Who we are

We are the members of the Ismaili Warrior Alliance, and this letter is for the one who is thinking about it.

You are not the first. Ismailis have served in the American armed forces for longer than this record reaches, and the record we keep begins in 1977 — five generations of Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen, with their names, their branches and their dates.

You will not be doing it alone. Whatever branch you are weighing, someone in this record took the same road: the recruiter’s office, the bus, the first week, the first time you were responsible for something larger than yourself.

We will not tell you it is easy. It takes years you will not get back, and it asks patience of the people who love you. It gives back a competence and a steadiness that do not leave.

We wrote these accounts down because service of this kind is usually kept inside a family and remembered in fragments. A name, a branch and two dates can survive where a longer story cannot. Written down, they can be read by someone who was not there, and checked by someone who was.

The record is public. The Alliance is private — a place to find one another, to ask what you would not ask a recruiter, and to hear it from a man who has stood where you are standing.

So go. Take the step you have been thinking about. And when you come back, come and tell us what happened.

We will write it down, and the next one will read it. That is the whole of what this is for.