Soldiers have a specific way of relating to the truth: it matters to them. It is a matter of life and death to them.

So they judge people by a different standard of truth. And they judge politics differently. They are the first to know what kind of power comes from the barrel of a gun.

That is why soldiers make good revolutionaries, and that is why revolutions always acquire their most turbulent force and active expression among the men and women of the armed forces, the workers in uniform.

Soldiers are political scientists. No-one is more interested than they are, in what they are asked to die for. For this reason, no-one is closer to the heart of the people than soldiers are. When the people are rotten, soldiers cannot fight. When the people rise up, it is the soldiers who are always first to the front ranks.

We must learn to work amongst the armed forces.

—Mark Jones, 2000

My eldest stepson, Jessie, who I first met when I picked up his mother for a date 11 years ago, and who I have watched grow from a corpulent, chattering little boy into a strapping, handsome, 19-year-old man with his own son, joined the Army last July (2002). Children grow up and they make their own decisions. And we don't abandon them when those decisions fail to conform to our wishes.

He met me when I was assigned to 7th Special Forces Group in Fort Bragg. His Mom, my partner-in-life to this day, Sherry, was working as a civilian medical records clerk at one of the Troop Medical Clinics. She was holding down, heroically (in my view), this and another job at night to feed, care for, and otherwise sustain three small children by herself. The first thing Jessie asked me when I came by to take his Mom to a movie was, did I jump out of airplanes?

I did. He even came out to watch one of my free fall jumps at Raeford Drop Zone when he was 11. I didn't know then where that shine in his eyes – watching me descend under canopy to land ten feet from him in the pea gravel pit – would take him.

This week (February 2-8, 2003), Sherry and I drove to Fort Benning, Georgia, and we watched Jessie's fourth, then fifth and final qualifying static-line parachute jump. The next day we attended his graduation from the US Army's Airborne School, where, like me almost 33 years ago, he had silver wings pinned over his left breast pocket. An hour later, he secured his orders for assignment to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg – the very same Division to which I was assigned in 1971 after returning from Vietnam.

I fear he will soon be issued his desert camouflage uniforms, and that in short order he will be sent apart from his now eight-week-old child, Jadin, for so long that by the time our grandson walks, he will not know his father.

Now, flying in the face of my sometimes self-assured facade, Jessie has not done as I said, but as I did, and I am feeling somewhat helpless.

That was my second trip to Fort Benning in the past five months. I went there September last to visit Jessie when he graduated from Basic Training.

It was a hard experience to describe. Any time I am on an Army post, I am seized by a sense of both sadness and belonging. I lived a pretty nomadic childhood, and I never developed that sense of place that many people reserve for home. I'd be the last person to romanticize my own past – how trapped I often felt on active duty, how enraged I could become with the whole shadow army of bureaucrats, or how I lived in a kind of sub-clinical state of dread related to the physical risks of the career track I had taken. But it's my past, and that's where I have my sense of place, no matter the paradoxes.

I know an Army post. I know its social architecture. I know its energy ebbs and flows. I know its tendencies, its rules, its personality. I know where its advantages are hidden like treasures. I know its traps. I know what's edible and what's poisonous. I can navigate there. I know the language. My retirement ID is almost a diplomatic passport. I recognize all the hieroglyphics.

When, in September, I waited in the Sand Hills area at Fort Benning for Jessie to get a local pass, I strolled past the manicured grounds, the idle obstacle courses, the PT tracks, the classrooms, the barracks, the motor pools, the mess halls, the clinics, all the orderliness that contains not an ounce of anything commercial, that fits together coherently, coordinated to some singular purpose.

Gaudiness and commercialism are confined within the Shopette, a combination convenience store, video arcade, fast food joint in a single building with its single outside sign – isolated, so the anarchy of outside society is kept cleanly separated from the utilitarian beauty of the rest of post. Inside, the trainees, who are on some two hour respite, gaggle in the lines to buy shoe polish and razors, wolf down pizza, play the video games, and carry on slightly furtive conversations with a watchful eye ever trained for NCOs, especially drill sergeants. Absolute authority is ubiquitous.

