Hopefully this is a good omen of things to come! It's a honor to be chosen for the Our Vet Success's 2014 list of veterans in America making a difference.
It isn't that you have to have a beard to be a man (I just shaved mine off). It's that you have to have earned the right to consider yourself a man, to be a man. Oh sure, there's plenty of people who are going to tell you that you don't have to serve to be a man (99% of America to be exact), but let's face it, you and I both know that there's something that sets us apart. But maybe the 99% are right and us 1 percenters are wrong.
Do I ever want to tell them anything? Will this war still be raging in some form or another in the future? I would like to tell them why dad volunteered to go fight, about how noble his intentions were, how romantic the notion of going to war was supposed to be. How when you get there it loses all of that. In combat, you might wonder why you volunteered in the first place.