"Don't talk about it, be about it."
The Thinking
The Writing
Service shows up across the workspace. These are the pieces where it takes center stage:
Essays & Reflections
- No access — on generic gratitude, military fetishization, and the work required to deserve an opinion
- No access — a letter to a child on what service really means
- No access — on fences, rights vs. responsibilities, and Gopnik's love-as-care
- No access — the long-form essay
Published — External Bylines
- No access — Small Wars Journal, May 2026 — the post-Abrams force structure as a hidden subsidy on communities; case for honest accounting.
- No access — Military Mentors, Dec 2025 — Impact = Ability × Access; mentorship as a system, not magic.
- No access — From the Green Notebook, Oct 2022 — building cross-agency trust before the crisis arrives.
- No access — McChrystal Group case study, Feb 2021 — the 16-agency state COVID fusion cell.
- No access — Res Publica, Illinois Wesleyan, Vol. 18 (2013) — the origin of the trust-in-institutions thread.
Collected Wisdom — Service & Civic Life
- The Kelly quote: "If you're a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won't understand it or be part of it"
- Needleman on democratic citizenship: obligation as the inner dimension of democracy
- Berlin on positive & negative liberty
- "Our American tendency to fetishize freedom requires at least an acknowledgment of freedom's moral bedfellow: obligation"
- Full section in No access
The Doing
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Communities
Threads that pass through Serve:
- Earned vs. Inherited — earning opinions, tempered arrogance, deserve vs. earn
- Commitment Over Balance — stasis in disguise, satisficing has limits
- The Cost of Easy — all destination, no journey; automation eroding character