Thoughts on Military Service

My mom sent me a link to this video today. I thought I'd share it with all my military-family friends out there, assuming that they haven't seen it already.


This also gives me a chance to share some of my own thoughts on the subject.

I'll be honest, songs about military service always tug at my heartstrings. I have so much respect for servicemen and women. I think they are some of the noblest, bravest people in the world. True, you have that batch of men and women who just like to kill things, or are just in it for the paid college tuition, but I'm talking about the people who do it for a living. Papa Boatright. Rae's husband Phil. Cousins, friends, people I've dated. They give up so much to fight for a country that far too often fails to appreciate what they're doing.

Yes, war is ugly. It's the result of corrupt and greedy men. But war is not the soldier's fault. Ask a soldier what he's fighting for, and he's a thousand times more likely to tell you that he's fighting to protect his family and other families like his than that he's fighting to win oil rights, or whatever political agenda countries have for war. Sometimes, he's even fighting to protect the families of his enemy when he and his brethren dislodge a corrupt and oppressive government.

I dated (very briefly) a young ROTC officer while I was at BYU. There were a lot of reasons it didn't work out, but his being in the Army was not one of them. It broke my heart that he was so surprised when I didn't write him off right away. It seems that every girl before me had found out and promptly run in the other direction. When I didn't, I think he wanted to date me out of sheer relief. Although things definitely didn't work out, none of the reasons had anything to do with his career in the Army. If anything, his courage and willingness to serve were the things I liked best about him. But it made me think a lot about the kind of life he and his family will lead.

The life of an Army wife is a hard one. Not one that I would enter into lightly or without making sure that I really was supposed to spend my life with him. But it's one that I would be honored to live. As I'm sure these women are. And I honor them for their bravery. It takes a lot of courage and selflessness for a wife to let her country take her husband overseas to risk his life fighting for people she's never met. But I've talked to those Army wives. And none of them regret the life they live.

I may not agree with all the politics and tactics of war, and I know that the soldiers don't always agree with it either. But they continue to fight, in the hopes that their fight will make a difference in foreign countries and in their own. They fight because they believe that, underneath all the twisted political agendas, their country is still worth fighting for.

That is what I admire about them.