Each Memorial Day, we come face-to-face with the human cost of freedom. While we observe the holiday to honor our war dead – not all U.S. veterans – it is nonetheless an especially significant day to our surviving veterans. They have learned the hard way, having lost friends in battle, that honoring the fallen is more than just a platitude.

Veterans know better than most that the fallen young we honor each Memorial Day are not just names on a wall. They are not an abstraction. They were real people, with their own hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Many of them dropped those plans to answer the call and never got the chance to pick them back up.

The wartime loss of our best young men and women leaves gaping holes in families and communities across the nation. In a tragic reversal of the natural order, it compels mothers and fathers to bury their sons and daughters, and young children to venerate mythical parents they never knew.

Returning veterans shoulder the burden too. They visit with the spouses, children, siblings, parents, and friends of their fallen brothers and sisters in arms. After their service, they find that they must forge a new life and identity, shorn of the mission and comradery that gave them purpose, all while grieving the loss of too many close friends whose lives were cut short.

While some veterans struggle to find their place in life after combat, most find that the personal grit forged through their wartime experience serves them equally well in civilian pursuits. In George Washington’s farewell address to the Continental Army, he urged veterans of the American Revolution to “prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens, than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.” Today’s veterans continue to live up to that charge.

Yet even decades later, as veterans reap the hard-won blessings afforded by our great country, their minds endlessly return to the young dead who never got that chance. The chance to marry that special someone. To buy that first home. To bring those wonderful children into the world. To experience the satisfaction of a rewarding career. To reach their golden years, surrounded by friends and family, secure in the knowledge that they preserved the blessings of peace for themselves and their posterity.

As they shoulder these burdens, veterans must also find the balance between fostering appreciation of the honorable sacrifices made for our great country and maintaining their own personal code of integrity. In one of Shakespeare’s tragic dramas, Roman general Coriolanus disappoints the crowd while seeking public office by refusing to show his war wounds, finding it beneath his dignity. While angst over participation in this ancient custom may seem arcane to most, it is a dilemma familiar to many veterans.

Stories of sacrifice by our veterans and their fallen friends can move later generations to a deeper appreciation of the greatness of our country. The lived experience of survivors can also correct misperceptions that war veterans are too scarred to be social assets, needing instead to be pacified with government benefits and dismissed from the larger community.

But many veterans are quiet professionals, wary of contributing to these important narratives for fear of profiting from the sacred sacrifices of their brothers and sisters. Especially in today’s culture of victimhood, where success often depends on one’s ability to tell a compelling story of experiencing prejudice or adversity, veterans fear sullying noble service by seeming to seek personal advancement or victim-class status, even when their motives are pure.

That partly explains why you do not hear veterans brag about their wartime adventures or complain about their struggles. They are far more likely to worry about overstating their service and sacrifice. When asked about it, many are quick to volunteer that they didn’t do anything special. It is a way of preempting gratitude they have never felt comfortable accepting, especially when friends of theirs didn’t make it home.

What do we owe our fallen this Memorial Day? Remembrance, of course. Yet we can also strive to be a nation deserving of the veterans who buried our fallen. A country that believes in our veterans, that knows they have important contributions to make on the home front, and maintains its appreciation, even when it is never asked for.

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Aaron Rice serves as the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, which brings constitutional litigation on behalf of Mississippians whose rights have been threatened by government action, and has won major victories for the personal, economic, and religious liberty of Mississippians. Prior to his legal career, Aaron served in the Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq, where he received the Purple Heart for sustaining combat injuries that resulted in the loss of his left leg below the knee. He is also a Truman Scholar, a recipient of the Buckley Award in recognition for his leadership in the conservative movement, and has been named one of Mississippi's Top 50 Most Influential leaders.

Did you know that in Mississippi – the state that led the charge to overturn Roe v. Wade – elective abortions are both illegal and a constitutional right at the same time?

If that sounds confusing to you, it should. That’s why the Mississippi Justice Institute recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of pro-life physicians seeking to end the court-imposed, elective abortion policy in our state.

So, how did we get here?

The people of Mississippi have long sought to protect the lives of unborn children. However, in 1973, those efforts came to a near halt following the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous opinion in Roe v. Wade, which held that abortion was a right protected by the U.S. Constitution.

