People who have never lived through a catastrophe love to ask why America spends billions of dollars building giant nuclear aircraft carriers. Tell them to ask the mothers of Banda Aceh, Indonesia what they saw on the ocean horizon in January 2005. When the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than two hundred thousand people, the entire coast of Sumatra was erased. Every bridge, road, and water pipe was gone. Tens of thousands of children were dying of thirst in the mud, and no truck on earth could reach them. Two thousand miles away in Hong Kong, the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was on holiday port call. Within hours of the news, young American sailors walked out of restaurants and hotels, left their vacation behind, ran back up the gangway, and pushed the ship's two nuclear reactors to flank speed. When the Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor off the shattered coast of Aceh, it did not launch a single fighter jet. Instead, the American sailors turned their nuclear warship into the largest floating water factory on earth. Using the ship's four massive steam distillation plants, the crew purified nearly 100,000 gallons of fresh drinking water from the sea every single day. For weeks without sleep, young sailors stood on the hangar deck filling five-gallon plastic jugs by hand, while seventeen Seahawk helicopters flew nonstop from sunrise to sunset. They flew more than 1,500 missions into jungle clearings, delivering over 400,000 gallons of pure water and nearly six million pounds of food and medicine to people of a different faith who had been taught for years to fear the United States. America did not ask for one barrel of oil or one dollar in return. When the local hospitals were running again, the giant gray ship quietly raised its anchor and sailed away. A small mind looks at an American aircraft carrier and sees only a weapon. A survivor looks at that flat gray deck and sees five thousand young Americans bringing water from the sea.

I mean, no matter how you look at it, Jews, Africans, Arabs, Asians, South Americans, practically everyone on this planet harbors deep resentment and even murderous hatred toward Europeans. And yet Europeans are just sitting there, completely relaxed, saying, "Sure, everyone, come on into our countries!" I seriously don't understand it. Have they never studied history??? What did they think was going to happen? Did they honestly expect people to burst into tears, fall to their knees, and say, "You were so kind to us poor people! What wonderful people you are! We will obey you for the rest of our lives!"? Europe obviously needs to build walls about 10,000 meters high to keep the rest of the world out. How on earth did they lose the ability to understand something so obvious????

People know the U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan came to Japan during Operation Tomodachi in March 2011. Almost nobody knows what happened at the bottom of the freezing black harbor in Miyako and Hachinohe. After the tsunami, the ports of northern Japan were choked with sunken fishing trawlers, crushed cars, and jagged steel. Heating oil tankers could not dock. In the snow on shore, survivors were freezing in the dark. The U.S. Navy sent the salvage ship USNS Safeguard and the divers of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One. The water temperature was thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. It was black with spilled fuel oil and toxic mud. Visibility under the surface was zero inches. In my country, entering pitch-black water full of twisted iron in winter is a death sentence. Those American divers strapped on forty pounds of lead, stepped off the platform, and worked entirely by touch in the dark. With numb hands, they rigged heavy steel chains around sunken hulls and ripped open a shipping lane so Japanese fuel ships could bring heat back to the coast. When elderly fishermen on the pier brought pots of hot soup to thank them, the American sailors bowed and refused to take a single spoonful. Their commander had given one strict order before they stepped ashore: not one calorie of Japanese food or water was to be taken from the survivors. The Americans ate cold rations on their ship and jumped back into the icy water at dawn. Strength is clearing a wrecked harbor in the dark. Honor is refusing a hot meal when your friend is hungry.

Some people think the brotherhood between the U.S. military and Japan is an old story from the past. It happened again in January 2024. On New Year's Day, while families were eating holiday meals, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake slammed into the Noto Peninsula on the coast of the Sea of Japan. Whole neighborhoods in Wajima burned. Cliffs collapsed into the sea. Heavy winter snow buried the cracked mountain roads, trapping thousands of elderly residents at the tip of the peninsula. Out at Camp Zama, the crews of U.S. Army Aviation Battalion Japan did not stay on holiday. Supported by C-130J Super Hercules airmen from the 374th Airlift Wing at Yokota Air Base, two U.S. Army UH-60L Black Hawk helicopters launched straight into the freezing clouds toward Komatsu Air Base. Flying low through driving snowstorms and biting sea winds alongside the Japan Self-Defense Forces, American pilots threaded their Black Hawks over jagged coastal cliffs where no truck could pass. Sortie after sortie, they hauled tens of thousands of pounds of rice, bottled water, blankets, and medical supplies directly into isolated Wajima. When U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel was asked why American soldiers were flying into snowstorms for Japanese villages, he answered in one sentence: "A true friend shows up when times are good, but more importantly when times are challenging." An alliance is not a piece of paper in Washington or Tokyo. It is a Black Hawk rotor cutting through a January blizzard when your friend's road is gone.

On August 21, 2015, high-speed train 9364 was racing toward Paris at 180 miles per hour with 554 passengers on board. A terrorist walked out of the train restroom carrying an AKM assault rifle, a Luger pistol, a box cutter, and 270 rounds of ammunition. A brave passenger named Mark Moogalian tried to grab the rifle and was shot through the neck. People ducked behind their seats in terror. Sitting in Car 12 were three twenty-three-year-old childhood friends from California on vacation: U.S. Air Force Airman First Class Spencer Stone, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, and their friend Anthony Sadler. They had no weapons. They were wearing t-shirts and sneakers. Skarlatos tapped Stone on the shoulder and said two words: "Let's go." In samurai swordsmanship, there is a state of mind called Muhyoshi, charging into lethal range without taking a single breath to calculate your odds of survival. Spencer Stone sprinted forty feet straight down the narrow aisle toward the barrel of the assault rifle. The gunman pulled the trigger at point-blank range. The primer failed. Stone tackled him to the floor. As the terrorist slashed Stone's neck and nearly severed his left thumb with the box cutter, Skarlatos wrenched the rifle away and Stone held the gunman in a chokehold until he went unconscious. Then, with blood pouring from his own hand, Stone did not sit down. He knelt beside the dying passenger who had been shot in the neck, shoved two of his own fingers directly into the bullet wound to pinch the severed artery shut, and held it there until the train reached the station. Five hundred and fifty-four people went home to their families that night because three young Americans heard gunshots and ran forward.