizens our society can produce.” Points taken. And McRaven does a nice bit of double duty by twitting the sitting president and his ilk and praising his own ancestry at once: “Behind every attempt to overthrow the tyrants who hold on to power unearned—there is an Irishman.”

A call to true patriotism, perfectly timed for the nation’s 250th birthday.