In the summer of 2011, in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley, I sat across from a farmer wearing a dark gray perahan tunban, faded turban, and plastic sandals. In his hand, he absently twirled crimson prayer beads. His weathered face bore decades of sun and hardship, but his eyes were bright and his gaze was steady. I was a young U.S. Army officer a few months into my deployment, rifle and radio slung across my chest.
We were trying to persuade him to stop growing poppy, the Taliban’s cash crop. I offered seeds for alternative crops—legumes, grains, anything to sustain his family. He listened, skeptical. When he finally spoke through our interpreter, it wasn’t about ideology—it was about survival. He wanted safety, a steady income, and education for his children. I realized: our dreams were identical. We just happened to be born on different sides of the world.
A decade later, I was in the White House Situation Room, helping coordinate the resettlement of nearly 100,000 Afghan evacuees. As part of that effort, I visited Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, where newly arrived families awaited placement in American communities.
One afternoon, I met a family of seven—a father, mother, two sons, and three daughters. The youngest girl, maybe nine, wore a lilac shirt and green hairband. Through an interpreter, she told me she couldn’t wait to go to school—to study math and science and someday become a scientist. Her mother, in a purple hijab, beamed beside her. They had fled unimaginable trauma only weeks earlier, and already they were dreaming about their American future.
That girl could one day help cure cancer. Her brother might start a company. Their parents could become the bedrock of a new community. They weren’t abstractions called “refugees”—they were our newest neighbors, living proof of what connection across difference can achieve.
What links those two moments—the poppy farmer in the Arghandab and the young girl at Fort Dix—is service. Not just military service, but the act of working alongside people unlike yourself toward a shared purpose. Service collapses distance. It creates understanding across difference.
This is what America needs most right now—not more appeals to “unity,” but opportunities to earn it. We are siloed by geography, class, and ideology—and social media algorithms only make it worse. Dialogue helps, but only shared work—real, side-by-side effort—can rebuild the trust we’ve lost.
That’s why we should create universal access to national service: a year-long opportunity for every young American. It could be a gap year before college or a first step after high school. Participants would receive a modest stipend, healthcare, and education benefits akin to the GI Bill. They’d serve away from home in teams mixing rural and urban Americans, red and blue states, different races, religions, and incomes—working on disaster relief, climate resilience, healthcare access, or community infrastructure. The specific work matters, but the mixing matters more.
Critics will say that we already have federal and nonprofit service programs—so why expand national service? Even at full capacity, programs like Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, while meaningful, have never reached 1 percent of young Americans—far too few to create a national impact. We should aim for at least 500,000 participants per cohort to make service a common American experience rather than a niche choice. That will require investment—perhaps $20–30 billion annually—and generous educational incentives. But consider the alternative: political paralysis, government shutdowns that cost the U.S. economy roughly $15 billion per week, rising extremism, and families divided by ideology. This isn’t solely an expense; it’s an investment in national unity.
The idea of national service has been discussed for decades, but now we have proof of concept. This summer, Maryland Governor Wes Moore celebrated nearly 500 recent high school graduates—the second class of participants—who completed service programs, more than double the first year’s cohort. It’s time to scale this nationwide.
That young girl I met at Fort Dix is now in middle school, living her part of the American dream. Her journey isn’t just about resettlement—it reminds us that service transforms both communities and those who serve.
On Veterans Day, we honor those who’ve served in uniform. This year, let’s honor what their service teaches us: that we are stronger when we work together across difference. Let’s give every young American that transformative opportunity—not because it’s easy, but because the unity and future of our democracy demand it.
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