The Lord is a Man of War T-Shirt

When I was a junior at West Point, acting as a Cadre for the rising plebes, basic training or BEAST Barracks, I was confronted with a completely unexpected question. A female New Cadet knocked at my door and asked if she could have a personal conversation with me. I was a bit of a hard ass during BEAST, so this was way out of the ordinary. I could tell something was really bothering her, and I asked her to sit down. She explained that she was a Christian and that the more she was around West Point, the more the reality of what we had signed up to do was coming to light and she was thinking about quitting. The cadences, the training, the education, the stress all of it was to get us conditioned to be able to kill other people and to lead troops to do the same. She looked at me, not as her squad leader, but as another human being and asked me how I was able to justify that ideal. I was 19, almost 20, and I was floored, so I abandoned all auspices of being wise and simply did my best to