How to Build Up Your Fortitude

A few weeks ago I read a book I got excited about sharing. It’s my Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude. I had the audio version from the library, which is excellent, because he reads it himself. But it made getting quotes difficult. So I ordered the hard copy and have been waiting for that to arrive (it was lost on delivery day once and had to be reordered—a first-world problem), and it just got here Friday.

Since I first heard Dan speak, when I was deciding who wouldget my vote in the primary, 2 ½ years ago, I recognized him as a good communicator. He’s clear, to the point, on target. And, a huge bonus—he’s cool in a way that connects with his generation, and mine. He’s within a year of my oldest son, Political Sphere, so he’s a millennial.

Dan, you’ll recall, is the guy with the eye patch. He was hit by an IED in Afghanistan in 2012, as a Navy SEAL. He stayed in the service and deployed twice more after that, and did a lot of training. But then, against his will, they decided a half-blind guy wasn’t suitable for service, a decision he’s still not happy about. But he went on to Harvard Kennedy School of Government for a master’s degree in Public Administration. He finished up in 2017, close to the time Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, his hometown, and he went to work mucking out houses. Also that fall, our previous Congressman Ted Poe announced his intention to retire. Over a weekend Dan and family thought it through, and, pretty much without financial resources, started running for US Congress, in Texas’s Congressional District 2. About 8 others thought that was a good idea, too, most of them better funded and better connected.

That first time I heard him speak, he said, among all those conservatives, we’re all saying the same things; we’re all going to vote pretty much the same way. The important thing is to inspire others to vote that way too. He was inspiring me to vote for him; I believed he could do it.

And I worked on his campaign, delivering yard signs, and got to talk with him in smaller house group Q&As a number of times. I became more and more impressed with the way he said things—and I am a collector of things well said.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect from his book. Maybe mostly the story about his SEAL team experience and the recovery after the IED. And maybe there would be some conservative politics in it. But the book is so much better than I expected.

The story is there—including the SEAL team experience. He tells about how, the first time he went through BUD/S, or “hell week,” the worst week of SEAL training, intended to weed out the weak—his leg broke, a stress fracture caused by the grueling training that’s beyond most human bodies’ ability to endure. That meant he had to rehabilitate for half a year, and then go through the whole ordeal again. Because he wasn’t going to quit. As he puts it, “There is no plan B.” And failure isn’t an option. So you do whatever it takes.

There’s almost no politics in the book. Although, if you think of politics as policy to implement principles, then there’s a fair amount of conservatism in there. But what the book really is is a guide for how to live your best life—a way to be the best version of you that you can be.

In the introduction, he’s talking about some of the cultural problems we’re facing, and how to fix them. He says,

We aren’t acting as a culture that is mature or enlightened or educated, we aren’t acting worthy of this beautiful country and political system that we inherited from our revolutionary ancestors. Rather, we don a mantle of fragility, of anger, of childishness, and are utterly shameless in doing so (p.9).

He has a message to the snowflake culture:

If you’re losing your cool, you are losing. If you are triggered, it is because you allowed someone else to dictate your emotional state. If you are outraged, it is because you lack discipline and self-control. These are personal defeats, not the fault of anyone else. And each defeat shapes who you are as a person, and in the collective sense, who we are as a people (p. 10).

The book is intended to help people develop the discipline and self-control to overcome the outrage culture. He states the book’s purpose this way:

This book is about actively hardening your mind so that you can be the person you think you should be. It is about identifying who that person is in the first place, and taking responsibility for the self-improvement required to become them. It is about learning what it means to never quit. It is about learning to take a joke and giving others some charity when they make a bad one. It is about learning what it means to never quit. It is about learning to take a joke and giving others some charity when they make a bad one. It is about the importance of building a society of iron-tough individuals who can think for themselves, take care of themselves, and recognize that a culture characterized by grit, discipline, and self-reliance is a culture that survives. A culture characterized by self-pity, indulgence, outrage, and resentment is a culture that falls apart. It really is that simple, and it is a truly existential choice (p.10).

Dan happens to be a good storyteller, with a good sense of humor—albeit somewhat dark, since that comes from the SEAL culture. (And, a warning for the very sensitive, there is some language in the book that is also part of SEAL culture.) For example, he starts out telling of the IED explosion by telling why the Taliban used that method:

Smart bombs aren’t cheap, and national security is an expensive pursuit. The Taliban spent about ten bucks, including the cost of labor and medical benefits.

To which he adds this footnote:

Note to the Fact Checkers: THIS IS A JOKE. Taliban don’t have health insurance.

When his buddies from the teams, Joe and Dave, were with him during his hospital recovery, they wasted no time before asking him, “So, Dan, we can start making fun of you for looking like a pirate for the rest of your life, right?” As he adds, “Never too early for the dark humor of the teams.”

