The thing is the business of being a soldier is ultimately killing someone, no? You know, if you carry a gun, you have to come to terms with using it, you know, killing something…

As well is the willingness to give up the self to a group mind necessary to implement military actions without question…

Someone wrote that there are several paths to power, fortune and position, and the military is one of them. But also there is the priest hood. Um… I can’t remember what else. The point is, I think, what is the objective here. Just to make a living? Of achieve higher goals within the society, like power, fame and fortune…

You know, it sounds something like what Sam Kinnison once said about the starving Ethiopians back during that famine… why don’t they move out of the f#^^%$*&@g desert!?!?!?!

Which is why we leave home and go looking for our fortune…

At least, being a soldier is honorable as you see the direct results of your actions… as opposed to, say, a politician…

Please understand that this is not a comment on your nephew’s personal choices so much as, in general, our limited perspectives and the choices we all tend to make…

Hmmm… let’s see, the path’s were soldier, priest, politician, prostitute….

In the small town where he was born there are not a lot of opportunities. He was never very good in school, and so, college was not really an option. Of the few doors that were open to him, I suppose the military seemed the lesser of all evils. Of course he could have gone to work in the paper mill, come home stinking every day, and died of cancer at age forty. Or perhaps he could have landed a job on an off-shore oil rig and come home at the end of every two-week period with his hands and his face and his hair so stained and smelling of oil that it would take the next two weeks to scrub it all off. Or he could have learned to use a saw and become a logger and maybe, if he were lucky, just maybe he would only lose one or two fingers in the spans of his career. This is how you can tell who the loggers are when you go into a diner here – you look at their hands. They are the ones who are missing fingers, or, if you could see their legs, you would often find, as well, at least one long, jagged scar – the mark left by the chainsaw blade when it bounced off a nail or some other object buried in the trunk of a tree.

So is this young man a hypocrite for joining the military when he does not support the administration sanctioning the campaigns they are engaged in? Perhaps – I don’t know. But I will say this: he is not alone in his decision to chose this option as the lesser of all evils. And I cannot say that I blame him. It is hard to know what the doors look like that are open before another person unless you are standing in their shoes, which, of course, is impossible.