In 1986, several obstetrician-gynecologists and abortion clinics filed a lawsuit claiming that a Mississippi parental consent abortion statute violated the federal constitutional rights of minors to seek an abortion. That lawsuit ultimately failed, with the federal courts finding in 1992 that Mississippi’s parental consent law did not violate the federal standard for abortion regulations announced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

After that lawsuit failed, Pro-Choice Mississippi, an abortion advocacy group, and some of the same obstetrician-gynecologists and abortion clinics filed a new lawsuit in state court in 1994. This time, they did not argue that the parental consent law violated the federal constitutional right to seek an abortion. Rather, they argued that the Mississippi Constitution guaranteed a right to seek an abortion and that Mississippi’s parental consent law violated this state constitutional right.

Every state has its own constitution. While state constitutions cannot restrict rights secured by the federal Constitution, they can offer greater protection of rights than that afforded under the U.S. Constitution. So abortion advocates sought protection under the Mississippi Constitution for conduct that the federal courts had determined was not protected by the U.S. Constitution.

In 1998, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled on the state court lawsuit in Pro-Choice Mississippi v. Fordice. Relying heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings and reasoning in Roe and Casey, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that the Mississippi Constitution – like the U.S. Constitution – did protect a right to seek an abortion.

As we all know, the U.S. Supreme Court recently handed down the Dobbs opinion which overruled Roe and Casey and returned control over abortion policy from the federal courts back to the states, where it rightly belongs. After the Dobbs decision, Mississippi enacted a law prohibiting abortion except in cases where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape.

But what about the Fordice opinion? Because it relied so heavily on Roe and Casey – cases which the U.S. Supreme Court has now said were “egregiously wrong” – the rationale for the supposed state constitutional right to abortion appears now to be invalid. But the Mississippi Supreme Court has not yet had the opportunity to overrule its opinion in Fordice. So, as of today, elective abortions in Mississippi seem to be both statutorily illegal and constitutionally protected at the same time.

To make things worse, this legal uncertainty has placed physicians in Mississippi in an impossible “Catch-22.” Several medical societies and board certification authorities have issued guidelines suggesting that it is unethical, and potentially punishable by the government, for physicians who oppose elective abortion to refuse to provide or refer patients to other providers for lawful, elective abortions. But are elective abortions “lawful” in Mississippi? That depends on whether you are looking at Mississippi’s elective abortion ban or the Mississippi Supreme Court’s opinion in Fordice.

Due to this legal uncertainty, physicians in Mississippi necessarily have to guess as to the legality of their actions involving elective abortion, and no matter which guesses they make, they could be punished for guessing wrong. That’s why the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists partnered with the Mississippi Justice Institute to file a lawsuit seeking to clarify that abortion is not protected by the Mississippi Constitution.

In Dobbs, Mississippi secured a major victory for human rights and the rule of law. Now it’s time to finish the job and put an end to the judicially imposed, elective abortion policy in the state that took down Roe.

Aaron Rice is the director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a non-profit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Andy Taggart is a founding partner of Taggart, Rimes & Wiggins, PLLC, and a volunteer attorney with the Mississippi Justice Institute.

The Mississippi Justice Institute (MJI) filed a lawsuit on Monday that seeks to establish that the Mississippi Constitution does not protect the right to abortion. That question has come into sharp focus since July 7, 2022, when the state enacted a ban on elective abortions.

Here’s what you need to know about the suit, filed against state medical officials on behalf of the American Association of Pro-Life Physicians (AAPLOG), which is represented by MJI

1. Whether Abortion is a Constitutional Right Has Not Been Fully Settled.

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling Roe v. Wade, which held that the U.S. Constitution protected a right to seek an abortion, and returned control of abortion policy from federal courts back to the states. But a similar opinion by the Mississippi Supreme Court, named Pro-Choice Mississippi v. Fordice, still holds that abortion is a right protected by the Mississippi Constitution.

Every state has its own constitution. While state constitutions cannot restrict rights secured by the federal Constitution, they can offer greater protection of rights than that afforded under the U.S. Constitution.

