A Marine who takes a job in Singapore. A nurse in Quito. A mechanic who stayed after a deployment and opened a garage. A student who married in Madrid and never quite came back. These are not colonial postings. They are lives.
South America, Europe, and Asia are full of those quiet American households — church potlucks, little-league uniforms, bilingual report cards. Freedom is what lets a person leave without becoming an exile, and return without becoming a stranger.
We celebrate that the same way we celebrate the wars we did not turn into possessions: the point of American power, at its best, is not to own other people’s countries. It is to keep a world where people — including our own — may choose.