Home, Sweet Home

There's no place like home.

If you've ever had to spend an extended time away from home (and I'm not talking about a few days for business or even a couple of weeks for vacation) you know how wonderful the concept of "home" is. It is where the familiar resides, where you have built memories, where your identity has been shaped and has shaped others. It's where you've shared community with the most important elemental building block of societies throughout history - the family. It's that place upon which nations are built - or destroyed.

So as I go to war I keep an eye on the news, asking myself, "What exactly am I fighting for?" Some war movies say we fight for the man in the fox hole next to us. Some societies say it's for this or that cause - in our case, the cause having been the defeat of world terrorism. But what it always boils down to is family. While I love the soldiers with whom I will fight (or, more correctly, whom I will support in the fight), and while I agree that world terrorism needs to be crushed, I go because of my family. Selfishly, to some degree, I don't want my boys (or my girls) to have to fight this fight 10-20 years from now. Unfortunately, I don't believe our country has enough of the same focus.

Many people have asked me the question, "Why do you have to go again?" or, "Why are they making you go?" The fact is that this is a voluntary mission - first and foremost because I signed on the dotted line back in 1987 and have continued to show my volunteerism by simply remaining in the military ever since. Secondly, however, there was a need. Soldiers in this unit needed a chaplain. There were no other volunteers and no one really left to get voluntold. So my question is this: "Why are more people NOT going?" If not able to go, why are more Americans NOT finding ways to support the effort?

This is not like WWII, where the whole country was involved. Our boys went overseas then for years on end and died in numbers that would numb our modern sensitivities. With such a low- commitment war, I wonder if we truly appreciate home as much as we think we do? Home is a very special place. If our identity is formed by it - and if we shape it by who we are - then what will become of it, and of us, when we neglect our commitments to its defense in favor of our own comforts? Will our idea of "home" stand such neglect? 

I pray it will not take the war's encroachment on our soil to awaken us to the need to be decisive in this battle, lest we sacrifice our sons and daughters to battles we failed to wage in order to pad our own comforts. We're sacrificing their economic future for own comfort, so what hope is there that we will not also do the same concerning our defense?