250 Years, and We Still Have to Mean It
By Keegan Evans
To this day, the sharp ring of a heavy bell jolts me with a very specific meaning: the heat of the Iraqi desert, the smell of the flightline, the additional sounds of a siren wailing from the squadron next door, and the adrenaline that drove straight through my heart as I pushed my legs across the concrete and the gravel and the pitted asphalt to the first metal step of the aircraft.
In the summer of 2006 my squadron flew daytime casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) out of Al Taqaddum, an airbase near Fallujah and Ramadi. When someone was hurt badly enough that moving them by ground was a death sentence, we flew to the point of injury. For a point of injury, we would bring a second AH-1 Cobra on top of our usual escort and defensive loadout because those zones were usually a dirt lot some Marines had hastily secured a few minutes earlier near where they had just been fighting.
On July 27th that year, five days after I turned twenty-six, I took my first mission as aircraft commander of a CASEVAC flight. The call sent us to Karma, a town northeast of Fallujah known for its concentration of enemy fighters. The Marine was grievously wounded, and I pushed the engines in and out of their warning bands the whole way home, spending the aircraft for minutes which might matter for the dying man, and it made no difference. The young Marine had been gone before we ever got him off the aircraft. The docs told me later he'd had no chance.
We flew that hard for everyone. Not just our own. The wounded we pulled out of those zones were Marines and soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and sometimes the same fighters who had been trying to kill us an hour earlier, and the bell sounded the same for all of them. I have written before about what it means to run just as hard for an enemy as for one of our own, and why I still believe we were right to.
Not every pilot ran the same way on every call. Some didn’t jump toward the door at the first sound of the bell, or they would settle for a jog instead of a sprint. They might rationalize that there were other parts of the startup sequence that took the same amount of time whether they ran or not (usually those happened because the other pilot got to the aircraft first…). Some would talk tough about who was worth the risk, and unless it was an American on the stretcher, they didn't want to put themselves or their crews on the line.
On a bad day, tired or wanting to get along with the crowd, I could give into that reasoning too. But it never sat right. I only ever felt like myself, wholly myself, when I poured everything I had into keeping another human alive. Same bell. Same sprint. Same pushing the aircraft to get a casualty to higher levels of care. We did not get to choose who was bleeding in the back. The effort was never a verdict on the person. It was a verdict on us.
That reflex was grounded in a belief that ran end to end through my life: moral, intellectual, spiritual, and Constitutional. The belief that the fundamental dignity of a person is not based on which side of a line they were born on or by how they live their life. It is the oldest American principle we have: that all people are created equal. A phrase so familiar it’s on t-shirts and bumper stickers and hats. A statement that has historically existed with intentional exclusions and unrecognized exceptions. A concept that has required hard work, discussion, additional legislation, and even civil war to strive toward. A vision under attack right now by a smaller, meaner idea: that what makes America great is finite, that there is only so much dignity and opportunity to go around, and that holding onto yours means denying someone else theirs. That is not greatness. It is a garrison mentality gilded as patriotism.
And so I choose to spend this July celebrating a 250-year-old promise, imperfect and always striving toward its ideal (just like we all are). The preamble to the Declaration of Independence makes a magnificent promise. But the last 250 years teaches us that making a promise is not the same as keeping one. I celebrate July 4th as the day we made the promise. And we can celebrate July 9th as a day we re-affirmed and improved on the promise, with teeth.
On a recent podcast appearance, Heather Cox Richardson made the case that if we were going to mark another significant event for national reflection, it should be the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9th, 1868. Her point is that the Fourteenth is the amendment that looked back at the Declaration’s promise of equality and said, we mean it. Equal protection of the laws. Due process. Birthright citizenship. It makes clear the underpinnings of American democracy: that everyone should be treated equally before the law, that everyone should have a real say in their government, and that the basic resources of a society should be within reach of ordinary people. And it made those guarantees the federal government’s business; no state could decide some of its people counted for less. The first promise declared the ideal. The second promise made it an enforceable commitment.
When I first took my oath to the constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment had been part of that Constitution for 130 years. I was swearing to defend it too. I took the uniform off in 2016, and thought the torch to actively “support and defend the Constitution” had been passed to the next generation serving. But my oath never expired. Fighting for it looks different now than it did from the cockpit or with a rifle, but my commitment does not change.
The oath changed venues, not substance. “Support and defend” stopped being about a warfighting and started being about every place I worked, because the same conviction was underneath it: that the promise has to be real for everyone it covers, or it isn't a promise at all.
At Intuit I supported transforming the culture to hybrid, flexible work after the pandemic, and the whole of it came down to whether the company leadership described in all-hands meetings was the one a frontline employee actually experienced. In my coaching work now it is often the same question inside a single leadership team: whether the values painted on the wall are the ones people actually live in the hallway, or whether they only apply to the people with the most power. Marines, tech, Euda. It has looked like three careers. It has been one act, holding a system to its promise that every person inside it counts.
And right now the promise is being contested again. The specific danger of this moment is not that Americans disagree. Disagreement is the engine of the whole system. The danger is the growing belief, on more than one side, that the other half of the country is not a rival to be argued with but an enemy to be defeated, that winning matters more than the rules we win under, and that the guardrails (the courts, free and fair elections, the peaceful handoff of power) are obstacles rather than the thing itself. That is the road away from our republic. The arc of this country has never bent toward its ideals on its own. It bends because people put their weight and reputation and lives behind them. And the question on the table as America turns 250 is the same one that was on the table in 1868: do we really mean it.
I have my answer, and I am spending my energy to make it real. I work with the Leadership Now Project and The Chamberlain Network, business leaders and veterans trying to build a durable, principled center, one that holds the line on the rule of law and the dignity of people without asking anyone to check their politics at the door. This is not a call to burn everything down. It is the opposite. It is a call to build, which is harder and less glamorous than blowing up, because building asks you to show up again and again, to vote, to organize, to sit on the school board or the city council, to keep showing up long after the fireworks are swept up. The oath does not demand a revolution. It asks for citizens who do not look away.
Scott Galloway said recently that democracy requires conversation, not just conviction. I would add that conversation requires the part we are worst at right now: listening to understand, not listening while we reload.
That is the country I want to leave my two kids who will inherit the results of whatever we decide, this year and beyond. Someday they will ask what I did when that most American promise was up for grabs again, and I would like my answer to match the one I gave at twenty-six in Al Taqaddum, when the bell rang and I ran as hard as I could for someone else’s life. I stood up for a country that promises all people are created equal – and means it.