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November 5, 2009
Exclusive: In Memoriam – Capt. Benjamin Sklaver: Defying Convention
Colonel Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.)
In early October, Capt. Benjamin Sklaver lost his life to a suicide bomber while on patrol near the Afghan-Pakistani border. A civil affairs officer attached to the storied U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, Capt. Sklaver’s job was local governance – those “people functions” that determine success or failure in any insurgency, but especially in Iraq or Afghanistan. A government losing control to insurgents first loses the everyday battles of governance, contests over basic resources like security, transportation or water.
Ben Sklaver’s specialty was water. During a 2007 deployment with his Reserve unit to Uganda, he became known to local children as “Moses Ben,” simply because he brought clean water to thousands of people. After his tour of duty was over, he returned stateside to set up a non-profit organization called the Clearwater Initiative. Its mission: funding projects that could help provide clean drinking water to people who otherwise had little reason to hope – either for water or much of a future.
Unlike other combat casualties, Capt. Sklaver’s death received a fair amount of national media attention, the most notable being Mike Barnicle’s compelling TIME magazine article. Barnicle wrote that this highly accomplished young man had “fought on behalf of a dangerously self-absorbed people back home and the politicians who represent them, many of whom are unable to see beyond the next election.”
Perhaps proving Barnicle’s point, I learned about Ben Sklaver only after receiving an alumni email from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, an elite Ivy League school where we each received our graduate degrees half a generation apart. (The Army sent me there en route to the West Point faculty, the equivalent of an athletic scholarship.) And that’s what you really need to know about Ben Sklaver as Veteran’s Day approaches: he was a charter member of this country’s best and brightest. The Fletcher alumni bulletin carrying news of Sklaver’s death proudly listed the achievements of other graduates who had written articles in the leading journals, the ones in line to be under-secretary of this or ambassador to that. So how was it that such a promising young man - “a future Senator” as one of his classmates described him to me – had sacrificed his life in a war? Hadn’t we out-sourced all that unpleasantness years ago to the Red States and the less-than-upwardly mobile?
Maybe. The New York Times, which practically invented elitism, recently documented how military service in the Ivy Leagues has now become an endangered species. “At Harvard and Yale there are so few R.O.T.C. students that on days they wear uniforms, they are mainly a curiosity. Their classmates can’t seem to conceive that a student at an elite college would be preparing to go to war.” The Times story ended by quoting one of the few ROTC cadets at Yale, “They’d see me in uniform, and ask, ‘Hey, are you in a play?’ ”
Ben Sklaver was made from sterner stuff, reinforced by the incomparable advantages of faith and family. The results: an indomitable spirit and outrageous sense of humor praised both by his rabbi and an Egyptian classmate. Among the advantages of being People of The Book: the moral clarity that understands why some things are worth fighting for and which rejects any contradiction between the warrior and the humanitarian. There is also the timeless teaching of Isaiah: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ Then I said: Here am I, send me.”
Defended by conscripted dollars if not draftees, middle-class Christian America often neglects that Old Testament wisdom as well as the example of a radical rabbi named Jesus who taught that the greatest among us must first be the servant of all. Those victories over self and the resulting willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the greater good are among the most troubling of our society’s steadily growing deficits.
But Capt. Benjamin Sklaver clearly deserves the farewell written by David, the warrior-poet, who concluded his most famous psalm with a timeless epitaph: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Col. Ken Allard (U.S Army, Ret.) is a former NBC News military analyst and the author of WARHEADS. Email: WARHEADS6@aol.com.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (1)
A beautiful memorial to a brave American.
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