“The Question People Ask Veterans”

When people find out that I’m a veteran, a certain question sometimes comes up sooner or later. It happened to me once at dealer school in Las Vegas. A few students—some young Chinese girls in the class—asked me directly, “How many people have you killed?” They probably didn’t mean anything bad by it. To them it was probably just curiosity. A lot of people around the world only see the military through movies, television, or the news, and those stories tend to focus on combat and dramatic moments. From that perspective, soldiers can look like characters from an action film, and the question comes out bluntly without much thought about what it means to the person being asked.

When someone asks me that question, though, it always feels strange. Military service is not a scoreboard. It isn’t something where a scorekeeper tracks numbers like in a video game. When I think about my time in the service, the things that come to mind aren’t tallies or dramatic scenes. What I remember are the long days of training, the discipline, the responsibility, and the people I served with. Most of military life is not the cinematic version people imagine. It is work. It is preparation. It is learning to rely on the people beside me and making sure they can rely on me in return.

So when someone asks me how many people I’ve killed, my honest reaction is that the question misses the point of what service really means. Being a veteran isn’t about counting anything. It’s about having been part of a system built on duty, teamwork, and responsibility. The most important memories most veterans carry aren’t about violence at all—they’re about the friendships formed under pressure, the strange places we find ourself in, and the lessons you carry long after you take the uniform off.

I’ve learned that when people ask that question, it usually says more about how they understand war than it does about my experience in it. Many people simply don’t have another frame of reference. They imagine soldiers as characters in a story rather than as ordinary people who served in extraordinary circumstances. When I run into that question now, I usually just smile, shrug a little, and let the conversation move somewhere else.

Because the truth is that military service, at least the way I remember it, isn’t about numbers at all. It’s about the people you stood beside and the responsibility you carried while you wore the uniform.