Health & Wellness
The Sacrifice of the Danes
Jan
It was sunny in southern Afghanistan on June 1, 2010, and the temperature rapidly reached 104 levels. Sophia Bruun was the gunner on a Piranha fight car, guarding two platoons conducting a patrol close to the city of Gereshk. They had been on the lookout for info from locals in regards to the Taliban.
One of many Piranhas in Sophia’s battle group had hit an IED very first thing within the morning, blowing off a wheel, however nobody was injured. On the outskirts of a village, they had been fired on by the Taliban. They returned hearth, and the state of affairs calmed. The patrol continued. However seven minutes after midday, an IED went off below Sophia’s car, flipping it. She was killed immediately, on the age of twenty-two.
Within the years after Sophia’s dying, her mom, Lene Bruun, returned repeatedly to particulars of her service, finding out letters from the Danish military that she saved in a steel trunk in her residence west of Copenhagen. Over time, she allowed herself distance from her grief. “You possibly can put it away for a short while, generally longer, however then it comes again,” Bruun, who’s 72, advised me over espresso at her kitchen desk. “And also you don’t know what triggers it.”
However today, Sophia’s mom is aware of precisely what triggers her grief: “when Trump says we’re not adequate.” Bruun is a tiny girl, with mushy white hair and high-quality strains grooved into her pale pores and skin. However she turned flushed when discussing the American president, who has been threatening to grab Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. “Maintain your fingers away,” she stated with a swatting movement, as if to thwart Trump’s land seize.
The Trump administration’s designs on Greenland have compelled European leaders to talk brazenly in regards to the potential finish of NATO. “If the US assaults one other NATO nation, the whole lot stops,” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, warned just lately. A army strike by the alliance’s strongest member would make its promise of frequent protection out of date—and danger the outbreak of World Warfare III. It’s a bewildering chance for the Danes, who see the US as their most vital ally, the nation that ushered them into the NATO pact and assured their safety for practically 80 years.
Denmark is small, with a inhabitants of simply 6 million. Nevertheless it has tried to uphold its finish of the discount. It misplaced extra troopers per capita than the US did in Afghanistan. In all, there have been 43 deaths, a sacrifice that Danes accepted as the price of their worldwide obligations. Sophia was the primary feminine soldier to fall in fight in Danish historical past, her dying a ripple impact of the September 11 assaults, the primary time that NATO’s mutual-defense clause was invoked. Triggering Article 5 obligated U.S. allies to help, together with by sending troopers like Sophia to struggle. This time, if Article 5 is invoked, the US is likely to be the aggressor.
Trump seems unbothered by the prospect that his transfer in opposition to Danish territory would possibly obliterate the American-led order. “If it impacts NATO, it impacts NATO,” he stated just lately. “However you recognize, they want us way more than we want them.” That could be true in a strict sense; U.S. energy eclipses Danish capabilities many occasions over. However after I traveled to Denmark this month, I discovered there was nonetheless constancy to ideas that appear to have vanished from the American authorities’s calculations, specifically a way of mutual obligation and primary morality.
That’s why Danes really feel such an acute sense of betrayal when Trump maligns their worth as an ally. “It’s not proper what he’s saying,” Bruun protested. “We’ve achieved a lot for America.” For the households of Danish troopers who died within the American-led marketing campaign in opposition to the Taliban, their nation’s partnership with the US shouldn’t be an abstraction. Denmark’s loyalty to America introduced Sophia Bruun to Afghanistan, and it ended her life.
Sophia’s mom is the one who prompt that she be a part of the armed forces. She was a spunky child who performed handball and gymnastics. As an adolescent, she favored to social gathering. After highschool, she was directionless, so her mom proposed six months within the army, pondering the expertise would put together her for any career and provides her buddies from everywhere in the world. She entered primary coaching in 2008, acing the bodily elements, and shortly signed a contract that required her to deploy to Afghanistan. “I used to be livid,” Bruun recalled, by no means pondering when she proposed a short course of army instruction that her daughter would truly go to struggle.
Denmark participated in worldwide operations within the Nineteen Nineties, however its troopers didn’t endure heavy casualties. The nation’s engagement in Afghanistan started in December 2001, as Denmark despatched plane and particular forces to assist within the coalition battling the Taliban. In contrast to Denmark’s involvement within the American-led struggle in Iraq, starting two years later, the choice to take part in Afghanistan wasn’t controversial, Rasmus Mølgaard Mariager, a historian on the College of Copenhagen, advised me. “Denmark wished to be the American empire’s European Gurkha,” he stated, referring to the Nepalese fighters who had been recruited into the ranks of the British empire beginning within the nineteenth century and proved their soldierly mettle.
