How An Oath I Took 47 Years Ago Led Me to Dulles Airport

By Cal Hickey

 

Nearly forty-seven years ago I raised my right hand and solemnly swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and that I would “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Throughout my 30-year Air Force career, wherever we lived I kept a framed copy of that oath on the wall in a place where I would be sure to see it everyday. I did this to constantly keep in mind why I was serving my country and to what I owed my singular allegiance. 

Seventeen years after retiring, I still have that framed copy on the wall of my study and feel myself no less bound to that solemn oath.

Because of this oath, last Sunday afternoon I found myself doing something I had never done before in my entire life of nearly 70 years. I accompanied my daughter to Dulles International Airport to participate in a peaceful protest against President Trump’s recent executive order restricting entry of legal residents, immigrants, and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations.

We spent two hours holding up signs, chanting and singing with hundreds of other people equally appalled by the injustice and national self-destructiveness of President Trump’s order. The company of people that represented a true cross section of American society, and not a few veterans, buoyed our spirits. Most heartwarming among them was Hamza, an Iraqi Kurd who came to the United States in 2002, became a citizen, joined our military and served as an interpreter in Iraq.  

Hamza, a Muslim from northern Iraq, and I, an Evangelical Christian who traces much of his roots back to Irish immigrants of the 1840s, found an instant bond of camaraderie as vets, and as vets do we soon fell into swapping “war stories.” Our bond wasn’t a matter of our ethnicity or religion, we were fellow Americans who’d honorably served our country, and that was all that mattered.

Later, reflecting on my chance ten-minute visit with Hamza, it came back to me that we’d both raised our right hands and taken the same solemn oath. We took an oath to a document, not to a political party, not to an institution, and certainly not to a person—especially a person with so little evident knowledge of and regard for the Constitution as President Trump. We served because we both believed so fervently in what that document says about the dignity and worth of the individual. 

We went to Dulles International Airport to demonstrate because we STILL believe in that document.

 

Colonel Hickey served a 30-year career in the Regular and Reserve components of the U.S. Air Force. For the majority of his career Colonel Hickey was involved in targeting, the geospatial sciences, weapons and weapon system effectiveness modeling, and operational planning.