Because the Fordice opinion relied heavily on Roe and Casey – cases which the U.S. Supreme Court has now said were “egregiously wrong” – the rationale for the supposed state constitutional right to abortion appears now to be invalid. But the Mississippi Supreme Court has not yet had the opportunity to overrule its opinion in Fordice. So, as of today, elective abortions in Mississippi seem to be both statutorily illegal and constitutionally protected at the same time.

The lawsuit filed by MJI seeks to clarify this legal uncertainty and establish that abortion is not protected by the Mississippi Constitution and that the state’s elective abortion ban is valid.

2. The Validity of Mississippi’s Elective Abortion Ban is Uncertain.

Mississippi’s elective abortion ban conflicts with the Mississippi Supreme Court’s opinion in Fordice and has already been subject to a state constitutional challenge by an abortion clinic. After failing to secure the right to continue performing abortions while that lawsuit was pending, the abortion clinic abandoned its suit and moved to another state. However, until the Fordice opinion is overruled or recognized as no longer good law, Mississippi’s elective abortion ban will remain vulnerable to legal challenges.

3. Pro-Life Physicians Are Being Pressured to Violate their Conscience.

AAPLOG is the largest organization of pro-life obstetrician-gynecologists in the world. AAPLOG includes obstetrician-gynecologists and other physicians, with over 6,000 medical professionals nationwide. AAPLOG members oppose elective abortion and are committed to the care and well-being of their patients including both pregnant women and their unborn children.

AAPLOG filed suit to defend the conscience rights of its members in Mississippi. Many professional medical associations have sought for years to advocate for pro-abortion political positions, rather than focusing on their missions of upholding medical standards. Even worse, those medical organizations have continuously sought to violate the conscience rights of pro-life physicians by forcing them to provide or refer patients for elective abortions. Several of those organizations have issued guidelines suggesting that it is unethical, and potentially punishable by the government, for physicians who oppose elective abortion to refuse to provide or refer patients to other providers for lawful, elective abortions.

By establishing that Mississippi’s elective abortion ban is constitutional, AAPLOG hopes to finally put an end to those intimidation tactics and to defend the right to life in Mississippi.

4. If Successful, the Lawsuit Would End Court-Imposed, Elective Abortion Policy in Mississippi.

The people of Mississippi have long sought to protect the lives of unborn children. However, in 1973, those efforts came to a near halt following the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous opinion in Roe v. Wade.

For 49 years, abortion policy was removed from the democratic process and decided by federal courts. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has returned control over abortion policy back to the states, where it rightly belongs. But Mississippi’s own courts have not yet had the chance to similarly relinquish control over abortion policy. If the lawsuit is successful, Mississippi’s courts will now recognize that abortion policy is for the people of Mississippi to decide, not the state’s judges.

Mississippi has led the charge to protect life, and with this lawsuit, Mississippi will continue to lead the way.

The Mississippi Justice Institute is a non-profit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. It defends the personal, economic, and religious liberty of Mississippians in court to ensure that all forms of government are limited to their essential responsibilities as provided by the Constitution and to foster freedom and prosperity in the state.

For the first time in twenty years, Americans will commemorate Memorial Day this year in peacetime, and in the shadow of the two longest wars in U.S. history. As we honor and remember those from all of our wars who did not make it home, we should also view those veterans who did in an accurate light.

For many veterans, Memorial Day is a time of mourning that brings difficult memories of losing friends. It can bring feelings of guilt for surviving when those friends did not. It can even bring reminders of other painful events experienced on the battlefield.

While they have endured physical and emotional suffering, we should recognize our veterans not just for the burdens of the fight, but for having emerged from it even stronger. They are warriors, not hapless victims.

After I lost friends in Iraq and was injured there, people often told me things like: “If it was going to happen, it couldn’t have happened to a better person. You had the strength to overcome it.” This appears to be the conventional wisdom about trauma: that it is almost always harmful to a person and usually produces lifelong misery and maladjustment, but that a brave few are naturally endowed with enough resilience to face life-altering adversity and overcome it. Hollywood, politicians, and the media fuel this stereotype, often portraying veterans as fragile, psychologically damaged victims.

But I see it differently. Retired four-star general and former secretary of defense James Mattis does too. “There is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are somehow damaged goods,” said General Mattis, speaking at the Marine Memorial Foundation in 2014. "I don't buy it."

