The First Bible

On my eighteenth birthday, my older brother John handed me a small, worn pocket Bible. It was 160 years old. A Union soldier had carried it through the Civil War.

I held it and felt something I did not expect. Not history in the abstract. A person. A man who had folded this book into a coat pocket and carried it into the worst hours of his life, and who believed that faith and a set of values could hold him together when everything around him came apart.

That Bible started a collection that now runs past two hundred, carried by American soldiers on the front lines of every conflict from the Revolutionary War to today. Nearly every one has a name written inside. Some still hold service records tucked into the cover. Many are marked front to back: verses underlined, dates and prayers written in the margins in the soldier's own hand.

I did not set out to collect anything. I set out to understand something. What makes a person carry the weight for other people, in the hardest place a person can be, and keep carrying it? The answer is never in the equipment or the training. It is in what the person is made of, and what they decided to serve.

That is the whole argument of this collection, made in objects instead of words. You lead by what you are willing to carry.

I am going to tell these stories here, one at a time. One Bible. One soldier. One lesson worth keeping. This is where it starts, with the one my brother put in my hands.