Being a soldier sucks in many ways.  You lose autonomy, are sent to a place where people want to kill you, watch your closest friends die awful deaths, you occasionally have to take a life, you see horrible things in war– children cut in half, old men bleeding and crying.  It gives you a chance to prove your bravery and loyalty, I suppose, but other things do too.  I wouldn’t be a soldier for all the ducats in Dick Cheney’s Halliburton portfolio.

Still, I am soldiering on.  Just because I send a request for help to a dozen people and eventually hear back from two,  that doesn’t mean I should lose hope.  I can’t lose hope, quite simply, for without it my program would die.  It’s based on hope, an admittedly fucked up thing to base anything on in a covetous world that sends soldiers to kill people, at great expense, for often very flimsy reasons.