To be clear, many veterans have indeed been damaged by war. Some are even at risk of homelessness or suicide. They deserve the support and care of a grateful nation. But the veteran-as-victim trope portrays veterans as fragile and deserving of pity, which is not how veterans feel – even those struggling with the physical and mental wounds of war.

Despite the indisputable grief and personal loss experienced by many veterans, most return home and build a new life – a life with a noble purpose that would honor the sacrifices of their fellow service members who did not get that chance. Their experience points to a different conclusion: that human beings are naturally resilient.

Most of us grow from losses and find meaning in them. Everyone talks about post-traumatic stress, which of course is very real and difficult. But, as General Mattis reminded us, “there is also something called post-traumatic growth, where you come out of a situation like [combat] and you actually feel kinder toward your fellow man and fellow woman; that you are actually a better husband, father; you actually have a closer relationship with your God.” While stress after combat or any traumatic event is inevitable, it can be the precursor to growth. Overall, “you come back from war stronger and more sure of who you are,” Mattis said.

Many of us fear we could never overcome tragedy because we would never choose it willingly. But when the illusion of choice is taken away, we find that we can not only survive it but even grow from it because that is our only path forward. And human beings are wired to survive and move forward.

General Mattis has a theory about why so many want to paint veterans as victims. “While victimhood in America is exalted, I don't think our veterans should join those ranks,” he said. Given the coveted status

of victimhood today, it is no surprise that well-meaning people would seek to bestow that special status upon veterans. But our veterans want no pity. And the truth is that it would only hold them back. They already have the growth and meaning that comes from serving a noble cause and overcoming real tragedy. They know that seeking pity, from themselves or others, would only hinder their ability to succeed in their new life missions.

This Op/Ed was published in the Clarion-Ledger on May 29.

Aaron Rice is an Iraq War veteran and a Purple Heart recipient. He is also the director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a nonprofit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

When our clients' constitutional rights are being violated and the political branches of government refuse to act, we take their fight to the courts. And we come to win.

In Liberty,

Aaron Rice
Director, Mississippi justice Institute

We did it! The Mississippi Justice Institute (MJI) just stopped the Biden Administration’s private employer vaccine mandate in its tracks. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted the mandate, finding that there is "cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate."

MJI represents Gulf Coast Restaurant Group (GCRG) in the lawsuit challenging the mandate. GCRG is the corporate family that owns several Mississippi restaurants, including Half Shell Oyster House and the Rack House. GCRG, which is already struggling with staffing shortages in its restaurants, challenged the mandate in court because it will encourage even more of its employees to quit their jobs and could even make it difficult to keep many of its restaurants open.

Private employers in Louisiana and Texas have also joined the suit, as well as the Attorneys General of those states. The State of Mississippi is represented by Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

The federal vaccine mandate for private employers requires companies with over 100 employees to force their employees to be vaccinated, or be subject to weekly testing (at the employee’s expense) and constant mask wearing – on pain of losing their job.

While this halt to the federal vaccine mandate is only a temporary measure, it is a crucial first round victory. It signals that the courts understand the serious and myriad legal problems with this mandate, and are willing to hold the federal government to its constitutionally limited role.

If you don’t own a business that is subject to the federal vaccine mandate, or work for one that is, should you care about the legal fight to put a stop to it? Absolutely, for several reasons.

It’s never a good idea to let the federal government infringe on people’s personal liberties to force them to do what the government thinks is best for them. Not only does that make us less free, it often backfires. Encouraging voluntary vaccination is the best approach to foster greater participation and trust.

Additionally, if we stay quiet when the federal government exceed its constitutionally authorized power just because it doesn’t personally affect us, we have no way stop the federal government from overreaching when what it’s doing does personally affect us.

And finally, the federal vaccine mandate will affect all of us, whether or not it applies to our businesses or employers. The labor market is as tight as most businesses have ever seen it. The supply chain is riddled with delays. The last thing the economy needs is any more major disruptions, like thousands more employees quitting their jobs over incredibly intrusive medical mandates.

