In the case of my grandfather, it was money. Looking at the strata of poor white trash in southern Virginia back then, his family was poor but working, held no land (share cropping and co-op, working as hired hands if plots ran out), had little real property. He saw the Army as both a duty and a way out.

My grandmother was from a more affluent family, a sociological gap that was huge when viewed from there, but tiny from here; both families earned less in a year than I make in 6 weeks. Her fether's pay was steady, though, coming from caretaking a WPA dam site that brought hydroelectric power to the area around Galax and Hillsville.

My grandfather went to the service, trained up, and waited.  Ship out dates were kept close to the vest, no-one knew the timing or the plans.  In reality, the Army was just starting to become the logistics expert that it evolved into today, but back then moving men and material was an imposing task. Civilian freightliners, private boats never intended for wartime were used to transport troops. In the south, trains and busses were loaded with young men scrubbed clean of their backwater mud, young men from Kentucky and Virginia and Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas.  My grandfather told me once that he realized how big it all was when he met someone from Ohio.  He'd never seen anyone from Ohio, ever.  Couldn't imagine that they'd talk with such a flat accent, devoid of the slang he and his used.

They waited.  My grandfather, recently engaged, fretted. My grandmother would send him letters, with pictures of her in whatever catalog-purchased dress she'd recently acquired.  She would continue doing this, sending pictures of her in classic 40's catalog model style, not risque at all, just a refined touch that hardly existed in those parts.  A small gem of red hair and crisp cotton against the deep emerald greens of kudzu and honeysuckle. It drove him to distraction, and while waiting at camp to be shipped to one theater of war or the other, he decided to go AWOL.  I've written about it, how he was working in a clerk position that led him to "borrow" a blank three day pass, how he'd had the desk sargeant sign off on it unawares, and then left with nothing but his pass, an ID, and some change. Busses ran free to soldiers, and locals gave him rides until he got back home, where he saw my grandmother one last time before leaving for war.  Got back to base and turned himself in at the gate.  They let it slide with a very stern warning...they could have shot him, but they needed young men "no matter how stupid."  Problem was, his unit had shipped off already. He was put in the brig, and told to stay at the ready.  Three days, they let him out and put him in a new company.  A week later, they head off to New York, which meant: Europe.

My dad sent me an email today about him: "He landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day and saw a lot of his comrades and fellow countrymen die on that  foreign shore. He was one of General Patton's 3rd Army troops and fought right through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.  Wounded in hand-to-hand fighting in the French town of St. Dizier, the old man was patched up and continued fighting....the Battle of the Bulge, the Breakout and all the other major battles for the men of the 3rd. They fought on until, as my Old Man puts it, they "ran out of Germans to fight" and Gen. Patton took a piss into the Rhine."

I'd seen him with 1st Army patches, which may have been his Korea assignment.  He slogged through there in the cold and muck, and I believe that took it out of him.  By the time they started talking about promoting him to master sargeant, they were also talking about sending him to Vietnam to train southern Vietnamese.  He'd had enough political war, and resigned literally moments before he would have been promoted, taking a cut in retirement pay to avoid that last war.

The picture of him at his retirement signing...they take this official picture of you as you sign out. He has a look in his eye, staring out over the lens of the camera, staring out past the fly-specked windows of that hot and dusty Ft. Bliss office, staring out into the unknown country that he'd served but hardly lived in.  That look is lost, adrift. He'd been a soldier to that day. Then, not.

He struggled with alcohol. He never struggled to find work, never shy about needing to work hard. A man works. He does what he has to do. No matter what it is, he does it.  Working as a pick up mechanic, a security guard, and finally a Teamster, driving trucks until one nearly killed him.

My dad:
"In February my Old Man will turn 87. He's not as quick as he once was and has definitely slowed down some, but still drives my soon to be 83 year old mother through the countryside on sight-seeing trips, doctor visits and grocery runs. Mom can't drive anymore. There's no one else to do it for them so he knows that he must. It gives him purpose everyday. The driving is that important. I mention this because he once told me that a man must have a purpose to get up in the mornings. I believe that, and he has set a good example as proof of his words."

I grew up with this, that our action and inaction are what make our image in other people's eyes.  That our ability and inability, what we choose to do and how we choose to do it, is what defines a man.  Not just what we do, but why we make the choices we make, the spectrum between self serving and selfless, how we help or hurt. Our vocation. Our purpose.

Every day, some men and women wake up and are parents, are teachers, are mill workers or mechanics or farmers. Secretaries, IT workers, clerks. Scientists, Doctors, clergy. They wake up and find that reason to do what they do, and they do it.

Every day, for reasons too complex to spell out, some men and women wake up as soldiers.  And once they are that, it never stops even when the uniform comes off, the measure of who they are being not just what they have done, but why they have done it.