I received a very nice note from my nephew who has finished his tours in Iraq, apparently with distinction. He is the son of the Master Conspiracy Theorist and the MCT's ex-wife who has been a "massage therapist" in Marin County lo these many years. Suffice it to say, it's a bloody miracle this kid isn't "hey duding" behind some grungy coffee bar in a university town like Austin. Bless his heart, he got an effing bronze star for his duty there and he feels like he has to say, "I'm going to be careful about my next life-changing decision so that I am not forced against my will to go anywhere again." He has accepted his father's view of him and the "victim narrative" that all Leftists want to impose: he was snookered, he was tricked into doing his duty. I feel the need to write to him, something along these lines:
Dear Nephew,
Your father and I had a long conversation about you and your service when he was here last year. OK, it wasn't a conversation so much as a discussion, a heated discussion. The central point of our disagreement was that you had been misled into combat, that you were in grave danger because you had no idea that you would actually be asked to fight when you signed up, as he put it, "out of a sense of patriotism after 9/11." Now, my math is pretty good. I figure you did a four year tour, ending in 2007, so you enlisted in 2003, when going to war with Iraq was clearly imminent. You signed up anyway. You were an adult: you assessed the risks, the benefits and saw that being in the military offered possiblities for structure, personal growth, a sense of purpose that was lacking in your life. It even offered the satisfaction of actually doing something that was right to do, defending your country. It probably also offered a chance to get some much needed benefits, like tuition payments for grad school. Am I close on any of this? All of these benefits would come at a cost, however: long separations from family and friends, various privations, physical hardship, the dust, the grit, the heat, and most of all, the prospect of violent encounters with people who really, really want to kill you. And handling weaponry and hanging out with a bunch of guys armed to the teeth, even if they are your friends, poses a certain risk as well. I'm guessing, but I bet that there were many times you thought that what you were doing, or at least the way you were doing it, was wrong. Indeed, you were put in particular danger because of the FOB strategy [My nephew was one of the non-coms in charge of a convoy that guarded a general who was a liasson to Iraqi forces and they would make trips all over the place from the FOB where they were stationed.]
I admire people who are patriotic, generally. I especially admire those who are willing to sacrifice for my country. We are all benefitting, all the time, from the sacrifices that you and every soldier has made for us. Because we have an all-volunteer military, men and women join for a variety of reasons but are moved to do so for their reasons, not out of compulsion. Even if you don't consider yourself "patriotic," you sacrificed for us, for your country. You put yourself in the hands and under the control of officers and a President who were doing their best, and you made that decision knowing that there were risks. No one forced you to do anything against your will: you made the rational decision as a grown man to subordinate your personal wants to a commander, for the good of the group, for the good of the mission. Your "will" in that sense was fulfilled.
That was the essence of my disagreement with your dad. He can't reconcile your decision to do that. He tends to think of these things in highly cynical terms, and he thinks that you were misled, then used capriciously to satisfy W's bloodlust (I paraphrase...) I think that all of us adults have a great deal of control over our lives and the way we conduct them. We aren't victims, unless someone deliberately abbrogates their duty towards us. That applies to every aspect of the real world, not just the military. If you continue teaching, you will see first hand how the unions cynically use children to accrue political power. You will be used. You will have volunteered for that, too.
Anyway, I hope that you will find yourself accepting that perhaps you got more than you bargained for but rose to the occasion, inspite of all the risks. That you did all this with distinction shows that your have great character. Embrace that, and my deepest admiration.
Your aunt, with love.