From Repaying Lafayette
Introduction: The Ledger of Liberty
On the morning of July 4, 1917, a battalion of American infantry marched across Paris. The men were three months off the farms and factory floors—their commander privately thought they made a ragged showing—but Paris in the fourth summer of the war was not grading on precision. Crowds packed the boulevards ten deep. Women broke through the police lines to press flowers into rifle barrels. The city had waited three years for that column. It ended its march in the twelfth arrondissement, at the gate of a walled garden cemetery called Picpus.
Picpus is the only private cemetery in Paris, and the saddest ground in the city. Behind its convent wall lie two pits holding more than thirteen hundred victims of the guillotine, carted there at night in the Terror’s last weeks—among them the mother, the grandmother, and the sister of Adrienne de Noailles, the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette himself lies a few steps from the pits. When he was buried there in 1834, his son—christened Georges Washington de Lafayette—covered the coffin with soil the family had carried back from Bunker Hill, so that the man might rest in the two countries he had served. Over the grave, then as now, flew an American flag.
General John J. Pershing, commander of an American Expeditionary Forces that in July 1917 consisted mostly of promises, distrusted his own eloquence and detested speaking French. At the graveside he said a few words and yielded to his aide, Colonel Charles E. Stanton, a paymaster by trade and an orator by inheritance. Stanton looked at the stone and delivered the sentence his general could not: “It is with loving pride we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great republic. And here and now, in the presence of the illustrious dead, we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here!”
The wires carried it around the world before nightfall. It became the most famous American utterance of the war. Pershing spent years explaining that the words were Stanton’s; his tone suggested he wished they had been his own. What gave the sentence its force was not poetry. It was bookkeeping. Lafayette, we are here is not a boast; it is the language of an audit—a debt acknowledged in public, with a hundred and forty years of interest accrued. The crowds on both sides of the Atlantic understood it instantly, because the account was already five generations old.
A little more than a century later, in the last days of January 2025, two flag-draped transfer cases crossed out of Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine after months of negotiation. One of the Americans still unrecovered that winter was Zachary Ford, twenty-five, of Missouri, a former United States soldier killed by a drone one September evening near a bridge outside Pokrovsk, on a mission with almost no chance of success, in the service of a country that was not his. No government had sent him. No government negotiated for his body. That work fell to a private foundation whose caseload of dead and missing foreigners had grown to eighty-eight, half of them Americans.
By the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, at least fifty American volunteers had been confirmed killed in Ukraine—four in five of them veterans of the United States military—and the count has only risen since. There were no parades this time. There was a warehouse near a border, a manifest, a folded flag, and a family in Missouri that had raised a soldier the republic did not send and could not quite claim.
Stanton’s sentence and Ford’s homecoming belong to the same story. This book is the history of that story: the Americans who have crossed oceans, without orders and often against their government’s explicit advice, to fight in other people’s wars for other people’s freedom.
It began as a debt. In the spring of 1777 a nineteen-year-old marquis—an orphan, and by inheritance one of the richest young men in France—bought a ship with his own money because his king had forbidden him passage on anyone else’s. He slipped out through Spain and sailed in April with a fifty-five-year-old German-born professional soldier, the Baron de Kalb, and a cabin full of officers holding paper commissions signed in Paris by an American merchant-diplomat named Silas Deane, who had been handing out generalships with the desperation of a man selling shares in a sinking ship. The Continental Congress, by then drowning in European adventurers demanding rank and salary, nearly turned the boy away. He disarmed them with a single offer: he would serve at his own expense, without pay, as a volunteer. They made him a major general at nineteen, and George Washington, who had no son, found one.
What the foreigners gave the Revolution can be itemized. Steuben walked into the frozen misery of Valley Forge, invented an American drill, swore at the troops in three languages through an interpreter, and wrote the Regulations—the “Blue Book”—that governed the United States Army for a generation. Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer, chose the ground and built the works that made Saratoga a trap and West Point a fortress. Pulaski built the American cavalry and died leading it at Savannah. De Kalb took eleven wounds at Camden and died of them; Duportail built the engineers; the chevalier de Fleury went over the wall first at Stony Point, and Congress struck him a medal. Behind the volunteers stood the crowned exchequers of France and Spain, which together supplied the loans, the fleets, and some nine-tenths of the gunpowder and firearms with which American independence was actually won.
On the other side of the lines stood the instructive contrast: more than thirty thousand German soldiers—the “Hessians”—rented to the British Crown by their princes at so much a head. The men at Valley Forge could see the difference plainly, because both kinds of foreigner were shooting at or drilling beside them. One kind came for wages; the other came for a cause, or at least for glory dressed as a cause. That distinction—volunteer or hireling—was burned into American memory at the founding, and this book turns on it for two hundred and fifty years.
For the next two and a half centuries, Americans repaid. They sailed for Greece in the 1820s with Byron’s poetry in their sea chests; they died at the Alamo and Goliad within months of stepping off boats from New Orleans; they rode for Juárez, ran guns for Cuba, and returned by the tens of thousands to fight for the old countries in the Balkan Wars. They flew for France before their country would come, for Poland when their country would not, and for China while their country was still selling Japan its scrap iron. Three thousand of them went to Spain to fight fascism early, and were investigated for decades as “premature” in their antifascism. They built Israel’s air force, commanded its first brigades, and were prosecuted at home for it. They rose to comandante in Castro’s Sierra and died refusing what the revolution became. They filled a brigade for Kosovo from the Bronx, buried a West Virginia soldier under a Kurdish flag, and are dying this year in the trenches of the Donbas. Fifty times—the full census stands in Appendix A—citizens of the United States have gone to war under someone else’s colors while their own country stood aside.
