Heh - the view from New York
From John Renehan writing at
Front Page Magazine:
I Am Not Having a Crisis
I am unusual, apparently. It�s not because I am a coffeehouse dweller, or an NPR listener, or prone to wear loafers with jeans. In the world I inhabited until recently, all of these are quite normal. Rather, it is that I am also a field artillery officer in the U.S. Army. Which places me in that subdemographic of New York lawyers who wear suits and work in office buildings until they decide to join the military and blow things up. (Trust me, there are some; just not many.) For this decision, I now endure lingering looks of concern from people who care about me.
I knew that friends and colleagues would be surprised. Prior to 2004, the year I left for basic training, I had shown no tendency toward reckless acts like joining the military. Nor did my colleagues know that members of my family had, in previous generations, routinely done stints in the armed services during times of national need. So I was prepared for a certain range of responses in New York, from puzzlement to backslapping support to outrage.
What I wasn�t prepared for was the quality of some people�s reactions�not simply surprise or distress, but something deeper and more permanent. People I had known for years started behaving differently toward me. This is a tough thing to put your finger on�but you can sense it. You can tell when you are being discussed, when people are trying to decide if they know you as well as they had thought.
A bit more:
And so their puzzlement continues. One distressed friend, hearing of my present employment, pounds the table and unleashes obscenities. Another tells people she thinks I�ve �changed.� (My oldest friends tell me I haven�t, which is a comfort.) And another tells me that she�s happy �that you�re doing something you care about,� with the forced enthusiasm of a supportive parent. All of which I try to take with good humor. But I wonder how we came to a point at which young persons�of a class that once viewed military service as an ordinary expression of its own privileged relationship to the state�could come to see the act of entering service as an oddity requiring special explanation.
Well said.
Posted by DaveH at September 12, 2008 7:28 PM