01-20-2018, 10:10 PM
(01-18-2018, 09:17 AM)Ed Hurst Wrote: Over the past week or so, I've been reflecting on my time in Europe and in uniform. Because of my involvement in the NATO Chapel program at AFCENT HQ, I came into close fellowship with a handful of people who had the highest security clearances. No, they never divulged anything they weren't supposed to, but they did unburden their souls of how painful it was to face the jarring disconnect between what they knew and what everyone else was led to believe. One man in particular struggled with his emotions; the deeper he got into that stuff, the more it drove him nuts. He had a conscience, and didn't do well with the necessity of induced schizophrenia that comes with national security. You have to understand that "national security" always means horrible and nasty evil our government does to people. Only those with a real talent for sanity could bear the burden with any degree of peace.
You can bet a lot of those people went into the field with the best of intentions, maybe even to "do good" or "change the system" and were totally blindsided by their experiences. While I don't think it was necessarily a moral failure with every case, it's certainly a good chunk of it. For some it was a lack of preparedness, or simply naivete.
I confess a vast ignorance of the details of national security, so my advice might not be accurate at all. However, given what we know about how far removed from shalom the modern nation-state is, unless you're called directly by God to get involved, I would steer clear of the high-level government and military involvement directly.