A woman once told me, after her life had taken an unexpected turn, that if you live long enough, pretty much anything can happen. That thought was in the back of my mind on a cool morning last November as I sat in the covered bleachers overlooking the wide expanses of Hilton Field parade grounds at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina. Across the field, about a thousand camo-clad soldiers marched in formation out of a pine forest, emerging from the green and white fog of detonated smoke grenades. They came toward us across the dead winter grass, in five companies, Alpha through Echo, to the wild whoops and cheers of the crowd and the strains of “Soldiers,” a rousing modern rock song with lyrics like “This is a perfect day to die” and “With our final breath, we will fight to the death—we are soldiers, we are soldiers.”
I was there not as a reporter but as a dad. Alongside me were my ex-wife, Jacqueline Wallace, and our twelve-year-old daughter, Harriet, all of us with tears in our eyes and our skin tingling, proud to bursting of our son and brother: Private John Henry Lomax, who would be formally graduating from Army boot camp the next day.
Military service is a tradition in many families, but not in mine, nor Jacqueline’s. No Lomax or Wallace had served in the armed forces since World War II. The general idea in our family was that the military was for other people, not for our son. I’m not proud of that, but it is the truth. I grew up on war movies, played guns incessantly as a kid, and later, when at loose ends as a young adult, toyed with the idea of joining the Navy or even the French Foreign Legion, but I never followed through on those schemes. I was isolated from the military world: even in my thirties, I could count on one hand the number of my friends, acquaintances, and extended family members who had served.
A great article in Texas Monthly, as a father reflects on his son's decision to join the Army.
XBradTC 
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