The Sacrifice of the Danes

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 automobile, guarding two platoons conducting a patrol close to the city of Gereshk. They had been in search of data from locals concerning the Taliban.

One of the Piranhas in Sophia’s battle group had hit an IED very first thing within the morning, blowing off a wheel, however nobody was injured. At the outskirts of a village, they had been fired on by the Taliban. They returned fireplace, and the scenario calmed. The patrol continued. But seven minutes after midday, an IED went off below Sophia’s automobile, flipping it. She was killed immediately, on the age of twenty-two.

In the years after Sophia’s loss of life, her mom, Lene Bruun, returned repeatedly to particulars of her service, learning letters from the Danish military that she saved in a steel trunk in her dwelling west of Copenhagen. Over time, she allowed herself distance from her grief. “You can put it away for a short time, sometimes longer, but then it comes back,” Bruun, who’s 72, informed me over espresso at her kitchen desk. “And you don’t know what triggers it.”

But nowadays, Sophia’s mom is aware of precisely what triggers her grief: “when Trump says we’re not good enough.” Bruun is a tiny lady, with comfortable white hair and superb strains grooved into her pale pores and skin. But she grew to become flushed when discussing the American president, who has been threatening to grab Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. “Keep 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 concerning the potential finish of NATO. “If the United States attacks another NATO country, everything 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 A army strike by the alliance’s strongest member would make its promise of frequent protection out of date—and danger the outbreak of World War III. It’s a bewildering chance for the Danes, who see the United States 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. But it has tried to uphold its finish of the cut price. It misplaced extra troopers per capita than the United States 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 loss of life 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 combat. This time, if Article 5 is invoked, the United States could be the aggressor.

Trump seems unbothered by the prospect that his transfer towards Danish territory would possibly obliterate the American-led order. “If it affects NATO, it affects NATO,” he stated just lately. “But you know, they need us much more than we need them.” That could also be true in a strict sense; U.S. energy eclipses Danish capabilities many instances over. But after I traveled to Denmark this month, I discovered there was nonetheless constancy to rules that appear to have vanished from the American authorities’s calculations, particularly a way of mutual obligation and fundamental morality.

That’s why Danes really feel such an acute sense of betrayal when Trump maligns their worth as an ally. “It’s not right what he’s saying,” Bruun protested. “We have done so much for America.” For the households of Danish troopers who died within the American-led marketing campaign towards the Taliban, their nation’s partnership with the United States 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 advised that she be part of the armed forces. She was a spunky child who performed handball and gymnastics. As a youngster, she favored to social gathering. After highschool, she was directionless, so her mom proposed six months within the army, considering the expertise would put together her for any career and provides her pals from all around the world. She entered fundamental coaching in 2008, acing the bodily parts, and shortly signed a contract that required her to deploy to Afghanistan. “I was furious,” Bruun recalled, by no means considering when she proposed a short course of army instruction that her daughter would really go to struggle.

Denmark participated in worldwide operations within the Nineties, however its troopers didn’t undergo heavy casualties. The nation’s engagement in Afghanistan started in December 2001, as Denmark despatched plane and particular forces to help within the coalition battling the Taliban. Unlike 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 University of Copenhagen, informed me. “Denmark wanted 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.

Read: Denmark’s military chief says he’s able to defend Greenland

Danes can’t boast the identical army prowess. “This is not a Viking people,” 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 typically known as the Six-Hour War. It is known to be the quickest nationwide defeat by the hands of Hitler’s armies and gave rise to a chorus, “Never again an April 9,” that also motivates Danish troopers, Søren Knudsen, who served three excursions in Afghanistan and later labored on the NATO Defense College, in Rome, informed me. “We’re tired of being bullied by these big nations,” he stated.

Bruun supported Denmark’s participation within the Afghan War. “Because we are such a small country, we can only go with other countries,” she stated. “That’s the only way we can survive.” Denmark expanded its contribution in 2006, when the Danish Parliament accepted plans to deploy troops to a British provincial-reconstruction staff and different allied efforts in Helmand province, a infamous Taliban stronghold within the nation’s south. In all, Denmark despatched practically 20,000 personnel, in keeping with estimates. Many of them helped perform Britain’s so-called platoon-house technique, by which small teams of troopers occupy fortified positions in strategic cities to challenge authority and fend off the Taliban.

Denmark’s troopers engaged within the fiercest fight seen by its forces because the struggle towards Prussia and Austria in 1864. The lesson, says Peter Boysen, a deputy commander of Danish troopers in Afghanistan, was that the nation may handle the casualties. “We risked our lives by participating in an operation far from our home,” Boysen, who’s now chief of the Danish military, informed me. And as a result of the combat was in assist 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 individuals—that the Americans can’t replicate, Bruun insisted.

Greenland grew to become a Danish colony in 1721, when a Christian missionary landed on the island’s west coast. It gained dwelling rule within the twentieth century and is now a self-governing a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with a Parliament based mostly 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 individuals’s destiny with Denmark and Europe. “If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” the prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, stated. “We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the European Union.” Asked concerning the feedback, Trump stated that he didn’t know who Nielsen was, however that his selection could be a “big problem for him.”

