My dad always pushed for it. He himself dreamed of being enlisted as a soldier to continue his father's legacy in his time during World War II. But, due to lack of sufficient money, my dad never got past a high school diploma, erasing his chances of becoming a soldier.
I always thought that his proudest moment of me was when I announced to the family back then that I wanted to become part of the military. He wanted to fulfill his sole dream through me, so he pushed and pushed me to become his ideal soldier. He signed me up for multiple sports activities such as basketball and football. He also tried to get me into boot camp, despite being deep in debt at the time.
Since I was still young and fully ignorant at the time, I didn't mind his enthusiasm. I would have loved to be part of the military to finally get him to be proud of me for something, anything. But, two things recently occurred that transformed my entire perspective and made me doubt my previous decision:
Cracked.com is a comedy website that's filled with obscure facts and little known stories. They excel in destroying previously known beliefs through the use of scientific facts and jokes about their penises. They also have a group of full time columnists whose job is to make at least one column per week about any subject they wish.
During the end of 2011, eight of the columnists constructed a 64 item list about eight subjects in which they told something about their top pick and why. David Wong, the chief editor, picked Portal 2 as his game of the year (which I absolutely agree with and will probably be something I will talk about some other time). He opened up his reasoning by explaining that trying to reach for better graphics is completely superfluous today:
"Hey, video game industry, what are you going to do when you can't make any more meaningful advances in graphics? I've been asking you this for like seven years now, because we're pretty much there. The next generation of game hardware will be all about taking us through that last 1 percent of photorealism, and I have to tell you, it's a gap that's not worth filling.
Remember, you need to keep at least a little bit of uncanny valley in your video games. I need to still feel good about shooting these dudes on the screen. I want the enemy soldiers to look like real video game people, not real people people. I don't want to look into the face of a victim and see their hopes and dreams die, the light going out of their eyes as they realize they will never again hug their wife and kids on Christmas. So, yeah, you can pretty much stop where you are."I recommend reading the rest of the article here.
While I enjoyed a good laugh out of it, the last paragraph in particular stuck to me. Even though I enjoyed barbarically murdering people in video games, I never thought of translating it to real life. For some reason, I thought that playing hundreds hours of Battlefield and Call of Duty would be enough for me to gauge the brutality of warfare.
I never tried to imagine what I would do in a situation where I face a man pleading for his life in the midst of battle when before he ran out of ammo, he was shooting at everybody in sight. I never tried to imagine if I would end this man's life or let him continue on, opening up the entirely plausible scenario of him stabbing me in the back once I turned around. I never tried to imagine if I even had the guts to take away somebody's life while erasing any possibility of letting him continue his future plans of proposing to a girl he loved, visiting a sickly mother, or going on a trip around the world with his best friend.
That was when I decided that I could bring myself to be part of the military.
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