Real men fight in wars, even if they don’t believe in them.

In 1968, John’s junior year, reports poured in about unthinkable war casualties all around Vietnam.  Everyone had an opinion, and John listened to all of them.  But the more John absorbed these viewpoints, the more he suspected that these people didn’t really know.  It was not that he doubted their conviction; in fact, he admired their passion and felt invigorated by the era.  But he asked himself about the lives of the people behind the opinions, and the more he asked, the more he became convinced that few of them had ever gone out and looked for themselves.

…

Early in 1969, during John’s final semester of high school, a girl attended one of his classes wearing a black armband.  B-52 bombers had conducted recent heavy raids against targets near the Cambodian border.  American protesters were demanding that the United States leave Vietnam.  The girl made strong statements that day; she believed in her antiwar message.  John pictured himself as a soldier risking his life in combat and wondered whether he would appreciate this girl and her armband and her fist, but he could not decide; he did not have enough information.  And this was John’s central problem in life, right there in the classroom, right next to the girl with the armband and students chanting, “Right on!”  He didn’t have answers.  He had never gone and seen for himself.

John hit on an idea: the military could take him into the world; by joining the military he could see for himself.

—Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II 74-5 (2005 Ballantine Books Mass Market ed. 2004).