Danes can’t boast the identical army prowess. “This isn’t a Viking folks,” as one U.S. official in Copenhagen put it to me. Veterans I spoke with stated the deployment to Afghanistan was shadowed by two humbling moments of their nation’s historical past, reaching all the way in which again to 1864, once they had been routed by Prussia and Austria. The second defeat was much more chastening. On April 9, 1940, when Nazi forces swept north, invading Denmark, the nation’s army couldn’t face up to the assault and folded in what is usually referred to as the Six-Hour Warfare. It’s understood to be the quickest nationwide defeat by the hands of Hitler’s armies and gave rise to a chorus, “By no means once more an April 9,” that also motivates Danish troopers, Søren Knudsen, who served three excursions in Afghanistan and later labored on the NATO Protection School, in Rome, advised me. “We’re bored with being bullied by these massive nations,” he stated.
Bruun supported Denmark’s participation within the Afghan Warfare. “As a result of we’re such a small nation, we will solely go along with different international locations,” she stated. “That’s the one method we will survive.” Denmark expanded its contribution in 2006, when the Danish Parliament authorized plans to deploy troops to a British provincial-reconstruction group and different allied efforts in Helmand province, a infamous Taliban stronghold within the nation’s south. In all, Denmark despatched practically 20,000 personnel, based on estimates. Lots of them helped perform Britain’s so-called platoon-house technique, through which small teams of troopers occupy fortified positions in strategic cities to venture authority and fend off the Taliban.
Denmark’s troopers engaged within the fiercest fight seen by its forces because the struggle in opposition to Prussia and Austria in 1864. The lesson, says Peter Boysen, a deputy commander of Danish troopers in Afghanistan, was that the nation might handle the casualties. “We risked our lives by taking part in an operation removed from our residence,” Boysen, who’s now chief of the Danish military, advised me. And since the struggle was in help of a NATO ally that had come below assault, he stated, it was price it.
As Sophia ready to deploy to Afghanistan in early 2010, her mom was in Greenland. Bruun labored as a nurse on the time, and he or she carried out rotations on the island. Danes have data of the territory—of its unforgiving local weather, and of its folks—that the Individuals can’t replicate, Bruun insisted.
Greenland turned a Danish colony in 1721, when a Christian missionary landed on the island’s west coast. It gained residence rule within the twentieth century and is now a self-governing a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with a Parliament primarily based within the capital, Nuuk. Denmark nonetheless controls Greenland’s protection and international affairs, and it gives the island an annual block grant that largely underwrites policing and well being care.
This week, Greenland’s prime minister positioned his folks’s destiny with Denmark and Europe. “If now we have to decide on between the US and Denmark right here and now, we select Denmark,” the prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, stated. “We select NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the European Union.” Requested in regards to the feedback, Trump stated that he didn’t know who Nielsen was, however that his selection can be a “massive drawback for him.”
Earlier than Sophia deployed, Bruun shortened her contract and returned to Denmark. Sophia left days later. A few of her buddies got here to the airport to say goodbye, alongside along with her mom, father, and youthful brother. “She was trying ahead to it,” Bruun recalled. “She was going out to do what she was educated to do.”
Sophia referred to as residence occasionally, reporting that it was sizzling and sandy. She wasn’t permitted to say a lot about what she was doing. Sophia’s mom took care of her canine, a cocker spaniel named Minnie, and he or she crammed letters with particulars of the canine’s actions, together with looking chickens. In a letter residence, which her mom learn to me, Sophia expressed enthusiasm about returning to Denmark for depart. “After which she stated, ‘I’ll name, I’m getting up early tomorrow, so now I’m going to mattress.’”
She signed off, “Love you.”
Sophia’s mom was on the hospital in her hometown of Holbæk on June 1 when a physician appeared on her ward and ushered her to a gathering room. As quickly as she walked in, a person in army costume stated, “Sophia is lifeless.”
“I stated, ‘No, not my Sophia,’” Bruun recalled. “‘Sure, Sophia is lifeless,’ he stated.” Her imaginative and prescient turned distorted, and he or she sat down on the ground.
Sophia hadn’t wished an enormous army funeral. In her will, she specified that solely troopers who had served alongside her ought to attend. The ceremony came about on the household’s church, additionally in Holbæk. She was cremated and given a spot within the cemetery. She wrote the phrases now etched throughout her personal headstone: Needed to make the world a greater place to reside in.
Danes are incredulous in regards to the threats emanating from Washington, and offended. I spoke with former troopers who stated they had been making ready to ditch their iPhones and Gmail accounts in favor of European options. This month, officers in Denmark’s third-largest municipality vowed that they might proceed funding an annual celebration of Independence Day—believed to be the biggest occasion marking July 4 outdoors the US—provided that official representatives of the U.S. authorities had been excluded.
I advised Boysen, the Danish military chief, in regards to the feeling of betrayal I encountered, particularly amongst households of fallen troopers. “I do perceive that anger,” he stated. “However I believe we have to ask the president, as a result of he’s the one, I imply …” Boysen trailed off, blowing air by means of his lips.
