“Thank you for your service.”

We hear it all the time. We may even say it when we see someone in uniform at the airport. But what does it actually mean? What weight might it carry for someone whose experiences in the military we will never know or understand?

At the all-school Veteran’s Day Assembly on November 11, Henry Pedersen, a former infantry officer in the US Army who had served two combat tours and led special operations units as a Green Beret, grappled with these exact questions. He recounted how five years ago, after a well-intentioned grocery store clerk thanked him for his service, he found himself overcome with a complex mix of emotions, crying alone in his car.

Henry’s life started out very much like those of the Menlo students in the audience. He grew up in a liberal, outdoorsy community in Seattle, fueled by tech wealth. “I was told from as early as I could remember that I could be whoever I wanted, could do whatever I want as long as I went out to change the world,” he said. He considered the ideals of the 1990s and 2000s as calls to action: think globally, act locally; be a citizen of the global village; Free Tibet; The Millennium Project; and tolerance.

Henry attended Columbia, received a Fulbright Scholarship to study camel DNA in India, and returned to the US to join the inaugural faculty of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, DC. He fell in love with the capital as a place where he could surround himself with smart, interesting people facing difficult dilemmas head-on. In 2009, many of these conversations centered around the war in Afghanistan. Henry had plenty of opinions, was well-read and researched, and had developed a take on the war to share over cocktails. But still, he wondered: what was the point?

“Here I was, making my way in the world…by reading something that someone else had written about someone, something that someone else had done. That was the way I formed my own arrogant opinion about it. But neither I nor anyone else that I was talking to had ever actually seen the thing that they were talking about. Who was I to judge lest I hadn’t walked a mile in those boots?”

So despite his reservations about the morality of the war and the the military’s role in American society, there was only one way for Henry to learn what responsibility felt like in the most challenging, high-stakes situations. “I had gotten to be very good at critiquing power ethically. But I’d never begun to learn how to myself hold power ethically,” he said. And so he joined the Army.

There, Henry found purpose. He learned resilience, the depth of sacrifice, the complexities of leadership, and the profound emotional impact of war. He started to understand how to put others’ needs before his own and how it feels to care so deeply about your team that you would lay down your life for them. He learned the power of shared goals and shared suffering and how these intense lived experiences made coming home the hardest part. But the biggest and most important lesson for Henry was how to take responsibility, do his part, and make sure what few things he touches in this world are left better than when he found them.

Henry reminded Menlo students of their unique privileges—having the time, the effort, and the support to think, challenge, critique, learn, and grow. “By merit of the fact that you are here at this school, in this city, at this time in world history means that no matter what you do, at some point down the road, you will wield enormous influence in your communities, whether you want to or not,” he advised. Perhaps the ability to chart their own paths is the most precious privilege of all.

When it was time for Q&A, rather than a barrage of war fascination questions that one might expect from an audience of over 800 kids ranging in age from 11-18, the students’ curiosities reflected empathy and compassion. From “Do depictions of soldiers and the military in the media align with how you see yourself?” and “Was there ever a time that you wanted to quit, and what helped you push through that feeling?” to “Does your heart feel heavier or lighter after your experience in the military?” and “What was the hardest choice you ever had to make?”

These are precisely the complex, dialectical, and emotional inquiries that brought Henry to tears in a grocery store parking lot all those years ago. “I was crying because of how much I learned, how much I faced, how much I endured, how much I sacrificed…all of those thoughts, all of those feelings that came up, all the pride, the guilt, the shame, the joy, the anger,” he reflected. “And it was a lovely thing to be thanked for my service. A lovely thing that someone wanted to extend that grace to me. And it’s something I wish we did more, for more people.”