“You’re the look-out. So you can’t fall asleep, otherwise we will fail our mission,” Stuart said. “If you complete your mission, you will be promoted to a lieutenant sneak. You got that?” I nodded with mirrored intensity.
My mission: stay up all night in my rocking chair and make sure my parents didn’t foil the mayhem of my three older brothers. My commander: Stuart, my oldest brother by six years.
People always ask me what it’s like to have a brother in the service. I never have an answer for them, because growing up I had always expected he would. While my friends were playing games of hide-and-seek with their siblings, I was creating strategic war plans throughout the neighborhood. Stealing cookies before lunch, sneaking into neighbors’ backyards, catapulting stuffed animals into the neighboring streets—all as an army of one. My most heated arguments with my brothers were always the same: my dollhouse turned into a battlefield, and dolls became hostages—or of course the occasional closet lock-in when my brothers were teaching me to escape from any hostage situation.
Of my three brothers, two have joined the army, and the other is currently entertaining the idea. It is fairly common to join the military where I am from—not because of any lack of opportunity, but rather, a sense of duty and allegiance.
Moving from Dallas, Texas to Washington, D.C. last year, I came to find that this desire to serve was not replicated here. Many people were surprised to hear that I had a brother who willingly joined the military, especially in the wake of anti-war sentiments over Iraq. In fact, I often felt uncomfortable talking about politics in general, knowing that the conversation would inevitably steer towards the war in Iraq, and at some point I would have to stop them and reveal that my brother was currently in Baghdad and I would rather not know the current death toll.
During this past year I have realized that people often fail to look beyond the initial intent of the war, forgetting that American soldiers fight for us. The original goals of the Iraq war may not have been realized, but there are still soldiers there, trying to bring stability out of chaos, and still risking their lives in the process.
It did not come as a shock to me when my brother chose to attend West Point and thereby serve on active duty in the military for five years. I remember my mom crying when she knew that he was definitely going to join. “He’s ready,” she told me. I asked how she knew, and what he had said to her. She told me, she had simply asked him, “why?”
“Mom, if anything ever happened to one of us, if someone hurt me or Brooks or Andrew or Kate, wouldn’t you want to do all in your power to make sure that never happened again? Wouldn’t you want to kill the person that did that to them?”
Despite hearing this conversation secondhand from my mom after-the-fact, they are always the words I come back to when I question his choice to serve. You see, I am the idealist of the family—war is often unnecessary, but it is inevitable. I could never justify killing another human being, I don’t have the heart for it, but perhaps if I had children of my own I would think differently. In the case of my brother, his calling to protect our country was comparable to my mother’s calling to protect her children. I don’t fully understand the intensity of his convictions, but I respect them.
Like many Georgetown students, I attended the inauguration. It was an incredible day, but unfortunately one of the things I will remember most is the crowd booing former President George W. Bush. I was truly ashamed. Not because I am a Texan and not because I am a fervent Bush supporter, but because of the utter lack of respect that seems to have developed for those who have served our country.
From a young age we are all pulled towards something— whether we realize it or not—for my brother, it was to protect what he loved. For him, neighborhood battlefields have expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan. Our respective missions differ widely—mine include making deadlines for papers, his are interrogating possible terrorist suspects—but we are an army of one nonetheless. I hope someday to find a calling and a passion that similarly drives me. And I hope someday that we will revive the pride in our country, which was once fervent, and extend that pride to those who serve it.
