"So why did you sign up?”

I am still trying, as best I can, to answer a few of the questions posed to me here. This one seems like the logical next step. The only problem is that the decision at issue was so long ago that I fear and distrust my own memory.

Historians are like that, soldiers too, now that I think about it. Both of my professions are professionally skeptical, and so it is natural that I extend this inclination to myself, to my memory. This is, in no small part, because both my professions are also supposed to be about honesty as well. Being wrong, while regrettable, is accepted as a function of both fields. You can make mistakes, so long as they are honest ones. But being dishonest, in your thesis or with your motives, and the results can be immense and disastrous for far more than yourself. Soldiers shape the present, by violence at times, and that is a terrible force. But historians, well, historians shape the very nature of our understanding of the past, and that is a much more powerful force. So please, bear with me for a moment. Getting to the truth is important to me. Accordingly, this story may well be episodic, apparently disjointed, and no doubt to some, nonsensical.

But it will be honest.

Historian John Lynn, in his classic work The Bayonets of the Republic, which was about the early military actions of the Republic of France in the immediate wake of the Revolution, addressed the issue of military motivation quite logically. John was talking about the so-called “Volunteers of ‘93” (that is 1793, of course), but his framework has not been surpassed for simplicity and utility. Moreover, it is unconsciously paralleled by the questions I am asked.

John’s idea was that there was no single thing called, “military motivation.” Instead he proposed that there were three distinct motivations: Enlistment motivation (“why did you join?”), Sustaining motivation (“why do you continue to serve?”), and finally most studied and least understood, Combat motivation (“how do you manage to operate in combat”). I buy that, but the problem is how to break it down still further. That may be beyond my analytic side, so I will just tell stories.

It was the books, I think, that did it.

I remember, I was probably about sixteen, laying on the couch in the living room of my parents home. It was a nice day outside, comfortable Spring weather, and I probably should have been off doing some family yardwork chore. Instead, there I was, reclined and reading. I was vaguely aware of my dad passing the entranceway at some point. Perhaps he chuckled, or perhaps I am imagining that detail.

I noticed Dad a few more times, passing back and forth, going from one part of the house to another. But that was not unusual for my father on a Saturday afternoon. He was, and is, the consummate fix-it guy, and if he could not fix it, or buy a replacement, he would make one. That is my father, a physicist-turned-windsurfer, who built our first color television from a Radio Shack kit, and built our first computer, right down to wiring the motherboard, from scratch. So he was always moving, here and there, on a Saturday afternoon. I barely registered his presence. I was reading. In the end, he was laughing.

Dad stopped. I looked up.

“Backsight, how many books are you reading?”

Trick question. You can only read one book at a time. My family was big on word games like that.

“Uh, one,” I said, holding the cover for him to see from across the room.

“No, I mean how many total books are you working on right now?”

Still confused, I responded hesitantly, not sure where this was going, “Uh, I don’t know, a couple.”

Typical teen response: Non-committal while scrabbling hard to figure out what he has done wrong.   

Dad actually laughed. Dad never laughed. He smiles sardonically, grins happily, but rarely actually laughed, then or now.

What he had been doing, crisscrossing the house, was looking for my books. I had this habit, you see, of reading multiple books at the same time. And, because I was a teenage boy, it just seemed inefficient to me to carry each book everywhere I went. So, there were a few books here, a few books there, a single book in one place, and perhaps two more in another. Basically I left my books anywhere that I would be paused for a few moments. When I was in that spot, I would read that book. Seemed logical to me. That was what had started this.

My dad, upon doing his business, apparently noticed one of my books resting open on the laundry basket in my parent’s bathroom. (I had probably left it there before getting in the shower.) This struck him as curious, since he had seen me reading another book not moments before, and thinking about it could recall a few others splayed open around the house. So, being methodical about these things, he walked all over the house, finding my books; in two of the three bathrooms, in the basement, in the kitchen, by the phone, in the guest-room (near the one phone in the house where you could talk privately to a girl who is not your little sister), on my nightstand, the chest at the end of my bed, on my desk...all told, I was ‘reading’ thirteen books simultaneously. Sadly, for both my parents and my early academic career, not a one of them was a school book.

And in those books, you find the seeds of why I became a soldier.

I know that it will pain Mr. Spider Robinson, but he was a huge part of the process. I could, as he planned, associate with Jake Stonebender and all of the walking-wounded in Mike Callahan’s Bar. What bookish pre-pubescent boy would not? But I knew I was different.  Even then I knew, or at least had the glimmerings of belief, that somewhere inside I had it in me to bring others together, to protect them and make us all something more than our individual selves. At least that is what I suspected.  

Others, of course, were at the center of that boiling morass. You allow a twelve year-old boy to read Stranger in a Strange Land, then the Foundation trilogy, then Starship Troopers (even if he does not understand the Melian dialog, nor yet know that it exists, nor has any clue what "Civic Virtue" might mean), toss in Niven and Pournelle (because the kid is the son of a physicist), then add a few classics from another genre, say L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, some Tolkien, a huge volume of historical writing, good, bad, and indifferent, stir, and see what happens.

I am sorry Mr. Robinson, I really am. I know that you never intended to have a hand in making the likes of me. Soldiers, you believe, are your antithesis.

Your stories are about love and reconciliation, good Irish Coffees, a few washed-up hippies and a talking dog here and there. There is no way you could have known what would happen when your stories land in the lap of the son of a physicist and an art historian social butterfly, a boy too small for his imagination but too big for the religion he is dipped in for his own good. Your stories are about healing people, creating a team, and then saving the world. You know that the world of Callahan’s Bar does not exist here, and so did I. But when a young man drinks deeply of your literary Irish Coffee he is infused. He comes to believe that there are people who are innocent, and people who need to be protected, and that if he thinks it through, and feels his way forward, he may see within himself the possibility, the idea that he can create teams that might, potentially, save and protect and defend; not just his small corner, but because he is a dreamer, the world. But there is only one profession where that is possible.

And I think that for a start towards presenting my answer, this is as good as any other. It was the books that made me a soldier.