“And I actually always thought of the military as an ennobling and, you know, honorable option. But keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.”

I guess we all make different choices. The choice I made on August 19th, 1979, when ‘we weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point’, was to pursue the option of military service, so I raised my right hand, took an oath, and became a member of the United States Air Force.

Because, while there was no ‘active military conflict’ sounds like a rational argument, it’s a cheap rhetorical dodge.

The US Embassy in Tehran, American Territory, was taken and occupied by ‘Iranian Students’. Leonid Brezhnev presided over an apparently ascendant Soviet Union, still in the early stages of their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Russian and Cuban supported Marxists were well along the road to seizing power in several Central American countries.

I won’t claim these situations motivated my decision, or that I was even fully aware of their import at the time. I won’t claim that service to country was the prime motivator - it was secondary to the desire simply to join the Air Force, because it was exciting and cool. The service aspect was a side benefit, but it was there.

Maybe he actually considered it, maybe he didn’t. The beauty of it for Barry is that we only have his word on it.

Either way, it’s not really any more credible than hearing someone, anyone, pompously announce ‘yeah, well, I thought about being/doing/becoming a (fill in the blank), but decided not to’ when whatever fills in the blank comes up for general discussion.

Funny, how it’s usually the biggest, most narcissistic jerkwad that floats that line into a conversation.