There is almost no sensible reason why the various threads of my life should have led me there.
And yet, somehow, they did.
Yesterday, two submarines sat on the same pier in Norfolk, Virginia.
One was the USS New Jersey, one of the newest nuclear-powered attack submarines in the United States Navy.
The other was De Grasse, the newest nuclear-powered attack submarines in the French Navy.
For me, there was something almost impossible about seeing them there together.
I serve as a trustee of two nonprofit organizations that, on their face, have almost nothing to do with one another.
One is the USS New Jersey Commissioning Committee, which I joined to help bring the spirit and identity of New Jersey to a new American submarine.
The other is W3R, the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route, which preserves the story of the American and French armies that marched together toward Yorktown in 1781.
Submarines and Revolutionary War roads.
These things have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Except, apparently, they do.
Because 245 years ago today, on September 5, 1781, a French admiral named Comte François Joseph Paul de Grasse fought the British fleet off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
Most Americans have never heard his name.
They should.
De Grasse’s victory prevented the British Navy from relieving or evacuating Cornwallis at Yorktown. Washington and Rochambeau could close the trap on land because de Grasse had closed it at sea.
There is a reasonable argument that American independence turned on what happened in those waters.
And now the French Navy has a brand-new nuclear attack submarine named De Grasse.
This year also happens to be the 400th anniversary of the French Navy. And the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of a statue of Admiral de Grasse at Cape Henry, in Virginia.
So the French brought De Grasse to Virginia.
It was impossible not to recognized the symbolism:
Remember who stood with us. Be ready to stand with them.
I spoke with their operations officer. Their sonar technician who was on watch at the guard shack. Their baker, boulanger, cooking the evening meal. A chief maintaining the trim.
Sailors doing what sailors do.
And I thanked each of them.
Not ceremonially. I wanted them to understand why the name of their submarine matters to an American.
Their admiral – Comte de Grasse – came here when we desperately needed him. French sailors fought and died in the waters outside the Chesapeake. They did not win the American Revolution alone, of course. But without them, the story may have ended very differently.
Standing aboard that submarine, two worlds that had wandered separately through my life suddenly collided.
My old life as a submariner.
My newer life trying to understand the American story.
France and America.
1781 and 2026.
Service then and service now.
Maybe that is what nations are supposed to remember about one another.
Not that our histories are identical. They aren’t. They are complicated, contradictory and sometimes deeply uncomfortable.
France has Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
America has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Neither nation has ever perfectly lived up to those words.
Perhaps the words are important precisely because we haven’t lived up to them yet
When worlds meet, I always reach back to something Benito Juárez said in 1867, after Mexico had survived the French intervention:
Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.
Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.
There is something wonderfully inconvenient about that quotation appearing in this story. A Mexican, speaking after resisting French power, reminds us that no country owns liberty. No nation is permanently the hero of history.
The principle has to be larger than the tribe.
Maybe someday we will not need submarines prowling silently beneath the oceans to defend these things.
I hope so.
I don’t believe violence redeems us. But I do believe that liberty requires people willing to defend it—and that peace depends, at least partly, upon the knowledge that we will defend one another.
And maybe the universe doesn’t actually conspire with us.
Maybe our lives simply fill with threads, and every once in a while we are lucky enough to see them cross.
Many years ago, I left the submarine life a pursued a different path.
A Revolutionary War road outside my front door somehow led me back down a submarine hatch.
Not an American submarine.
A French one.
Named for a man whose victory helped make my country possible.
I got to say merci.
The quest for liberty is still ongoing. 🗽🇺🇸🇫🇷🦅🐓
