I was just discussing this with my husband – who is from Iran – last night.

A little background for the discussion: We're in the midst of a struggle for my 18-year old son to get his authorizations through for clinicals to become an EMT on his road to becoming a paramedic. He's a high school senior in a health sciences academy magnate school program. His last class he needs to graduate with his EMT full certification is taught by the local community collge. This community college class was contracted with the county EMS to teach this class to the onboarded apprenticeship program members. My son has been interning live in-field with the county EMS for months now. He's already worked at least 3 times the clinical hours and 5 times the patient touches required for the coursework at the community collge. Unfortunately, none of those hours or touches counts for the class.

Anyway, he's having trouble getting his clinical hours scheduled because he's still a high school student and has to have permission from the school to skip a day – yes, you read that right – JUST ONE FRELLING DAY. He needs four days in a row before this director will schedule his clinical hours. He can work Good Friday and Saturday and Sunday. But, he has to have permission from the principal to skip Monday. He's not allowed to choose to skip a day, even though he's an honor roll student and is 18 years old.

I pointed out that he's deemed not adult enough to skip one frelling day of his last semester of high school even though doing so may block him from completing a necessary part of his training – and possible knock him out of the apprenticeship program that is intended to pay his way through paramedic degree and then on to medical school. But, a 17 year old is deemed adult enough to die in defense of his country.

My husband said something along the lines of that the 17 year old is just meant follow orders and to be fodder on the front lines. I told him that wasn't true. That America's modern military were not intended to be fodder on the battle field – that our services invested too much training and technology in that 17 year old to just throw his life away as fodder on the battlefield. I explained that our service people are trained to survive and even to resist criminal orders that drove them into battles more like meat grinders than tactically important maneuvers.