And yet presidents need to visit the troops—it is a vital thing to do. Part of this is simply good leadership, because despite the cynics, most of the grunts want to see their president. For one thing, a president is, by definition, a celebrity, and the troops love celebrities—television or film stars, singers, you name it. They want the selfies and the signatures, and they get a kick out of watching the president serve Thanksgiving dinner or mug with a sweating, oil-stained mechanic. In that respect, they do not differ from their contemporaries in the civilian world.

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A presidential visit is also a reminder that they are not forgotten. The forever wars, as some have called them, have lasted 17 years. You may be a 19-year-old who has never been away from home this long. Or, if you are a sergeant and on the front lines for your third or fourth or fifth deployment, having missed the birth of a child, an anniversary, or a parent’s death, you begin to wonder. Israeli soldiers get to go home every second or third weekend. American soldiers get either six or seven months without a break, or a year with a single, jarring, two-week interlude back in the world. Email, telephone calls, and videoconferencing make things better in some ways, worse in others, but they cannot alter physical absence. And the year-after-year grind of battles of ambushes and raids, where progress is uncertain or unknowable, raises the question of futility. Was this worth the death of friends, the breakup of a relationship, the absence from family?

It is a truism that soldiers fight for one another. But they also crave the sense of larger purpose and support, and a presidential visit can provide it. They know it’s a big deal for the boss to show up. And since troops talk, stories about the visit will ripple, including when the president gets back and calls the family of the private he met and tells them how proud they should be of their daughter or son. It is why, despite the losses and suffering of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mistakes and misplaced judgments, George W. Bush remained popular with those in the field. Like any really good politician, he knew how to connect with them and radiate the warmth that they needed and that he could uniquely give them. Leadership at the top is often about providing that “touch of Harry in the night,” as Shakespeare puts it in Henry V. The young king, on the eve of Agincourt, cheers his anxious, outnumbered army by going from campfire to campfire, saying nothing of consequence, but simply showing up and making his presence felt.

But a presidential visit has other functions, including teaching the president a few things. “Always see for yourself,” Winston Churchill once said. “Once you have seen a thing working, you know how it works.” Even a brief visit to a war zone teaches you things that the antiseptic environment of the Situation Room cannot. You can judge whether commanders are genuinely upbeat or putting on an act. If you question shrewdly, you can find out what their real anxieties are. If you look at them from five feet away, in their fatigues, you understand them better than if you see them in a video teleconference. Having met with the earnest young enlisted, you think harder about the responsibility you bear for sending them into harm’s way.