Danes have a complicated understanding of U.S. politics, and so they take pains to separate the president from the remainder of the inhabitants. Nonetheless, their goodwill shouldn’t be infinite. “I believe it might be very tough to realize help for a U.S.-led mission someplace overseas immediately,” says Lennie Fredskov Hansen, a retired brigadier basic who served as an adviser to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the previous NATO secretary-general, when he was prime minister of Denmark within the 2000s. Hansen advised me that he labored carefully with the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan, the place he felt a way of “brothers in arms.” He expects that particular person Danish and American troopers should still really feel that method. However, he added with a notice of understatement, “I’m involved about how that can develop sooner or later.”
As for the previous, I discovered that sure attitudes are enduring, together with amongst households of troopers who died in Afghanistan. They haven’t reconsidered their perception within the worldwide marketing campaign in opposition to the Taliban. They usually don’t fault the U.S. for the disastrous final result of the struggle—violent extremism and human displacement on a mass scale. They remorse solely that the US withdrew so unexpectedly in 2021. “I’ve to assume, and I nonetheless imagine, that the mission was for the very best,” says Simon Enig, who had two brothers who went to Afghanistan alongside NATO forces; one, Samuel, by no means returned. Final Friday was the fifteenth anniversary of the day he was killed by a roadside bomb. Enig visited his brother’s grave, alongside together with his mom. “We had been simply quiet collectively,” he advised me.
I requested a number of the mother and father I met in the event that they regretted sending their kids to die in an American-led struggle, now that the American president is disparaging Denmark’s contributions to NATO. Perhaps, I put it to them, Denmark shouldn’t have been such a loyal ally to the US.
“No,” stated Malene Ebert, whose son Michael served in each Iraq and Afghanistan, and was killed in a firefight north of Gereshk in 2009. “We’re in an alliance, so now we have to meet our obligation.” She additionally stated she reductions Trump’s phrases, and hopes that American voters will elect completely different leaders. “I can’t perceive,” she stated, “why the American folks have chosen an individual like that.”
However Michael’s father, Nicolai Rasmussen, noticed no less than one optimistic impact of Trump’s strain: Denmark and different European international locations spending extra on their very own protection. “I can perceive why he’s saying, ‘Hey, it’s your security. It is advisable to pay what that you must pay,’” Rasmussen, a gardener, advised me. “I believe that’s truthful speak.” Ebert, a secretary, needed to agree. “I imagine that, too,” she conceded. “However I don’t prefer it; I don’t like struggle. I might use assets on peace as an alternative.”
For years, the Danish authorities adopted that strategy. Within the many years after the Chilly Warfare, the nation downsized its army and scrapped key weapons methods. Greater than 20 years in the past, Denmark decommissioned its ground-based air- and missile-defense capabilities, and started to rebuild them solely final yr. In 2024, Denmark pulled out of a serious NATO coaching train, scheduled for the next yr, due to funds constraints. Its absence was a humiliation, however the Danish authorities has pivoted rapidly since Trump’s return to the White Home. In 2025, it raised protection spending to greater than 3 % of its financial output, the best in no less than half a century.
Denmark has most of the benefits that will be anticipated of a rich, extremely educated society, together with technical experience, cybercapabilities, and an elite special-forces corps. Its limitations are additionally evident. The labor market is tight, so competitors for staff is fierce. Sure advantages that may in any other case be dangled as an incentive to enlist, equivalent to well being care, are already offered to all Danes by the federal government. So Denmark is getting inventive. Final yr, it prolonged its lottery system for potential army conscription to girls, becoming a member of simply two different European international locations, its fellow Scandinavian states of Norway and Sweden, in making obligatory service gender-neutral.
Sophia’s mom talked about that change to me, saying it might imply extra troopers like her daughter. “It’s a brand new world,” she stated. We stood in entrance of a collage of images of Sophia, which her mom assembled a month after her dying: Sophia along with her youthful brother on the airport, making ready to deploy. Sophia by means of the window of a indifferent automobile door in Afghanistan, pretending to drive. “It’s typical Sophia,” her mom stated. “She was all the time making jokes.”
It is a brand new world, I believed—one through which small international locations, like Denmark, which have certain themselves tightly to Washington have lots to fret about: Russia bearing down on Europe, the US retreating to the Western Hemisphere, and China flexing its energy in Asia. Denmark has been an particularly beneficiant donor to Ukraine, a lot in order that one U.S. official groused to me that the nation had left its personal cabinet naked. That’s of a bit with Denmark’s army monitor document. It’s been a succesful and accommodating companion in international wars. However its capability to defend itself, not least Europe and the components of its territory that stretch into North America, is restricted. Danes, after all, by no means imagined they could have to defend themselves in opposition to the US.
