Brian Turner

Up to the point that the conversation always went like this.

It was nearly verbatim every single time.

Hey, Sergeant T, I heard you have a master's degree.

Yeah, I do.

And then the other person would say, oh, what are you doing here?

And it was never like sort of, like a degree was some crazy, difficult, unattainable thing.

So it didn't matter what it was in.

It was just like, why would you be here if you had one of those things, you know?

Yeah.

Well, that's partly why, and I'm not trying to be coy with this answer, but that's partly why I tried, that was my initial impulse for writing the memoir.

straight answer because there's surface answers like i come from a military family with a going back to the american civil war and the wars you know um there's uh well i mean there's several reasons that are very clear like that but even when i say say that particular like most complicated decisions there's a field of sort of um uh

qualities that come together, there are components that come together to make the decision.

So if I take just one thread in that decision, which is the long line of military service in my family, what does that mean?

You know what I mean?

It's like, just because people before me served, how does that, what inheritance am I talking about?

What does it mean to inherit that?

And psychologically, when I'm seven, and I'm seven years old, and I'm in Fresno, California,

And I'm laying underneath the coffee table in the front room of my grandparents' house.

And there's Westerns, they called them, on television, which are really wars of colonial conquest of the American West and nations, native nations that the Americans were fighting against, right?

And so there's war on television.