On the Value of Military Service

In January, I crossed the milestone of 24 years of service in two militaries—the British and Australian armies. It is fair to say that I am a professional soldier. Soldiering has consumed the whole of my adult life. Indeed, it has been a focus since I first put on an army cadet uniform at the age of twelve.

A belief has developed from those campaigns that military service is inherently damaging. This is not unique in history. A similar perspective grew during and after the Vietnam War, one that took a generation to work through.

There is some truth to this negative image of service. I fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan and have written of my own concerns about the morality of the two campaigns. I have seen toxicity in culture and have experienced poor leadership. I have also, at times, likely been guilty of being a poor leader myself.

But this hard truth can exist at the same time as another truth: that I am undoubtedly a better person for my military service. Soldiering has not somehow suppressed my compassion and humanity; it has sharpened them. It has not diluted my values; it has constructed them. It has not fractured my family; it has strengthened us.

So, I believe there is deep value in military service. Sometimes this gets lost. My aim in this article is to reflect on and remind of this value. This is not an article about certainty of employment, subsidised housing, or money (although all those certainly helped my family and me to weather wars, the global financial crisis and a pandemic). Instead, I want to talk about the intangibles. The things that really matter. The things that have made me who I am today.

The name ‘military service’ is the right one. ‘Service’ has a dictionary definition of ‘the action of helping or doing work for someone’, and, in military terms, that ‘someone’ is the nation.

The idea of service as being at the core of the military profession is well embedded in history and culture. The rank of sergeant, for example, dates to the 13th century and is traced back to the Latin word serviens, meaning the ‘one who serves’. The motto of the Australian Army is ‘Serving the nation’. The idea of service is at the core of the oath of allegiance of the Australian Army. The mantra of Britain’s Royal Military Academy is famously ‘Serve to lead’.

This is no minor commitment. In 1962, the Australian-born General Sir John Hackett introduced the idea that military service involves a ‘contract of unlimited liability’. Soldiers agree to commit everything to the nation, up to and including sacrificing their own lives and deliberately taking the lives of others. Arguably, there is no profession that matches such a level of commitment. Few soldiers realise the scale of this when they join: it takes a few years, and often a few operations, for it to sink in.

That contract, however, is not a one-way street. You get something remarkable in return: a sense of purpose. There is something special in waking up each morning knowing that my work that day—however hard—will support the defence of the nation and the future security of my children. I have always been paid well as a soldier, but that has never been the point. And I have certainly never worked to make someone else money. I may only nudge the defence of the nation forward an inch on a given day, adding only one more brick to the ramparts, but I will have served, and that has purpose.

Is this worth my death? That is a good question. I have had to ask it several times. So far, the answer has always been ‘yes’. But I am clear that the day it is not, the day I am not willing to accept unlimited liability, is the day I should hang up the uniform. But such a day seems a very long way off, given how much the military has given me so far in terms of service and purpose.

Australian soldiers establish a position after disembarking from a US Army Chinook with Afghan National Security Force partners in Afghanistan, 2012

Australian Department of Defence

The second gift of my service has been a life guided by values. Armies have now shaped my values and behaviour for more than 30 years, without doubt the biggest influence on my sense of morality other than my parents. The language used has been pretty consistent. Service. Courage. Excellence. Compassion. Loyalty. Integrity.

None of this has been performative. Far from these ideas being some sort of corporate banner, I have understood from day one that both armies have expected me to live and display the values, tangibly, every day. Nor has this ever been a matter of being in or out of uniform; it is with me 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Perhaps not everyone sees it that way, but I always have.

Aristotle once said, ‘we are what we repeatedly do’—that we are our habits. So, it’s not surprising that those values are now deeply set. In fact, they reflect from top to bottom, most noticeably in the small things. I find myself being unfailingly polite. I open doors and always let others go first. I find it exceptionally difficult to lie or deceive, at least outside of very necessary deception in combat. I tend to look after others. Leaders eat last, always. Some might consider this all to be just old-fashioned. It certainly makes me a terrible businessman. But I am far happier this way, guided as I am by a clear set of values.

How does this work with violence, which sits at the centre of my profession? It helps square the circle. I have always been scared of becoming inured or desensitised to the violence, comfortable with killing. The values reinforced into me by the army have made sure that never happens.

Yes, it is my job to take life if required, in defence of the nation. But every life has value, and the cost of taking it must always be recognised. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.’ The British and Australian armies taught me this. It is not something I can forget.

Armies are hierarchical creatures, so for the past 24 years I have led, and I have followed, in many teams. Being part of this relationship is the best day-to-day aspect of the profession. I have followed some remarkable people. Tank officers and cavalrymen who took me to war with style. Special forces officers who dared, and won. Fiery frigate captains bringing force from the sea. And, most recently, remarkable senior leaders who have given as much as four decades of their lives to service: almost a third of the history of the Commonwealth of Australia.

I have also led soldiers, sailors and aviators, in both war and peace: teams from as small as 11 to as large as 400. Leading has been the greatest privilege of my life. In his excellent book War in Human Civilisation, Azar Gat describes military groups as primary or fraternal groups. They are as close to family as you can get, without being biological family. Gat is entirely right; my service has allowed me to be part of many families, all of them rich and full of characters.

It is true that military command can be a lonely task. One of the joys, however, is that you never do it alone. As an officer you always do it as a team, paired with a senior soldier of suitable experience and character. The accountabilities of command are rightly all yours, but the burdens of command are shared. This is a wonderful model, born of hundreds of years of tradition and experience: one that also leads to lifelong relationships.

