It is Monday night, and I am driving my oldest son, 19, to a hotel where he will wait to be picked up by a bus. We’ve stopped at K-Mart for toothpaste and shampoo and a prepaid telephone card and other last-minute incidentals. I grab a pad of unlined paper and a box of envelopes, hoping they will remind him to write. We drag out his departure as long as we can. When the bus picks him up at the hotel, it will deliver him to the United States Army. A reservist, my son will spend the next 10 weeks getting fit, training to be a soldier, should he be called to active duty. The odds are great that he will. We are, after all, at war.
