How I got started... (Part I)

In my last post, I promised that I would explain why I decided to pursue poker. There were a few precipitating factors, but one major theme stands out among all others. I'll try to explain this as succinctly as I can, but it could take a few posts.
As a relatively intelligent, academically-inclined and scientifically-minded individual, the most obvious career path for me involved heavy institutional training. My first choice, which was influenced mostly by my father's advice, was to pursue a science degree with an ROTC scholarship (and subsequently 4 years of service as an officer in the military). By the time the 9/11 attacks occured, I was a junior in the Army ROTC program at a state school in East Texas. I was confused by our whole approach to finding this "Bin Laden" character, apparently involving a large and inordinately delayed troop deployment. Did capturing a terrorist leader in a technologically underdeveloped country really require opening a full-blown war theatre with troops that are trained to conduct conventional warfare (meaning, shooting and blowing shit up, which is the only thing that the military was designed to do at the time, and rightly so)? This was a legitimate question that most of the active duty commissioned officers running the ROTC program at my school could never answer sufficiently (either because they were aggravated by my inquisitive temperament, and/or because they honestly didn't know), and suprisingly, an issue that seemed of little consequence to my fellow cadets. Eventually, I attempted to break my commissioning contract during the Spring following 9/11, but one of the officers convinced me that I was merely having problems with the bureaucratic elements of the military, and that I just needed to get into ranger school and think about moving into special forces, where this would be less of an issue. But over a year later, after we were well into the Iraq invasion, I found myself unable to cope with the military decisions that were being made by our government. I broke my contract assuming that I would most likely have to serve 4 years in the Army anyway as an enlisted soldier (that meant starting out as a private as far as I knew). Most of my family members and a few of my friends thought this was idiotic; since I would have to serve anyway, why not just "honor" my contract and serve as an officer instead of going through the military as a lowly enlisted soldier? Wouldn't that be easier as a lieutenant? And the answer for me was, no, because personally I felt I would share more responsibility as an officer than as a private for the ill-conceived and ill-motivated plans of the American government and the financial powers-that-be. At least as a private, I could say, "Hey, I tried my best to get out, and at least now I don't have to lead people towards a goal that I don't believe in."
Well, fortunatelyfor me, my battalion commander decided that he wanted me to write a letter to the regional commander explaining why I was choosing to break my commissioning contract. From my perspective, this was an attempt by our newly-appointed battalion commander, Col. Pike, to cover his ass, since, in his first 6 months of command at our unit, he had already removed several cadets from the program for relatively insignificant indiscretions (ironically, one cadet I knew was kicked out for getting caught "drinking underage"; responsible enough to carry gun-powered weaponry and receive training for managing military personnel, but apparently not responsible enough to have a drink at a party...). So he's kicked out several cadets, some of which were removed before ROTC training resumed in the Fall (he arrived at the unit around June or so), and now he's got this soon-to-be butter bar (this is just a less than endearing term for a second-lieutenant) who's trying to break his contract. By this point, I was still in the process of finishing up my physics curriculum, but had effectively completed the ROTC program, pending my college graduation; my first two years of college, I was a computer science major, so when I changed degree plans, I fell a bit behind on the 4-year college graduation thing. This Col. Pike guy told me that not only would they most likely force me to serve as enlisted, given the fact that I "obviously" waited to quit until I had taken advantage of all the scholarship and monthly stipend funding available under my contract, but that he would also personally request that I be involuntarily enlisted AND be held responsible for paying back all of my scholarship tuition in full. He assured me that I was going to spend the next several years of my life paying for my mistake. So I wrote a letter to the ROTC regional commander for this fucker at the end of November. By March of the next year, I recieved a letter stating that I wouldn't be required to serve an enlisted contract (whew! especially since Jesper and I had just met, and I had a new reason to stick around in Nacogdoches), and that I would only need to pay back my tuition to DFAS. Thank god for imperceptive sociopaths who can't think through their malevolent prick-headed deeds. Being asked to write that letter pretty much saved my ass.
I'll try to post again tomorrow and hopefully I can wrap up this topic.