As The Wars Continue

A reader writes:

Thank you so much for sharing that riveting photo essay of the baby-faced, tattooed soldier.  It made me want to weep.  I cannot help feeling guilty, and angry and sad, but proud and admiring at the same time.  I am an utterly privileged person, and the idea of enlisting to make something better out of my life simply never occurred to me. . . and my kids won't have to do so either.  But where I teach, at a college where many students need help to pay for their education, a significant subset of these young people enlist in the military.   They are so admirable, many of them my best, most motivated students.  But I ache for them, too, and worry like a mother about them going off to war.  Face it: the children of privilege do not have to make this choice.