conflicted Buddhist serving her country

[bianfu]

Hello everyone, I'm Bianfu. Growing up in a spiritually open household, I was always drawn towards Buddhism but it has only been in recent years that I have come to call myself a "Buddhist". Buddhism just seems to click with my personal views on life. But there is one brickwall that stands between me and my continued growth. It's this inner

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[sidthesquish]

hahaha, actually this is something I have dealt with a lot. I am a member of the United States Army reserve. I was deployed as part of OIF3(2004ish) in Kuwait with a signal unit. I had always had an interest in buddhism before I got deployed, read a few books attended a few dharma talks. I was very lucky in my deployment to spend the entire time in Kuwait working in server rooms monitoring networks, relatively safe. I found I had a lot of downtime and took advantage of it by reading ALOT. I took advantage of amazon.com and collected a large library of buddhist texts, which I read avidly. This is also the time period of my life where I joined this community. I found it hard at first to reconcile my duality, but I'm of the firm opinion that buddhist teachings can improve the life of any person regardless of what they do in life. If it helps than keep it up.

The military life can be very trying, but very rewarding too.

I don't know if this helps but here are two posts I made from Kuwait about this problem. They are old, but there are still many people who are still gracing this community actively. I hope it helps:

http://community.livejournal.com/buddhists/656214.html
http://community.livejournal.com/buddhists/658799.html

[bianfu]

Thank you for this very insightful post. I appreciate it and will most certainly be checking out those two links.