He gives enough detail about the recovery—including the miracle that he regained his sight in his left eye—but he does it without any sense of self-pity. At all. Just gratitude. To doctors. To his wife, Tara, who was his fiancée at that time, and stuck with him through all the pain and irritability—including spending six fully conscious weeks post-eye-surgery lying flat on his stomach to prevent the retina from detaching and causing permanent blindness. And gratitude to the many good people in the military he had worked with—and particularly to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, or ended up with disabilities much greater than his.

He teaches at least one principle for developing your personal character, in each chapter. I’d have to say the book is part LoneSurvivor, and part Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. It’s a bit less esoteric than Peterson, which may be a good thing for some readers, but the depth is there. He quotes Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt, and mythology, and Star Wars, and a pretty wide range of sources—and seems equally at ease with them all.

Some of the key ideas are:

·         Emulating the right kinds of heroes.

·         Be all in; be flexible, but accept no plan B on your main goal.

·         Be still; learn self-control over your emotions.

·         Sweat the small stuff; pay attention to details.

·         Have the right sense of shame; hold yourself accountable.

·         Have a sense of duty; and do your duty.

·         Do something hard; challenge yourself.

And he’s got a good final chapter on why America is a country worth loving, protecting, and preserving. He’s not about blindly assuming all is well. But we need to see more than flaws in a country this good:

So what is the right story? Is it just blindly assuming that whatever our country does is inherently good and righteous? No, that isn’t what I am suggesting. Just because victimhood ideology is toxic does not mean we have never had victims. But we must tell the story of America in a way that squares our suffering and injustice within the American identity without holding it in contempt for that injustice (p. 230).

Then he gives examples.

There’s José de la Luz Sáenz, a schoolteacher from Cotulla, Texas, who was called up to fight abroad in WWI and served with honor, hoping to emulate George Washington. He later formed the League of United Latin American Citizens.

There’s Frederick Douglass, who called on Americans to live up to the principles in their founding documents, saying, “The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (p. 233).

There’s Martin Luther King, Jr., who faced true injustice, and stared it down, peacefully, until an otherwise righteous people recognized their wrong in subjecting people more civilized than they themselves were.

Dan Crenshaw rejects the Howard Zinn/Herbert Marcuse version of America. And with it the Ilhan Omar, Beto O-Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg disapproval of everything American from our founding to the present. Modern political “progressives” say,

“Give us power… and we will end human suffering. We will end failure.

But until we do, stay angry. Stay outraged.

Why is this the wrong approach? Here’s the real point:

It’s an approach that does more than diminish the country. Far worse, it diminishes people. That’s why you’ll never see a happy (or funny) social justice warrior: A system that falsely promises the end of suffering also strips individuals of the capacity to deal with it. It’s ontological malpractice (p. 240).

You don’t come out ahead by expecting someone else to end your suffering. It’s not good to make government into a god that makes such promises while taking away your confidence and ability to deal with and solve your own problems.

The better story to tell is a belief in self-reliance. If we are to reverse the current cultural trend,

We must decide that our happiness is ours to pursue, not given to us by a supposedly benevolent politician. We will decide that our story—despite all the suffering we may endure—is not the product of an external immovable force, but our own to contend with. We must decide that we will be empowered and in charge of our own destiny. We must decide to tell the story of America that embodies the founding ideals and gave us the miracle of opportunity that we have today. We must tell a story that we are proud of (p. 241).

Dan Crenshaw doesn’t set himself up as a hero. He sees himself as a more-or-less regular guy who is spending a lifetime working to be the best he can be. And he’s sharing what he knows, to guide others in that attempt at the “pursuit of happiness” and a meaningful life. Still, in today’s world, he does look pretty heroic by comparison to all but a select few.

I've had my yard sign up for a month already.

In our reading for church this week, we covered one of my favorite heroes. It’s a military hero in a time of unrest, who writes the purpose for their defensive war on a banner to remind the people. He writes, “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children” (Alma 46:12).  God has granted them the basis for their liberty, just as He has for us; evil power mongers are attempting to force them into subjugation, a parallel to what we are facing. It’s a cause worth the fight.

This man who inspires his people by clarifying their cause is named Captain Moroni—not the same Moroni depicted in the angel atop our temples, but an earlier person by the same name. Of Captain Moroni it was said,  

If all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men (Alma 48:17). 

I am considering applying these words to Dan Crenshaw as well. He warns in his book against making any particular person a hero, because every person is human and flawed. But you can look at the ideal version, the characteristics of the person that are worth emulating. It’s a practice George Washington began early in his life as well, to decide what kind of person to be, and to set out becoming such a person.

I pray that Rep. Dan Crenshaw may continue to be exemplary, like unto George Washington, who also proved himself in battle against tyranny before leading a righteous people in liberty. And I support him in his effort to share the message of how to develop yourself—how to live a life of Fortitude.

So I recommend the book—for young people who don’t yet know what kind of person to become, for adults who missed the teaching or need reminding, and for the rest of us who need a dose of inspiration to be better than we have been.