What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
But what wasn’t said — what never gets said by people like me — is that I enlisted right after my 17th birthday, still in high school, in the California National Guard. November 1963. Monthly Guard meetings until graduation, then off to basic training at Fort Ord.
For anyone who went through basic training, you know the first thing they try to do is intimidate, confuse, and disorient you. That’s a pretty hard thing to accomplish when you and your brother had the run of the base because your father had been the East Garrison Commander — but that’s another story.
