Thank you. I remember the president at the college where I worked saying one of the professors showed him a combat infantryman’s badge with great pride from his time with the 4th Infantry in Vietnam. The president didn’t get it.
That tracks with something I have long thought, that even super rich corporate heads and mega rich Hollywood celebrities in their old age while being happy with their success sometimes give thought to themselves as just men, and are happy that they served in the military and remember that with all that the world admires them for now, in their inner life they feel more fulfilled because they served on that submarine tender, or as a gunner on that bomber, or pulled that hitch in the Army and knowing that they held their own as just one of the guys in life, that their man credentials at the more basic level are solid as well as their second life as business titans or movie star.
It gives them layers, a WWII submarine vet in San Diego that I knew, said that Tony Curtiss always showed at the reunions and that it was all sub tender guy Bernard Schwartz during the reunions, he was proud of it and proud to have that place among the guys in his private life, and then he went back to being Tony Randall back home, he had layers and they are the kind of layers that are important to a quality man.