Hey, I'm new here and not part of the CF yet, but hopefully will be shortly. I'm just curious to know what made you want to join the army. The nobility of service? Philosophical reasons? You needed the job security? Army family? And for those who are in it now, do you think you had the right reasons for joining/has being a soldier altered your worldviews at all?
My story is that at about the halfway point in my last year of high school, I got accepted to university. I was happy, my parents where proud and quite frankly most people where shocked. I was a gifted kid who drastically underperformed in almost every academic category. I was lazy, depressed, nihilistic and pretty much just pissed off that "Life sucks and then you die". I coasted, by god did I coast. I wouldn't go to class, and I'd study just enough to pass the tests, counting on the exam to bring my marks up. I did this, and pretended I was happy with that, acted like a hotshot because I "cheated the system". That I didn't try at all and still got into university. School for me was pretty much a forum where I could find more parties, score more weed and play sports.
After school ended, this behavior continued, and one day I just decided that my life needed direction, that there was no way in hell I trusted myself enough to go to university and potentially waste my time and money because I knew I had to change the way I had been living for the last couple years of my life.
Philosophically, for me, the army made sense. I have a huge, huge respect for the men and women who put themselves in harms way and face danger for the sake of not only our country and way of life, but they also enforce the Canadian views of equality and human rights for anybody regardless of race, colour, creed or religious association. A good analogy for people in general is that there are 3 kinds of people: sheep, the general population who at mostly good hearted and unable to kill. Wolves, dangerous people who mean to do harm to others for their own personal gain. And then there are sheepdogs, people who risk their lives and use cunning and coordination to ethically defend the sheep from the wolves. Soldiers are not murderers, despite the fact that they do kill, they have RoE's that they abide by against a foe who's never even heard of the geneva convention. They see their friends killed by an invisible enemy, but their training and structure allows them to carry on protecting human rights when they have every reason pull a modern day My Lai. To me this is remarkable, and I want to be like that, I want it more badly than anything I've ever wanted.
So what's your reason(s) for joining/having joined?
