the stars.

In the army, stars are apparently very important. I don't mean in that way that stars were important in kindergarten - this isn't about teachers holding a star in front of you like a carrot on a fishing line to get you to behave. No, a star in the army is more like being kinged in chess. Suddenly, whole new directions are opened up to you. It would be like in kindergarten, when the teacher gave you a star, you became a teacher. It's probably best that the system doesn't work that way in elementary school.

I saw lots of stars this past week. I was an exhibitor (not an exhibitionist) at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting and conference. There were lots of people there, everyone from Senator's aides to high school ROTC kids to guys who work at Boeing. And then there were the people with stars, the generals, the big men who walked around with an assistant or six and basically just impressed everybody. I wasn't impressed, but that was because I didn't know any better. I take that back, I was impressed, but not with the men themselves, just the way everyone else deferred to them.

I was helping out at the Humvee booth, answering any software questions that came up about the prototype vehicle I worked on. Since pretty much no one had any questions for me other than ones you might ask a secretary, I had a lot of time to observe. And I was constantly amazed at the way people just swarmed like bees around a queen every time a dude with any stars came near. My dad calls this knowing which side your bread is buttered on, and I guess he's right. We did want to impress the generals with our new vehicle so that the army might end up buying a bunch of them. I understand that the world works this way. I'm just not used to seeing perfectly ordinary-looking men get royal treatment.

After one would leave, the guys working our booth would stand around and compare notes. They talked about generals like they were celebrities, referring to them by their last names and trying to gauge how impressed they had been. By the end of the three-day conference, I was starting to learn their names, and I'd long ago learned where to look for the stars on their uniforms. I suppose my bread is buttered on that side, too.

During the last day of the conference, maybe half an hour before it all closed down, while we were counting down the minutes and complaining good-naturedly about our sore backs and feet, a guy in a wheelchair came by. He was a soldier, a private first class who had gotten his leg blown up in Iraq. He told us how he'd been in one of our Humvees, for which he was thankful, when the explosion hit and fractured all but one of the bones in his right leg. He told us all this matter-of-factly, and talked about all the rehab he would have to go through before he would be able to get back to Iraq.

He could not have been even twenty years old.

This soldier, this kid, he did not have any stars. And yet he was the one who would be driving around this vehicle we were trying to sell, he was the one whose life would depend on it. The stars would be safely back at some remote headquarters while boys like this one fought and either lived or didn't. After he left, we all just looked at each other sort of dumbly. I didn't want to be there anymore, I didn't care which side my bread was buttered on. I just wanted to get out of there, and I can only hope that the guys with the stars know what they're doing.