Commentary - Marc Danziger: When your son joins the Army

In our circle of friends, it’s been the topic of lots of discussion and no small amount of criticism. This group is part of the information elite: people who live in coastal enclaves and get paid to move information around. They’re well-educated and well-traveled, have high incomes and typically view themselves as cosmopolitan in outlook.

Our kids are supposed to go to East Coast colleges and then to graduate or professional school, not join the military as enlisted men. In this circle, I count only one other family whose son went into the military. That’s two children out of maybe 50 or 60 families.

That’s too bad; I think the elites in our society and our military would both do better if each was more closely tied to the other. In writing about U.S. politics, I talk a lot about the increasing and frightening isolation of U.S. policy, information and economic elites.

While watching (and, in my own way, trying to participate in) the debates about the future course of the war in Iraq, I’m frustrated because it appears that we’re being led by actors in a stylized Noh play set within the rules of this isolated clique — instead of frank-speaking members of the broader community with a real sense of leadership and responsibility.

My son didn’t make his decision because of my politics, which he finds an amusing hobby. He made it while he was in Brazil last year based on how he could best “give back” to our society, and also on his experience living among the American expat students there and the communities they moved within. His reasons, really, are his own. He’s quizzical when I talk to him about it because he doesn’t see it as a big deal; “I haven’t done anything yet,” as he puts it. And I try as best as I can to explain to him that this decision is important to me because it puts him on the other side of childhood. His accomplishments once he’s there matter a lot, but he is taking the huge step across that line into a new world where he is my son but no longer my child.

I’m proud of him for taking that step, and not a little frightened about what it will lead to. He decided last year that he would join as an enlisted man rather than as an officer so he could be in the Army “18-X” program. Qualified new recruits are tracked directly into Special Forces, if they can make the very difficult cut at several steps along the way.

So whatever he does, he will be doing it out at the pointy end of things, not safe in some basement in Washington or Langley where I, as a protective parent, might wish he’d make his contribution. But he’s taken the keys to his life. When the recruiter came to our home to pick him up and drive him away, I was reminded of the other passages in his life that he’s navigated so well — all of them telescoped together into images of his back as he left: walking to school in second grade, riding his bicycle off for an adventure, walking onto a plane for his solo trip to see grandma in France, pulling out of the driveway the first time alone behind the wheel and the sight of him in my rearview mirror as I drove away from his first college apartment.

Being a parent seems to be a series of those moments, of watching your children pulling away and stepping out into a wider and wider world of responsibility and risk. And after yesterday, my son will be in the widest and riskiest world

there is.

I fed him and paid his tuition. He’s taken those materials, and now the man he’s used them to become has set out to navigate that wide, risky world. I watched his back again as he walked down our driveway last night.

From now on, I’ll do my best to see that our leaders are watching his back as well.

Marc Danziger is a member of The Examiner’s Board of Bloggers and blogs at windsofchange.net.