protecting the principles and ideals.........

When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States need to draft me, and I declared that I wasn't going to sign it.  The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it.  I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war;  I just didn't trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.
     My father's reaction surprised me.  Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France.  "You don't own your country nothing," I remember him telling me.  "You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life."
     The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me:  suddenly the draft card wasn't so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself.  And he'd made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one.  Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I'd benefited from my entire life.

-Sebastian Junger,  Tribe:  On Homecoming and Belonging