I am considering joining the National Guard.

Right now, I'm considering with the same strength of determination that I am considering taking up jogging before work, which is to say I'm considering it without really planning on doing anything about it. This is a thought on a serious subject, but it doesn't mean I'm serious about the answer.

Yet.

Part of it, a small-but-significant part, has to do with physical fitness. I have been losing weight over the last year. Already, while I am still pretty much a large egg with legs in terms of shape, I no longer own a pair of pants that I can wear without a belt. Part of me wants to not live a life where I get up, get in a car, walk 100 steps from the parking lot to my cubicle at 8am, walk 100 steps back at 5pm and go home, and go back. Yes, I'm aware that even the Air Force would dump me immediately into the Fat Boy Program and I'd end up running and pushing up until I'm physically sick. I'm not masochistic enough to say "Bonus!" but I accept that is part of the reversal of my sedentary lifestyle.

And part of it is that a few more dollars a month would be quite welcome.

The greater part of it follows from my support of the War on Terror. I support the invasion of Afghanistan and the attempt to bring freedom. I am proud that our military comes not to enslave but to free. I wish things had gone better in Afghanistan and I wish the oil was flowing and the economy blooming in Iraq. I'm reminded that Wilson, with his League of Nations internationalism, had to deploy the forces of the US military far more than the saber-rattling Teddy Roosevelt, and that, in terms of our relations with the nations between Morocco and Pakistan, we haven't been showing ourselves in the best light. My wife's midway through the 9/11 Commission Report and cursing Clinton loudly for the quiet capitulation to Islamic/Arabic terror over his term in office, but considering the US focus on the USSR before that, I cannot credit any US president as being all that good on it, as realizing we've been at war with certain elements in the Middle East since the taking of the Tehran Embassy, if not before. The stakes weren't as high as the Cold War -- the Russians had nuclear weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles while al Qaeda has bombs and guns and hijacked jetliners -- but it is important.

However, I am reminded of a scene from All's Quiet On The Western Front. This is specifically Richard Thomas's version, from 1979. I only saw a small small part of it, but it had this scene. Richard and his friends were on leave, back from the front. Old fat men were sitting around the biergarten, congratulating the young soldiers and their work at defeating the French, and the soldiers had no respect for them because they didn't know what the horrors were like. Historically, I know that the face of warfare had changed fundamentally between Waterloo and Verdun, and nobody had a clue going into the conflict that things would be near that bad, but it is true. The minimum age to be eligable for the presidency is 35, and historically candidates have been much older. The maximum age to enlist is 34, and median age is far far far younger. (I'm pushing it for NG, I know.) The old send the young into war, and I feel like the old fools in the biergarten, with my ideological zeal unproven by my actions.

In other words, I want to sign up because I don't want to be that asshole.

I was an AF brat, and I never wanted in because I got sick and tired of moving every few years and losing every friend I had, plus I wanted to grow my hair. I felt, fairly self-righteously, that I had done 18 years and deserved out. I had no problems with the institution except as previously listed. Right now, the big bumps will be that, on deployment, assuming deployment, a pfc gets less pay than a system admin and the tight finances at home would get tighter. There are valid arguments against it, and I don't need any of this to support a political career -- I'll never have one because I believe in things. And this dedicates time away from my family.

Thus, still considering. This doesn't work like a real essay, as it has no real end. Foo.

This is a test. This is only a test.