If you have been getting something for nothing for a long time, it's tough to convince you to pay for it. But pay Americans must. In the years since … - Jack H. Jacobs

Young people don't have enough peripheral vision, they can't see very far into the future. Toward the end of my college career, the war was starting to heat up and a lot of people were against it already, but I figured they probably didn't know what they were talking about. There were no big protests at Rutgers, but the tenor of the intellectual discourse was decidedly against American participation in the war. Later on, I had a fairly grown-up view of what the war was really like and that the chances of getting your head blown off as an adviser were just as good as anywhere else: It's all a matter of luck, most times, anyway, all things being equal. So it's irrelevant whether you're standing in a bar that gets mortared or lying in the middle of a rice paddy getting shot at.

Today, a small number of brave and dedicated young Americans have answered the call, and whatever else one can argue about the merits of recent uses of military power, it is impossible not to revere the patriotism of these volunteers. More Americans were killed in New York on September 11, 2001, than were lost on December 7, 1941, and yet the response was a small fraction of that after Pearl Harbor. What is interesting, and more than a little distressing, is that the number of people wearing the uniform is only a bit more than 1.5 million on active duty, and that this represents only one-half of one percent of Americans.
One may reasonably inquire why, if the war in Iraq is so unpopular, there aren't riots in the streets as there were during the war in Vietnam. One answer is that our service members are all volunteers, and no one else has to serve. This country has been going about its business almost as if nothing catastrophic has occurred, while the sacrifice has come from only a few citizens. Those of us who don't serve have thus outsourced our defense to those who do. One could argue persuasively that if all citizens had a stake in the protection of our freedom, the arbitrary use of the military instrument of power, as a first resort, would be very difficult to engineer.

You don't think you're going to get shot. And, as a matter of fact, even when you get shot, you think it's a big mistake. Your first reaction- it's a bit like getting cancer or something, there's all this denial, you say, well, this is not really happening. This actually is not supposed to happen to me. It's supposed to happen to that guy over there. Then, of course, you realize that it is happening to you and it isn't a movie and you're not watching somebody else. If you had a high degree of confidence you were going to get killed, nobody would ever go to defend this country. I think one of the things that motivates you to do so is not only your inherent patriotism and your desire to do the right thing, but also at least the hope that it ain't going to happen to you. Otherwise, you just wouldn't do it. Only a maniac would do it, and most people aren't maniacs. So I think you start with a high degree of confidence that it's not going to happen to you. There was another old saw back then that said: 'If you go into the Army, you're either going to go to Vietnam or not; if you're not going to get sent to Vietnam, you don't have to worry; if you go to Vietnam, you're either going to get wounded, or not; if you're not going to get wounded, there's nothing to worry about; if you are wounded, you're either going to die, or you're not going to die. Well, if you are not going to die, you have nothing to worry about; and if you are going to die, you can't worry... so don't worry.'