I decided to join the military for reasons both patriotic but also intensely personal.
My father grew up in a mud hut in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India. He was the youngest of nine children and the first in his family to attend college—an education made possible only by his eight siblings pooling their wages. After graduation, he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to build and run a pharmaceutical plant. Through ingenuity and an enterprising spirit, he became successful at a remarkably young age.
When I was 2, our life in Lagos ended violently. Five armed men broke into our home, killed our dog, pistol-whipped my father, and threatened my mother as they demanded money from the company safe. We fled Lagos with nothing, and started over in America.
My father took a job at a company that supplied souvenirs to theme parks in Orlando, Florida. My childhood memories are punctuated by Space Shuttle launches seen from my school courtyard, and by the bone-rattling double sonic booms of the Shuttles’ reentry. Lessons about the power of American technology were literally falling from the sky around me.
My father never again saw the material success of his youth, and he faced setback after setback in America. But he always reminded me of the counterfactual: “But for the grace of this nation, you would be dead in a ditch in Lagos.” America gave him life, liberty, and possibility.
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more.
