War and Peace

In a few months, a movie called 300 is coming out. It is a movie based off of Frank Miller's (of Sin City fame) graphic novels which are in turn based off of the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae. I have always been fascinated by this battle for a number of reasons. It is an epic last stand of the little guy fighting for freedom from the bigger guy. It has a bittersweet ending, and on top of that, you have the little guy inflicting losses of 5:1 (or if some ancient historians are to be believed, 300:1).
Greece is being invaded by the Persians, and so it is decided to gather at a narrow pass to delay them. Most of the city-states of Greece send men, Sparta sending a small contingent of 300 soldiers. The Persian Empire is at its peak and fields an army of 500,000 men (given the time between me and them, the numbers might be a little fuzzy. The point is that the numerical difference is huge) of assorted races. Battle ensues, and while it isn't the biggest battle, since the Greeks purposefully only sent a small portion of their total armies, it was extraordinarily bloody, given the size of the battlefield. After a two days of combat, a traitor showed Xerxes a way around the pass. Finding this out, Leonidas (king of the Spartans, who expected to die, as did all the Spartans, at this battlesite) called a council, and sent the allies all away, staying with only the Spartans (Actually 700 Thespians refused to leave. They all voted to stay with the Spartans. They were also awesome). In the end, the Spartans died, as they came to do. A few days later, the Persians met up with about 80,000 Spartans at Plataea. This brings me to the interesting part.
Sparta was not a free society. Athens is known as the birthplace of democracy, but Sparta was a very strict Oligarchy. Slavery was the basis of their society. All men were required to serve for about...70 years (no, really, that long) in the military. Defective children were thrown out to die. But they were willing to die for freedom. Xerxes offered them a position at the head of his troops, but they refused. They decided that they would rather die free. When told that if they surrendered their weapons they would be allowed to live, the Spartans purportedly answered "Come and get them". And they died for the men from other cities. The Athenians lived very differently from the Spartans, yet the Spartans died for the Athenians.
As I am leaving college and eventually entering the military, I keep getting hit with the irony that in the Army, I will have no freedom, yet the Army was established to keep America free. Some give up their freedom that others might have some. This seems so wrong, and unfair. The Spartans trained their whole life under complete, forced discipline so that when Freedom needed to be protected, they could be there (we are ignoring the Peloponnesian War for the purposes of this post). As I struggle with discipline, I keep coming back to the idea that the best way to find overall freedom is to discipline myself in the small things. I do not like doing homework because I see it as a bar to me having fun, but if I made myself do my homework everyday, I would not have to worry about getting it done, and would be able to do the things I wanted to do. Hopefully this lesson will one day move past my head and make it's way into my heart.
--Andy