Since I went through Basic Training some 33 years ago, much has changed. There was a draft then. Antibiotics could handle every known sexually transmitted disease. There was a Black Power movement gaining ground. The Cold War defined us. The scrambled eggs in the mess hall were a green mass reconstituted from some powder. Half the drill sergeants were bona fide sadists who stole from recruits, beat down recalcitrants behind closed doors, and referred to trainees as maggots, shitbirds, and dickheads. The pay was shamefully low, and a quarter of it was taken back in the pay line for various Army scams. The old cruelties have morphed into a kind of humorously benign authoritarianism, as conscious as any physician's office of the potential for litigation. The physical brutality, direct and indirect, that trapped us on one side, with the exotic, fatal mystery of Vietnam on the other, is gone. Tobacco, our truest friend and pacifier, is now banned. As I said, a lot has changed.

But there is an essence there – seeing these hairless, pimply lads trying to fit themselves to a new and as-yet unformed identity – that made me deeply sad. Not out of empathy for the young men so much, as self-pity associated with plain, garden-variety mortality. I felt old.

That was me once, just as young and real and unformed and charged up on ignorance, hormones, and unknowably remote possibility. I saw those boys, and I became overwhelmingly aware of how unlike my post-adolescent expectations my future then would become. I looked at these shaved down youngsters in their cherry uniforms, and all I could see was how little they understood that every passing day was further circumscribing some of their own potentialities, and opening up others.

I'd have never seen the inside of a college classroom had it not been for the Army. I'd have never traveled to Guatemala or England. I also doubt I'd have ever taken from another human being the one thing I can never give back: his life.

I could not know the first time I received post privileges in Basic Training, when I rushed down to the PX to get half-pissed with my associates on 3.2% beer, that in a very few months I was to become a witness to murder, that I would be strung out on opium-laced marijuana, that that I would learn to close myself off from my own actions, my own brutality, and don a hard shell that would never completely come off. I was to become infected with a shapeless covert rage that would bury the fearful, bright-eyed, expectant boy from Basic Training for good.

I saw those kids at Fort Benning. I mourned the buried boy. And I felt old.

I wrote something to a list about my emotional reaction to Jessie's military service recently, and a self-righteous shit wrote me back that Jessie had chosen his course of action, he had made his decision, and if he is lost in this gangster's project of international plunder, oh fucking well...

I didn't bother to tell him that I was as concerned with the possibility that Jessie would learn xenophobia, that Jessie would be called upon to kill, that Jessie would have his human trust buried, as I was with the prospect of Jessie being killed in action – a dreadful possibility to be sure, but one I consider more remote than the others. Things are just never simple enough for an ideologue who still believes that soldiers are all robot killers, and that the world is divided into good and evil.

I remember a passage from Grundrisse, a startling declaration by Marx, that "Society does not consist of individuals." Some people have taken comfort from religion. Some people from therapy. I found mine, and the way out of the morass of my own past, in these forbidden texts.

"Society does not consist of individuals."

My initial confusion about this statement was based on my fixation on nouns and my inattention to verbs. "Society does not consist of INDIVIDUALS." Absurd. Of course it does. But my stroll through Fort Benning and the sealed porches of my own memory reminded me that "Society does not CONSIST of individuals... but EXPRESSES the sum of connections, relations, in which these individuals stand with respect to each other."

I don't need to get off the hook, to be morally absolved. I figured out a long time ago that we can't rewind and re-record life. But the role of soldier existed long before I took it, and it exists now, as Jessie occupies it. I reproduced that role in my time, and now I am transforming that role in the context of a politics of resistance. Hope, as Brecht said, is hidden in contradictions.

There is hope for Jessie. It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity, that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by-and-by transform the whole edifice of human relations.

Meanwhile, I will love my son. I will wish as fervently and vainly as anyone else. And I will continue to fight for the political destruction of these posturing, caviar-and-cocktail-fed Washington thugs.

If we want simple, we'd best avoid life.