IF YOU ARE YOUNG, DON'T JOIN THE MILITARY

 

What a privilege it is to be alive.

 

I am an old man of nearly nine decades, and the odds against my being here are so astronomically large as to be uncountable.

 

Of all the billions of galaxies with their billions of stars, circled by all the billions of planets: in this particular solar system of a relative minor star, the third planet from the sun happens to be in the Goldilocks zone, which allowed the development of life, that through the chaos of evolution and happenstance produced a me.

 

My mother worked at a defense plant in Memphis, Tennessee. My father was in the military, stationed in Louisiana.  Strictly by chance, they both attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the year before my birth.   They happened to meet and ended up having sex.  She didn’t practice birth control, he didn’t use a condom, he didn’t pull out, it wasn’t a hand job, or a blow job, or anal intercourse. She happened to be fertile at that particular time. He ejaculated up to three hundred million sperm, and the only one of those three hundred million carrying my particular DNA managed to penetrate and fertilize that egg.

 

What are the odds of that happening?

 

I have often wondered why I wasn’t aborted; she was a single woman, and he was a married man. 

The odds of my existence are uncountable (like pi).

 

In almost nine decades, the beauties, sunsets and sunrises I have experienced: the sting of an Arctic blizzard; the thrill of running a wild river or transiting the Okefenokee swamps in a canoe; the women I have known, the motorcycles I have ridden, the pleasures I have had; and most exciting of all, I married the most stunningly beautiful woman I had ever met, who has shared almost fifty years of adventures with me and has made my existence on this earth pleasurable beyond description.

 

And I could have lost it all!

 

My second twenty years of life were spent in the military.   I flew as air crew on dangerous patrols over the North Atlantic, sometimes in blizzard conditions; I survived a crash landing in Turkey; twice in Vietnam, our aircraft was riddled by ground fire, and we limped back to the base leaking oil and gas; I have facial scars and a permanent limp from a military accident…

 

If you lived through the Vietnam era, you remember the daily death toll announced on the radio and television: 28 men died today… fifteen men died today… 

 

I don’t believe the official total death toll announced by our government: 58,000.   It was much higher.

 

Some vets died much later from war-related illnesses and injuries, people who committed suicide or drank themselves to death, or died as a result of mental breakdowns…

 

In Vietnam, the men who died accomplished nothing.  They were sent there at the whims of politicians playing partisan politics, and more interested in keeping their illustrious jobs than caring for the men and women of the military.

 

Where am I going with this?

We have a President talking about putting boots on the ground, in a war instigated by the Israeli President, and ultimately about oil and natural resources that can make the mega-rich more wealthy and powerful.

  

What a waste it is to be young and die in a War; to squander these precious moments we have of life; to never experience the pleasures of our brief human existence. To end up as a name printed on some cold marble wall, as pawns of politicians who see the military as boots, and not individual living men and women.

 

the Ol’Buzzard