Part of the gig of a veteran-writer is talking to ROTC cadets and at the military academies about war and leadership.

These conversations and events serve as highlights for life on the road; they’re usually an engaged (albeit sleep-deprived) audience, for one, and they’re certainly a captive one. The same can’t be said at bookstores and the like when, as an author, you’re just hoping there won’t be any crazy and/or homeless people in attendance. (Nothing against my vagabond friends, but they tend to be more interested in heat and lodging than an exchange of bookish ideas.)

Anyhow, some fifteen years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, I realized this year that war isn’t just these cadets’ and midshipmen’s futures — it’s their pasts, too. Their entire pasts. Somehow, someway, we have an entire generation of young Americans who only know and remember their nation at war, blowing shit up in strange, dusty lands far from home, losing soldiers and Marines in those same strange, dusty lands. And yet despite all that, or in some cases perhaps because of it, these 18-to-22-year-old kids are joining the military to serve.

It seems likely that some readers of Penthouse and Embrace the Suck columns fall in that age range, too, and some joined the service thinking through the very same ideas and issues. Christ, that’s courage. For better or worse, in my era of youth in the aughts, our country and political leaders at least pretended our foreign wars would, and could, end. Now we don’t even use the term “forever war” ironically. While that shift in thinking deeply concerns me, both for our republic’s present and for its future, it only calls more attention to the resolve of the young people who are willing to give their lives for our nation’s defense. It’s not a question of if they’ll see combat. It’s a matter of when and where.

We’ve gotten to the point that children of Global War on Terror (GWOT) veterans are now becoming GWOT vets themselves. Recent news articles have interviewed young soldiers who are deploying to Iraq in support of counter-ISIS operations whose fathers served in Afghanistan and that very same Iraq a decade-plus ago. A warrior caste separate and distinct from the society that wrought them is, slowly and surely, coming into being. The whole thing brings to mind the hilarious (and damningly prescient) satirical Duffel Blog headline: “Soldier Who Said He’d Fight War So ‘Son Wouldn’t Have To’ Feels Like An Asshole Right Now.”

Oof.

While the historical parallels for the effects and consequences of protracted, unending conflicts aren’t great — there’s the slow decline of the Roman Empire partly brought on by constant skirmishing along their western and northern frontiers, for example — there is an argument for what we’re doing beyond an Orwellian “We’re at war because we’ve always been at war and thus always will be at war.” It’s that peace over there isn’t the point, but calm back here is. It’s that a slow burn impacting the few benefits the nation more than a quick burst that involves the many. It’s that even if the radicalism and extremism we’re confronting overseas could be exterminated (and it can’t, because while militaries can be destroyed with force, ideologies cannot be), it wouldn’t be worth it to go all-in. Not in lives, not in resources. A contrary lesson taught by the past from Athens and the Peloponnesian War to France in post-World War II Algeria.

Sorry to bore you with all the history talk, but it’s important, I promise.

“Soldier Who Said He’d Fight War So ‘Son wouldn’t Have To’ Feels Like An Asshole Right Now.”

America, fifteen years after 9/11, stands at a crossroads. Despite the many mistakes, tragedies, and outright failures of the past decade-plus, we’re still a beacon for good in a world on fire. The separation between soldier and citizen, veteran and civilian, has never been wider in this country. For some very good reasons, our leaders decided (and have continued to decide) that keeping the slow-burn warfare going with an all-volunteer military is our best option. For some other very good reasons, that decision (or continual set of indecisions, if you prefer) is rightly called out as a proverbial kicking the can down the road. This is not sustainable. And yet, we’re in the midst of proving that it actually is.

I’ve written here before about how it’s up to us as a collective to take back our military, to ensure it’s always utilized for something achievable, for something where force is the last option because all other options have been exhausted. Because that’s how a republic behaves, because that’s how we were set up, and because that’s how adults should just fucking function. All that’s well and good. But maybe more people might think about that, or at least consider some of those ideas, if they were confronted by the resolve and earnestness of this new generation of Americans joining up. A generation that’s only known their country to be at war and still are deciding, Yes, send me.

They’re more than worthy of us. It’s about damn time we do the same for them.

PHOTOS: Shutterstock / Milan Tomazin; Everett Collection