Ideas worth dying for

New Year's Eve, 2009

New Year’s Eve, 2009, did not arrive with champagne or music. It arrived in Afghanistan with dust in my teeth and that thin metallic smell that follows a fresh wound. I was attached to the US Army Special Forces, and a night raid alongside the ANA Commandos went wrong. An Afghan soldier had been shot high in the thigh. People hear “thigh” and think it is survivable. They do not picture the artery that runs there, or how quickly a strong man can become a fading, gasping, rattling thing.

I remember my hands more than my thoughts. Pressure, reposition, pressure once more. Tourniquet. Blood reveals that time is truthful. Minutes stop being just an idea and start slipping away. I spoke to him in whatever scraps of language, tone, and presence I could find. Anything to keep him tethered to this side of midnight. His eyes kept searching my face as if I held an answer bigger than medicine: is this what it was for? At some point, his eyes faded to static. Medics took over with no more success than I had.

The search ceased. He bled out on me as the year changed. Somewhere else, people counted down together under pristine city lights and entered 2010 as if time itself was a promise. I entered it with a new weight inside my chest, the kind you cannot put down.

I completed three tours in Afghanistan. For a long time, I clung to a belief with the stubbornness of someone trying to understand what he has seen: that it was worth dying for. Not the war, not the chaos and mistakes, but a cause larger than the small self that only wishes to survive.

Country. Faith. Duty.

The conviction that a life can be offered if the offering is sincere.

Distance complicates that conviction without erasing it. “Worth dying for” is not just a slogan; it is a ledger. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, say the words over the original altar window in the Royal Memorial Chapel at Sandhurst. Noble words gather shadows when they are paid for in blood. The dead do not get to debate the meanings we assign to them. They go silent, and the living decide whether that silence will be honoured with purpose or buried under noise.

Noise is abundant now. We are urged, constantly, to regard the self as the supreme authority. Comfort becomes a principle. Commitment becomes conditional. In that atmosphere, country and faith do not disappear; they fade away. They turn into things you display when it benefits you, something you put down when it costs you.

That hollowness shows in our rituals. Watch the midnight New Year fireworks over London: a curated collage designed to include everyone and offend no one. It is not diversity that feels bleak; it is the absence of a core. Spectacle without belonging. Light without heat. A celebration that references everything but stands for nothing.

Perhaps that is why the conflict over Israel cuts so deeply. It forces old words back into our mouths: words like homeland, survival, covenant, and obligation. Israel reminds us that, for some, these are not just debates; they are questions of life and death.

So, what is worth dying for? Not the neat story we tell afterwards. Not the slogans that make sacrifice seem easy. What is worth dying for is what pulls you out of the orbit of self: the innocent you refuse to abandon, the truth you will not sell for applause, the faith that insists you are not the measure of all things, and the country that is more than policy. A shared vow that we will endure together.

If you know what is worth dying for, you also know what is worth fighting for. Usually, the fight is not a dramatic last stand but the steady discipline of living: honouring your word, sharing your burden, loving without promises, and building something durable enough to outlast the fireworks. It involves carrying the dead into the new year and refusing to let their silence become meaningless.

I regret nothing and everything.