I just found this Army wife's blog post and it made my fingers itch to write:

I was told the other day that Hubble's ultimate mission is to come home to me (actually the choice of words was "come home to his mother" but we're not going there today). I had to bite my tongue. That is not the ultimate mission. It is to succeed, to better, to save, to secure. I know he can do all that. After all, I married him.

He did not enter the service to fulfill the mission of coming home to me. We both well know that there is a chance he may make the ultimate sacrifice. That is something we've come to terms with. There IS a war and there ARE people depending on him.

My husband is freaking out that when it comes time to get his Civil Affairs assignment, he'll get South America or something. We have no idea if this is even something to worry about, but I've seen the Army do dumber things. (I met a soldier on our post in Germany who was an Algerian-born fluent Arabic speaker...and he was on Rear D while the rest of the post was deployed to Iraq. The Army is anything but logical sometimes, but I digress.) My husband wants desperately to be put to good use to support the Global War on Terrorism because, like kd's husband, his mission is "to succeed, to better, to save, to secure."

The meaning of life is not Avoid Death. The meaning of life is to use your life for meaning.

Not everyone in the United States sees meaning in what we're doing in Iraq. I attribute this to many things. AWTM remarked that "people are much too busy watching American Idol/Dancing with the Stars and Deal or No Deal to bother researching world Events." I also fault the Bush administration for not helping Americans see what's really going on. But some people, like my husband, want to do what they think is right, no matter how many people the polls say are backing them.

As den Beste put it,

Honor comes from inside. An honorable man is true to himself and his own ideals, and he lives and acts according to those ideals no matter what anyone else says. It doesn't matter if that makes him respected or despised, for honor is not based on peer opinion.

And an honorable man will, if necessary, die for honor, die for what's right. There are issues worth dying for, and issues worth killing for. These things are not done lightly, but when they must be done an honorable man does not shy from his duty, even if he has to face it alone. It is more important what you stand for than who you stand with.

Honor is not and cannot be "multilateral". When you stand up for what's right, you may stand with many others, but each of those others stands there because of his honor. Each makes that decision for himself, and every one decides unilaterally.

If you compromise your honor in the name of "unity", or of "harmony" (or "alliance", or "multilateralism"), then you have lost your honor and have sold it cheaply. But if you are willing to do that, you never really had any honor to begin with.

I admire kd's husband's honor and sense of duty despite the naysayers around him. And I admire my husband for taking a job that will take him closer to the fight.

And I pray they don't give him South America. We'd have another ukulele incident for certain.

Posted by: Sarah at 06:46 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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