Six years ago, I joined the National Guard. If not for the military, my career choices in tech and a master’s degree would naturally have led me to occupy very homogeneous social circles. I do occupy some such circles, but I also ditched my laptop and home office to spend July in Fort Stewart, Georgia, in the rain and heat, training for combat with other soldiers from across America who work in every trade imaginable: Big Four consultants, mechanics, cops, firefighters, waiters, stay-at-home moms (for 50 weeks a year), software developers, and truck drivers.
The Reserves and National Guard provide a way for young, ambitious people to give something to their country without putting their careers, their dating, and their desire to build a family on hold. The military needs soldiers who have the brains to be corporate attorneys, bankers, journalists, and machine learning engineers in its ranks. What’s more: America’s white-collar workforce desperately needs the kind of people who are willing to drop what they are doing to be activated for hurricane relief, to sacrifice occasional weekends training in deserts and swamps, and, sometimes, to go to war.