Read: Trump triggers a disaster in Denmark—and Europe

Before Sophia deployed, Bruun shortened her contract and returned to Denmark. Sophia left days later. Some of her pals got here to the airport to say goodbye, alongside together with her mom, father, and youthful brother. “She was looking forward to it,” Bruun recalled. “She was going out to do what she was trained to do.”

Sophia known as dwelling 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 stuffed letters with particulars of the canine’s actions, together with looking chickens. In a letter dwelling, which her mom learn to me, Sophia expressed enthusiasm about returning to Denmark for go away. “And then she said, ‘I will call, I’m getting up early tomorrow, so now I go to bed.’”

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 dead.”

“I said, ‘No, not my Sophia,’” Bruun recalled. “‘Yes, Sophia is dead,’ he said.” Her imaginative and prescient grew to become 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: Wanted to make the world a greater place to dwell in.

Danes are incredulous concerning the threats emanating from Washington, and offended. I spoke with former troopers who stated they had been getting ready to ditch their iPhones and Gmail accounts in favor of European alternate options. This month, officers in Denmark’s third-largest municipality vowed that they’d proceed funding an annual celebration of Independence Day—believed to be the most important occasion marking July 4 exterior the United States—provided that official representatives of the U.S. authorities had been excluded.

I informed Boysen, the Danish military chief, concerning the feeling of betrayal I encountered, particularly amongst households of fallen troopers. “I do understand that anger,” he stated. “But I think we need to ask the president, because he’s the one, I mean …” Boysen trailed off, blowing air by way of his lips.

Read: Trump is risking a world disaster

Danes have a classy understanding of U.S. politics, and so they take pains to separate the president from the remainder of the inhabitants. Still, their goodwill shouldn’t be infinite. “I think it would be very difficult to gain support for a U.S.-led mission somewhere abroad today,” says Lennie Fredskov Hansen, a retired brigadier common 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 informed me that he labored intently 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 approach. But, he added with a be aware of understatement, “I’m concerned about how that will develop in the future.”

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 towards the Taliban. And they don’t fault the U.S. for the disastrous end result of the struggle—violent extremism and human displacement on a mass scale. They remorse solely that the United States withdrew so rapidly in 2021. “I have to think, and I still believe, that the mission was for the best,” says Simon Enig, who had two brothers who went to Afghanistan alongside NATO forces; one, Samuel, by no means returned. Last Friday was the fifteenth anniversary of the day he was killed by a roadside bomb. Enig visited his brother’s grave, alongside along with his mom. “We were just quiet together,” he informed me.

I requested a few of the mother and father I met in the event that they regretted sending their youngsters to die in an American-led struggle, now that the American president is disparaging Denmark’s contributions to NATO. Maybe, I put it to them, Denmark shouldn’t have been such a loyal ally to the United States.

“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 are in an alliance, so we have to fulfill our obligation.” She additionally stated she reductions Trump’s phrases, and hopes that American voters will elect completely different leaders. “I can’t understand,” she stated, “why the American people have chosen a person like that.”

But Michael’s father, Nicolai Rasmussen, noticed not less than one optimistic impact of Trump’s strain: Denmark and different European international locations spending extra on their very own protection. “I can understand why he is saying, ‘Hey, it’s your safety. You need to pay what you need to pay,’” Rasmussen, a gardener, informed me. “I think that’s fair talk.” Ebert, a secretary, needed to agree. “I believe that, too,” she conceded. “But I don’t like it; I don’t like war. I would use resources on peace instead.”

For years, the Danish authorities adopted that method. In the many years after the Cold War, the nation downsized its army and scrapped key weapons methods. More than 20 years in the past, Denmark decommissioned its ground-based air- and missile-defense capabilities, and started to rebuild them solely final 12 months. In 2024, Denmark pulled out of a significant NATO coaching train, scheduled for the next 12 months, due to finances constraints. Its absence was a humiliation, however the Danish authorities has pivoted rapidly since Trump’s return to the White House. In 2025, it raised protection spending to greater than 3 % of its financial output, the best in not less than half a century.

Read: The gap in Trump’s rationale for buying Greenland

Denmark has lots of the benefits that may 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. Certain advantages which may in any other case be dangled as an incentive to enlist, resembling well being care, are already supplied to all Danes by the federal government. So Denmark is getting inventive. Last 12 months, it prolonged its lottery system for potential army conscription to ladies, becoming a member of simply two different European international locations, its fellow Scandinavian states of Norway and Sweden, in making necessary service gender-neutral.

Sophia’s mom talked about that change to me, saying it might imply extra troopers like her daughter. “It’s a new world,” she stated. We stood in entrance of a collage of images of Sophia, which her mom assembled a month after her loss of life: Sophia together with her youthful brother on the airport, getting ready to deploy. Sophia by way of the window of a indifferent automobile door in Afghanistan, pretending to drive. “It’s typical Sophia,” her mom stated. “She was always making jokes.”

It is a brand new world, I believed—one by which small international locations, like Denmark, which have certain themselves tightly to Washington have lots to fret about: Russia bearing down on Europe, the United States 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 chunk with Denmark’s army observe document. It’s been a succesful and accommodating associate in international wars. But its capability to defend itself, not least Europe and the components of its territory that stretch into North America, is proscribed. Danes, after all, by no means imagined they may must defend themselves towards the United States.