Gulf Coast Restaurant Group encourages its employees to get vaccinated. It even offers a $100 reward to every employee who does. While GCRG is proud of its efforts to encourage employee vaccination, it is equally proud to stand up for the rights of Mississippi businesses to operate without burdensome and unconstitutional federal regulations that prevent them from retaining their employees and adequately serving their customers. And MJI is proud to represent them in that fight.

With your continued support, we hope to keep fighting for Mississippians’ constitutional rights for many more years to come.

In Liberty,

Aaron Rice

Director, Mississippi Justice Institute

“Flatten the curve” is a phrase that Americans who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic will never forget. Its arrival in our collective lexicon marked the moment that our daily lives were dramatically changed for months on end. As COVID patients overwhelmed our hospitals, the goal was to lessen the strain by slowing transmission of the virus to levels that hospitals could handle. Those efforts were not enough, so we were forced to face the virus without enough hospital beds and medical personal to treat the sickest among us. 

As we appear to be pulling out of the most recent Delta variant, it’s worth asking: why did it take so little to overwhelm Mississippi’s healthcare system to begin with?   

Like most public policy issues, there isn’t just one answer to that question. But there is one answer that stands out as the most obvious and easily fixable one: our state’s “Certificate of Need” (CON) laws.   

After all of the efforts to conserve and increase the number of hospital beds – going so far as to set up temporary tent hospitals – would you believe that Mississippi went into the pandemic with a policy of intentionally limiting the number of hospital beds in our state? Shockingly, we did. 

Even more shocking are the problems that CON laws were originally designed to solve: a facepalm-worthy fear of too much investment in the healthcare sector. The idea was that competition might lead health care businesses to build too many facilities, and that those facilities would be too large and too fancy, and then patients would receive subpar care and be overcharged for that care to cover the extravagance. Never mind that in every other industry competition increases quality, lowers prices, and spurs innovation.  

Just describing the way that CON laws actually work makes it easy to see what is really behind them: protecting established businesses from competition with newcomers. First, a would-be healthcare startup (or even an existing hospital that just wants to add more hospital beds or medical equipment) must complete an application to try to prove to the state government that there is a need for the new facility, beds, equipment, or services.  The fees for filing that application can be as high as $25,000, while the cost of paying the lawyers and consultants needed far exceed that amount. The application can take months to complete and years to go through the approval process. 

Once the application has been filed, the applicant’s competitors get to take them to court in an effort to prove that the new facility, beds, equipment, or services are not needed, and that the current market participants have patients taken care of just fine, thank you very much.   

After all of that time, money, and effort, the application can easily be denied, making all of it a waste. It’s not exactly a business-friendly system, to say the least.   

So how did having CON laws work out for Mississippi during the pandemic? According to the Reason Foundation, states with CON laws have exceeded 70 percent of their ICU capacity for an average of 14.99 days per month during the pandemic, while states without CON laws have done so for only 8.65 days per month. Cutting the length of our hospital bed shortages nearly in half during the pandemic likely would have saved lives and spared us from a lot of economic pain.   

Mississippi’s CON laws made the pandemic more difficult, but they will continue to lower the quality of our health care, increase the cost of health care, and reduce our access to care well beyond the pandemic. This legislative session, Mississippi should join the twelve other states that have repealed their CON laws and be done with it.   

Aaron Rice is the Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a nonprofit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. 

Happy Constitution Day! As we celebrate one of America’s founding documents, it’s worth asking: what made America so great? 

When we declared our independence in 1776, America was just a fledgling experiment in self-government which the rest of the world expected to fail miserably. All of the wealth and power was in the Old World, with its palaces, empires, and powdered wig-wearing aristocrats. America was considered the boondocks, full of log cabins and fur cap-wearing farmers, trappers, and frontiersmen.

A few years later, America had fielded a Continental Army that defeated the largest military power in world history, and had become the freest and most prosperous country in the world. 

America became great because the Constitution limited the power of government and empowered individuals to lead their lives as they saw fit. The framers of the Constitution did not know what America would look like 230 years in the future. But they knew they were tired of being subject to the whims of a king. They carefully constructed a government that had just enough power to impose civil order, protect citizens from foreign invaders, and secure individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not enough power to violate those rights itself. To achieve this, the framers confined the powers of the federal government to those specifically listed in the Constitution and divided that power among three branches of government.

