Last week, I left for my long-awaited vacation and the journey was a minor disaster. The first leg of my transcontinental flight was delayed by almost two hours, such that I was worried about missing my connecting flight in Chicago. When I got to O’Hare with about 40 minutes to spare, I thought with relief that the hard part was over.

After almost 3 hours of waiting, they let the passengers off the plane so we could stretch our legs. We were told it was the battery pack for some emergency lights that was the problem, but who could say for sure? Another hour or so passed and we were herded back on the plane—that seemed like a good sign. Wrong again. We disembarked a second time and the crew handed us meal cards so we could get something to eat from the nearby food court. A few minutes after I’d gotten my food, the man who’d been sitting next to me on the plane came by and said the flight wouldn’t be leaving til the next morning. This after over 6 hours of waiting. So, off we all went to various hotels with more meal cards in hand. I called a friend and my brother so they could send yet more emails to my husband, who was supposed to meet me at the other end.

This was one of the worst flying experiences I’d had, and I was furious about losing a whole day of my trip. On the shuttle bus to the hotel, however, riding with people from other cancelled flights, I was roused from my self-pity long enough to watch a new United States Army recruit burn off his nervous energy with small talk, while another recruit sat silently, off in his own world. The kid was skinny and tall, his big ears seeming to stick out even more with his recent crew cut. He tried to strike up a conversation with a boy of 6 or 7 sitting next to him (the eldest of three boys traveling with their young mother), asking him where he was going. The question was a way for him to tell the boy and anyone else who cared to listen where he was headed—South Carolina, for boot camp. “Wanna trade?” he asked the boy, laughing. A middle-aged woman sitting across from him, and next to me, smiled in a maternal way, and then she caught his eye and pointed to her wrist. She was wearing about 5 rubber bracelets of various hues (inspired by the original yellow Live Strong bracelet put out by Nike for the Lance Armstrong Foundation) representing various causes, one of them an olive green one with “Support the Troops” stamped on it. They nodded and smiled at each other, and after a few minutes, she asked him where he was from. Kalamazoo, Michigan. He and the guy sitting next to him were going to be training as mechanics.

At one point, I thought about asking him, “what the hell are you doing joining the Army now?” It seemed incredible to me that young men like him, fresh-faced and eager (and naïve? overzealous?) were still willing to serve. I wondered if he was joining because he felt a patriotic duty, whether he planned to make the Army his life, or use it as a means to some other end—a college education, a career, a ticket out of his hometown. But I kept quiet. Something about the young man’s cheeriness made me sad. He seemed so desperate to connect with the people around him, to mark this momentous passage in his life in some way.

The small talk continued in spurts, the young man trying to draw out the little boy with more teasing questions. Turns out the boy wants to be a fighter pilot when he grows up, according to his mother, who expressed vague worries about such a prospect. As we neared the hotel, the middle-aged woman said something like, “as long as you don’t get sent anywhere that begins with ‘I’” to which the new recruit replied that he didn’t think that was likely, and besides, he and the guy sitting next to him were going to be mechanics, so they’d be at the base fixing up the vehicles, not riding around in them. Then he added, shaking his head, “no, I don’t wanna shoot anybody or be shot at.” An understandable sentiment, and one that I happen to share, but an odd thing for a soon-to-be soldier to say out loud, I thought.

This last little exchange made me think that perhaps I was seeing George W. Bush’s dipping approval ratings in action: the supporter of troops hoping that this young man end up nowhere near that unnameable place; the young recruit not wanting to serve his country or his president in that particular way. My hopeful reading of the subtext is of an implicit disapproval of the mess in Iraq, and the acknowledgment that supporting our troops is not synonymous with supporting the cause that’s getting those troops killed. Maybe that's being too optimistic. When we got off the bus and entered the hotel lobby, I headed for the front desk. Rather than getting in line right away like the rest of us, the young man looked around, taking in the details of the Ramada—the neutral, plush carpeting, the upholstered chairs, the hushed atmosphere, and dim lighting. He was impressed, his eyes as wide as his grin, making me think that he’d never spent a night in a hotel—“not bad!” he said. His enthusiasm about this generic airport hotel lobby made me even sadder. Or maybe it was guilt. What to me—a middle-class academic—was a great nuisance, was to this kid a surprising and delightful gift on his last night of civilian life. He was not at all unhappy that his flight had been cancelled. I got to see different parts of the world by saving up and going on vacation, staying at hotels as a matter of course. He got to see parts of the world by saying that he’d be willing to die for his country, even if he wasn’t.

At the time, I was too wrapped up in my own immediate problems to give this young man’s situation much thought. And I have no great insights now. But imagining him at boot camp in South Carolina while I sit here, an ocean away, I can’t help but think how insulated we Americans are from the war in that place that begins with “I,” or the wars in any other far flung place that we’ll never see. And though I want to support our troops, I’m not sure what that means in these times, and I feel I have very little to offer to young recruits like the kid who crossed my path so fleetingly. Be safe, the woman on the bus said.