An Air Force detail from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. A flag-draped coffin. The family with hands over hearts as Taps mourns over the cemetery. A flag folded into a tight triangle, saluted.

I know why my father joined the U.S. Air Force in 1952. Or rather, I think I know. The Korean War was at its fiercest. There was still a draft. Rather than be drafted, my father joined the Air Force. He wanted to have at least some choice of what branch he served, a choice in the capacity in which he served. Or so that was his explanation.

When I was old enough to understand that some boys had resisted the Vietnam draft, while others had little choice but to go, my father would tell me that I might have to make such a choice--to go or not to go, to join or not to join. At the time, pubescent machismo overran any fears of dying, any moral convictions against killing. Certainly, if I ever had to decide, I would go, I would join up, as my father had, perhaps even go into the Air Force, serve in communications as my father had, with the knowledge that in communications I would likely have a better chance to survive. I would serve my four years and head home, just like my father.

In college, pubescent machismo collided with classic anti-war novels and at least one anti-war film: A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, Platoon. The images of blood, gore and death overrode machismo. Soldiering was stupid. War was insane. And yet, because my father had served, I would still have to face my own newly shaping conscience--always the question, to go or not to go, to join or not to join?

I knew I would never join the military on my own; it would take something like another Vietnam to create the dilemma--a dilemma that because of my age I now may never have to face. And yet, then I longed for some kind of institutional acceptance--high school sports, academia, something to give me the sense that I wasn't always going to be outside of life.

From time to time I would wonder if military service would have met that need. At the same time I wondered why anybody in his or her right mind would join--what kind of person would voluntarily suffer the indignities of boot camp? of leaving family behind for months at a time? the possibility of getting killed or worse, surviving but surviving permanently maimed? Was institutional acceptance worth it, especially when military service had become so separated from civilian life? That's the question Anthony Swofford tries to answer in his memoir Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.