I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. After my first year of college I sat on a mountain of debt.

I decided to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery,

better known as the Asvab. I thought about enlisting in the military as men and my family had done.

I was proud of their sense of service. However, my decision was purely financial. Soon after, recruiters from the

major branches of the military called my home. But my local army recruiter was the most persistent. For nearly a month, he rang my phone. It felt daily. I didn't tell my parents. I stretched the phone cord out of the kitchen and into a hallway.

And listened, as he listed off the procedure for signing up.

On several occasions, I enjoyed talking with him.

Yet I never committed.

Then, one evening, while studying for an exam, his chief commander called instead.

He asked pointed questions that felt concerning.

He wanted to know if the recruiter had laid out all the benefits of enlisting in the Army.

I said yes, I understood them all then he asked had the recruiter made a remark that was

offensive I said no he hadn't.

Then, to my surprise, he said, you're not signing up now, but someday you will.

You need us. I know your type you're poor and smart you don't have many

options I hung up. What changed my mind? I was in a college course on the history of slavery and abolitionism.

There I studied more intimately the Religious Society of Friends.

I even considered life as a Quaker and went to meetings in Old City, Philadelphia.

I valued the work of folks I knew in the American Friends Service Committee and their

commitment to nonviolence. I wanted to be associated with people who sought to promote peace, whose vision of a world

meant the absence of the tools of war. Today's sobering poem lands a powerful reminder that even when we adhere to a belief against

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