Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw was grievously injured in Afghanistan in 2012. A sudden explosion hit him like a train and killed and injured comrades whose agony he could hear but not see. He had lost his vision in both eyes, but after months of grueling rehabilitation—including extended periods harnessed face down in a hospital bed—doctors miraculously restored the vision in one eye. In “Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage,” Mr. Crenshaw reflects that critical to his recovery was a sense of history and stoicism, a realization that many others have undergone even more challenging hardships. “A little perspective,” he writes, “can be the difference between spiraling into dark despair and clawing your way back to the light.”
How do you achieve this mind-set in the face of such difficult circumstances? Even if you can’t actually live the ordeals experienced by most of humanity throughout history, you can at least learn about them. The antidote to self-pity and hopelessness, Mr. Crenshaw found, was recognizing that, as bad as his injuries were, “it could have been worse” and that many others “have had it harder,” including other veterans with whom he served. Internalizing this reality allows you to adjust “the lens through which you view your current situation.”
“Fortitude” isn’t just about persevering over personal adversity. It is, rather, a wide exploration of prevailing cultural maladies that flow from the decline of resilience—political polarization, the loss of nuance and shame in public life, the rise of outrage mobs, and the ascendance of victimhood as the pinnacle of virtue. The book has elements of a combat memoir, social critique, political analysis and self-improvement manual. These disparate genres are seamlessly woven into a plain-spoken, cohesive and timely argument and call for renewal.
The author’s character and worldview were formed, Mr. Crenshaw tells us, growing up in Texas and South America in the 1990s. When he was 8 years old, he lost a croquet match to his mother. The future commando was not a good loser and raged in fury at his defeat. Compounding his anger, he recalls, was a feeling that he should have been allowed to win. His mom, perplexed at the boy’s outburst, pointedly noted that his skills were simply not good enough and that just because he was a kid and may have felt entitled to victory, actual performance is what truly matters.