The claim of this book is that these volunteers are not a colorful footnote to American military history. They are a parallel foreign policy—a foreign policy of conscience, conducted by citizens, that has repeatedly run ahead of the official kind and repeatedly dragged it forward. The mechanism repeats across two and a half centuries: private citizens generate capability and moral pressure abroad; the state later converts both into policy and calls the result its own. The philhellenes organized America’s first foreign-aid movement while John Quincy Adams was warning against entanglement. The Lafayette Escadrille manufactured the emotional case for intervention that no Wilson speech could have made. The Flying Tigers were recruited, shipped, and paid while the United States was formally at peace. Machal’s airmen wrote themselves into the founding story of an alliance that now shapes the Middle East; the Kosciuszko Squadron’s crest still flies on the F-16s of a NATO Poland. The scholar Nir Arielli has observed that foreign volunteers’ deepest effect is to make wars abroad matter at home—to convert distant conflicts into domestic questions of identity and obligation. No country has proved the point more often than the United States.
Some definitions, because the tradition has counterfeits. This book is about people who meet three tests. They were private citizens acting on their own initiative—not soldiers under orders, not intelligence officers under contract. They fought in a war in which the United States was not a belligerent. And they understood themselves to be fighting for liberty—for another people’s independence or freedom from tyranny—an understanding this book takes seriously and then examines, with four questions applied throughout: Whose freedom? Who profits? Who invited you? And would you say it plainly at home? By these tests the hireling falls outside the tradition, the covert employee falls outside it, and the conqueror wearing liberty’s costume falls outside it—which is why William Walker, the San Patricios, and the Americans of Rhodesia appear in these pages as a gray mirror, held up precisely so the edges of the real thing can be seen.
The republic’s law has been arguing about these people since the beginning. In the summer of 1793 a Philadelphia jury acquitted an American sailor named Gideon Henfield, taken in arms on a French privateer, for the excellent reason that no statute made his adventure a crime. Washington’s cabinet, appalled at the prospect of private citizens dragging the young nation into Europe’s wars, asked Congress for a law; the Senate passed it on a tie broken by the vice president, and in June 1794 the Neutrality Act—recodified in 1818, alive today in three sections of the federal criminal code—made it a crime to enlist for a foreign belligerent within the United States. But in 1896 the Supreme Court confirmed what every recruiter had already discovered: leaving the country in order to enlist somewhere else remained perfectly lawful. Through this door—the volunteer exception—nearly every American in this book walked. The law has been winking for two hundred and thirty years. Prosecutions have been rare enough to count on two hands, and the most famous of them, the convictions of the men who armed Israel in 1948, ended in presidential pardons from Kennedy, Clinton, and George W. Bush. The ambivalence is not a failure of the system. It is the system—a republic that will not send its citizens to every fight for liberty, and cannot quite bring itself to punish the citizens who go.
The official creed was stated once and permanently, on another Fourth of July, by John Quincy Adams in 1821: America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” It is the most quoted sentence in the history of American restraint—and Adams spoke it in the very season when Greek committees were forming in American cities and the first American volunteers were taking ship for the Aegean. Restraint and crusade have coexisted from the start, the state holding one doctrine and some of its citizens holding another. The volunteers are where the second doctrine lives.
Ground rules, honestly stated. Motives were always mixed: faith, kinship, ideology, wages, boredom, flight from failure, the veteran’s ache to matter again. This book weighs motives; it does not launder them. Numbers are contested—how many went, how many died—and where they are contested this book says so and shows its work. Memory is self-serving, and commemoration has its own politics; those get the same scrutiny. Of the fifty episodes in the census, some are glorious, some are criminal, and several are both at once. A tradition that cannot survive its own gray cases does not deserve the name. This one can.
The book runs in seven movements: the founding debt and the law built to prevent its repayment; the first installments, from Greece and Texas to Juárez’s Mexico and Cuba, with the current twice reversed; the age of the hyphen and the trench; the crowded years from Poland’s skies to Spain’s hills to Burma’s; the postwar peak and the Cold War eclipse, when the state absorbed the volunteer’s work and the counterfeits multiplied; the revival, from the Balkans to Ukraine; and last, the argument—why they went, what the law should say, and what the tradition does for the republic that produces it.
Every Fourth of July since 1834, at Picpus, someone has raised a new American flag over Lafayette’s grave. The ceremony has survived every French regime and both German occupations; the cemetery’s keepers say the flag flew even in the years when Americans could not come to change it. That is what a standing obligation looks like when a nation chooses to keep it standing. The running tally opened by a nineteen-year-old in 1777 has never been closed out—only serviced, at intervals, by Jarvis in his fustanella and Ehrenberg at Goliad, by Rockwell over Verdun and Cooper over Lwów, by Law at Brunete and Robinson over Addis Ababa, by Marcus on the road to Jerusalem, by Morgan in the Escambray, by Broomfield at Kobanî and Ford at Pokrovsk. On the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States, the question is not whether the tradition endures. It plainly does. The question—this book’s question—is whether the nation still understands what the tradition is for, and what it says about a republic that its citizens keep paying a debt their government never quite acknowledges is owed.
The ledger is open. What follows is the accounting.