Those connections of leading and following go deep. In September last year, I travelled more than 26,000 kilometres from Australia back to Britain for a 10-year reunion of a particularly lively tour of Afghanistan, where I had been the officer in charge of a 130-strong unit for a nine-month stint. I was in Britain for less than 50 hours. I landed, borrowed my father’s car and by lunchtime was hugging and swapping stories in Warwickshire with the best of men and women.

Sitting in the late autumn sunshine, in a 16th-century English pub in Shakespeare’s county, I couldn’t help but think of how well the Bard captured the feeling of military camaraderie in Henry V; a bond born of shared hardship. Life somehow shone brighter in those nine months in Helmand Province, surrounded by violence and death. As King Henry put it in the play, those days would ‘na’er go by from this day to the ending of the world’ without us remembering them, or each other. We truly were a ‘band of brothers’—and sisters. And, as Shakespeare’s Henry said, ‘He who fought with me that day shall be my brother.’ This was my brotherhood—my family—of Afghanistan veterans.

Three of the family are no longer with us. One was lost on the tour, two in the decade since. But they were there at the reunion, in spirit if not in body. Their photos were carefully laid out on a pub table, resting on our squadron flag. Drinks were bought for them, and glasses raised throughout. Ours is a family for which the phrase ‘we will remember them’ is a promise, not a slogan. Such camaraderie is hard-earned. To be part of it is a privilege.

Tom McDermott in Afghanistan: British Ministry of Defence via author.

Over the years, I have thought a lot about visceral emotions, the deep-set, intuitive and powerful ones that strike to your very core. Everyone experiences them at some time: the dual feeling of joy and terror at the birth of your first child, or the feeling of uncertainty and grief when you find that a loved one has died. But true visceral emotions are much rarer than people think.

My service has led to me experiencing many visceral emotions. You might think those were bad, and some were. The terror of hearing a burst of enemy machine-gun fire, followed by a ‘Man down!’ call on the radio. The eviscerating grief of hearing that a comrade is dead. Over the years, I have come to accept those moments as a reality of the profession, just as a doctor must learn to manage death. General William Sherman once said that ‘War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’ He is right. One thing I have learned is that two emotions are more dangerous than others: hatred, and disgust. Those are the gateways to revenge, an urge that must be guarded against at all costs.

But those difficult visceral emotions are genuinely offset by the positive ones. The first hug from my wife and then four-year-old daughter after nine months fighting in Afghanistan reached a scale of joy that is difficult to express. The feeling of collective achievement walking out of the back of a Chinook helicopter after a successful operation, the heat of the engines singeing the hairs on the back of my neck. The surge of pride watching one of my brother officers receive a medal from the Queen. Perhaps oddly, those positive emotions include the affirmation of actual combat. Winston Churchill once wrote, ‘nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.’ That is true. The battlefield is the most challenging of human arenas. My experience is that one values life more having endured it.

Those emotions—the good, the bad and the ugly—have had an overall net positive effect. Above all, they have given me perspective. I tend to view life differently now. I have less interest in material things, in the trappings of wealth or success. I am not bothered by the small problems: the traffic, not being able to find a parking space, a lack of phone signal. I am very slow to anger. I am not religious, but I am more spiritual … as the saying goes, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’ My use of language has changed. I very rarely use the word ‘hate’; I have felt the glimmers of true hatred, and I know what it really means.

Overall, the idea of a bad day has different context, when you’ve experienced days that are really bad. War has taught me that the Stoics were right, there really are only two things in your control: your thoughts and your actions. War asks you to have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. These are lessons you carry for life.

The passages above outline (however inadequately) what I have gained from service. The obvious final question though is, ‘Why do you still do it?’ Surely after 24 years, you’ve paid your dues and could do something a little more relaxing? Something a little less burdensome? A little easier on the family?

The simplest answer is that military service is my identity, and has been for more than half my life. I’m not sure how I would go without it. Writing in a different age, Samuel Johnson said, ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ I don’t think that is the case today, but I know I certainly feel better for being one. I think identity is the reason why many soldiers find life hard after they leave the military: the niggling loss of the service motive that has underpinned each day in uniform.

But that simple answer isn’t enough. The second and better answer is because I am needed. The world is clearly a more dangerous place than at any time since I started serving in 2001—indeed, perhaps since my grandfather was in uniform in the Second World War. The return of great-power competition heralds a period of tension that could well lead to armed confrontation or war in the Indo-Pacific.

History tells us that we must prepare for the worst, and that a strong and capable military is a vital part of that preparation. I migrated to Australia to secure a better future for my children, and I believe that future is now under threat. My service in 2025 has more meaning than it did when I arrived in 2015. It is my contribution to securing my children’s future.

This brings me to my final answer: ‘I serve because I am Australian.’ This is a fine place to finish. Migrating to another nation in mid-life has been hard—a core change in identity that led me from being British to becoming Australian. I often reflect that, while I originally served to gain Australian citizenship, I have now become truly Australian due to my service.

My time in the Australian Army has fundamentally connected me to the nation. It has shown me all the different Australias: from Whyalla in the south to the red desert in the Northern Territory, from the beauty of Perth to the Atherton Tableland. I have been privileged to lead the oldest cavalry regiment in the Australian Army, with a history dating back to 1860. I have worn the Australian national flag on my sleeve every day for nearly a decade, a constant reminder of what the country has given my family and me. I would not be the Australian I am today without the Australian Army.

For me, this is one of the most under-recognised benefits of service: an appreciation of and connection to nation. The idea of patriotism is struggling in the modern age, but the definition remains clear: ‘the quality of being devoted to one’s country.’ I am far more devoted to Australia than I expected to be, just 10 years ago. Because I am an Australian soldier. Always.

Tom McDermott is an Australian soldier.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).