The framers also took a belt-and-suspenders approach to protecting the rights of the people. They added a Bill of Rights to the Constitution to ensure that certain important rights were never violated, even though the framers themselves said that the Constitution had not granted the federal government the power to violate those rights to begin with. Additional amendments were later added to the Constitution to extend its protection of rights to all people, regardless of race or gender, and to keep state and local governments from violating the people’s rights.

If you don’t recognize this strictly limited government, you would be forgiven. Today, politicians say they can do just about anything they want, except what is explicitly forbidden by the Bill of Rights, and even that is up for debate. When asked where the Constitution authorized a proposed law, one congressman admitted, “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this to be honest.” 

The rest of Congress appears to feel the same way. Every detail of our lives is subjected to government rules. The Federal Register, which contains all proposed and final regulations issued by federal agencies, has published over 3.2 million pages. If it were printed and stacked, it would be taller than the Washington Monument. This does not take into account all the laws passed by Congress, or by state and local governments. 

Because of all these rules, the cost of doing business in America is staggering, and startups and small businesses are at a competitive disadvantage to big businesses that can easily afford it. Those large companies can also afford to pay lobbyists to convince lawmakers to pass even more laws that keep new competitors at bay. All the while, countless Americans are prevented from pursuing their version of the American Dream.

Where did we go wrong? The framers envisioned the judiciary as the guardians of individual rights. But over time, the courts have become more interested in picking and choosing which rights to protect or neglect. In the process, they have invented government powers that do not exist. The result is that our government is far more powerful than the founders ever intended. You may have heard the term “activist judges.” We certainly don’t need those. But we do need an engaged judiciary that takes seriously its role in the system of checks and balances so carefully designed by the framers.

The good news is that we can all play a part in restoring the American vision. Courts will only take our constitutional rights seriously if we do. We need citizens who are willing to stand up for their rights, and attorneys who are willing to advocate for those people, simply because it is the right thing to do. At the Mississippi Justice Institute, we have made that our mission.

There is only one moment that has been forever seared into the collective memory of living Americans: the horrific terrorist attacks on our homeland twenty years ago on September 11, 2001.

We all know exactly where we were that day. We remember the feelings of confusion as the initial reports came in. The horror of watching fellow Americans jump to their deaths and the towers collapse. The anger at realizing that we were watching an intentional attack. The fear of what would come next. The acts of heroism we witnessed. The unity that followed. The resolve to prevail. The vows to never forget.

If we had known on September 11th that America would not suffer another terrorist attack during the next twenty years, we would have been relieved and even overjoyed. It’s easy to forget that now. Sometime during the past ten or fifteen years, the fear of another major terrorist attack receded. It wasn’t something that average Americans worried about at all. But twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the single biggest fear gripping America was the fear of another large-scale terrorist attack.

We saw daily warnings and color-coded terrorist threat advisories on our televisions. We worried about how easy it would be for a lone terrorist to detonate a dirty bomb in a crowded metropolitan area. We worried that attacks on our infrastructure could cripple us. We worried about becoming the next victim of terrorism anytime we boarded planes, trains, or even buses. We worried that every crowded sporting event might become a massacre.

For the past two decades, none of that has come to pass. Instead, thousands of our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters fought the enemy overseas and prevented the fight from coming here. While most Americans returned to their normal lives after the shock of 9/11 wore off, our veterans paid the cost for that normalcy for the next two decades. Nearly 2,500 American veterans were killed in Afghanistan. Hundreds more were injured, and countless others still carry the hidden wounds of war.

Unlike many of America’s past wars, the war in Afghanistan was not supported by a military draft. The soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought in Afghanistan were part of an all-volunteer force. Many of those veterans dropped their life plans and enlisted in the military after 9/11 specifically so they could join the fight to defend our nation, our values, and our way of life. They did this even though nobody asked them to and despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of their colleagues and peers did not.

Americans are blessed to have a unique generation of volunteer veterans in our families, communities, and workplaces. As we mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and take stock of the past two decades, we should be sure to honor their sacrifices.   

Aaron Rice is an Iraq War veteran and a Purple Heart recipient. He is also the director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a nonprofit, constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.