Veterans Day Requiems for Our Fallen Warriors

Ron Capps, a former Army intelligence officer and crisis-scene diplomat, embraces fellow veterans with heartbreaking songs of loss and recovery.

This is an update of a tribute I wrote on Veterans Day 2022.

Veteran Ron Capps, doing his thing. (Courtesy Ron Capps)

Veterans Day honors all our fallen, but the costs over the past 20-plus years now have been borne mostly by those sent to battle Al Qaeda and ISIS or their affiliates across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Today we verge on another military adventure in Venezuela.

And our wounded veterans are still paying. In the first four months following Hamas‘ attack on Israel in Oct. 2022 for example, roughly 186 U.S. military personnel were injured or killed in the volatile region, nearly 70 percent due to traumatic brain injuries, according to the Pentagon. The stretchers and caskets are still coming home. The number of daily suicides by veterans is unspeakable, so I won’t repeat it here. The Semper Fi and America’s Fund, launched in 2003 by military spouses who understood the intense financial and psychological emergencies faced by the families of wounded veterans, is here to help. (If you want to do more than offer solemn respect to the fallen, send them money.)

Longtime SpyTalk readers, meanwhile, may recall my past tributes to Ron Capps, a CIA-trained Army intelligence officer and later crisis-scene diplomat with the State Department, who was inserted into the middle of some of the world’s worst catastrophes of the 1990s and beyond, from Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan to the civil wars and genocide raging across Central and East Africa.

“It just about broke him,” I wrote on Memorial Day 2022, “as have the repeated counterterror tours carried out by so many of our veterans, who are now struggling in unprecedented numbers with post-traumatic stress.”

But Ron is one of the lucky ones. He’s survived and flourished. Not only that, over the past dozen or so years since leaving government service he’s selflessly helped countless other veterans rebound. For starters, he founded the Veterans Writing Project, which encouraged and helped former warriors organize their experiences into publishable stories, books and scripts—which has had some major successes. Capps also returned to his youthful roots as a successful, pre-Army barroom singer-songwriter to craft beautiful odes to fellow war fighters passing through their own crises. Back in 2022, I featured Ron’s work and backstory on a weekly edition of the SpyTalk podcast. It remains so stirring I’m doing it again.

I hope you’ll visit the show. But before you go on this Veterans Day, I urge you listen the heart-breaking refrains of Ron Capp’s absolutely stunning This Time:

And you come home

With the smell of war still on your clothes

And the airport’s a freak show

And it’s hard to fake a smile.

You’re wearing your past,

In the ribbons there on your chest.

But they can smell the future on your breath.

It’s just a shot to calm your nerves.

And your little girl wants to know,

When she sits down for suppertime,

Is that the last time you’ll have to go?

Daddy, did you win the war this time?

In Trying to Catch Amnesia, he sings, “And when the walls close in, he’ll pray to St. Tequila.”

“I’m in prehab,” he writes in another lament, about spending afternoons drinking away the war in the local bar.

A couple years ago Ron and his wife Carole, a former public relations consultant who worked at the Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno, left D.C. for Maine, where they’re spreading their creative and loving wings into theater, more stories, more music. We should all be so full of luck-making pluck.

“There’s an angel here before me,” Ron sang at a low point in in Carry Me, “but I’m not ready.”

Neither are we, on yet another Veterans Day. We have miles to go before we can sleep.

Listen to the work, and learn more about Ron Capps, here.