I turned 18 while still in high school, which meant that one afternoon I came home from the dorms to fill out my green draft card at the post office. Not long after, I graduated and got ready to leave for New England, both for the summer and for the next four years.

Before I left, I had to get my booster shots updated. I went on Post with my mother to Kimbrough Army Hospital, where my father had been Chief of Surgery, to get them done. Shots aren’t a big deal for me, and as I waited I joked with the grunt who signed me in about having gotten tested for allergies there as a 6th-grader. After 22 pinpricks in my right arm, 20 in the left, and 5 painful shots in my shoulder, semi-regular boosters mean little. I got them taken care of, then sat there for the required waiting period, just in case there were any adverse effects.

When the girl came in, I noticed her because she was mousey but cute. She was a few inches shorter than my rather average 5’ 9”, with pale skin and a hint of freckles. Her fatigues made her look spunky, like someone’s tomboy little sister. I heard her tell the grunt that she was getting her boosters, too. She was going to Bosnia.

I stared at her, then looked away, then stared again for the rest of my visit. She didn’t notice; I was never really in her line of sight. But I watched her. I wondered how old she was; she was that kind of brunette that could have been 18 or 30. But she seemed my age or younger. She seemed like someone’s little sister. She probably was someone’s little sister. And she was going off to war.

Soon the grunt said could I go. So I walked out into the hot June sun, and thought about how wrong it all felt.

I’m a feminist, and was even more so eight years ago. But I’m also a Catholic and an Eagle Scout, and, first and foremost, I’m my father’s son. Meetings of my high school’s NOW chapter (supposedly the first in the country) and talk about equality didn’t mean anything when faced with the reality that I had spent the afternoon sitting inches from a girl who could potentially die while I went off to get drunk with America’s elite. It struck me as a great injustice. It struck me as a cosmic wrong. Down at my core, I felt like by all rights our places should be reversed.

This soldier was in my mind for weeks. I was still dating a girl in Severna Park at the time, which meant driving by Ft. Meade each way a few times a week. So I would think of this soldier every time I passed the base, and the hospital, and the commissary. Maryland nights are purple, and against them NSA stood lit up in sandstone orange and yellows, surrounded by satellite dishes, geodesic domes, and fences. Steam—the conspiracy-minded said it was smoke from burning documents—billowed skyward from the roof. I would think about the soldier, and Bosnia, and the heft of a rifle, and wonder where she was, and hope she was okay.

Then I moved away and forgot about her.

This week’s New Yorker brought her back to mind. It features a full-page photo of a brunette a lot like the one I sat next to in Immunology at Kimbrough. They have the same kind of face, and hair, and generic the-neighbor’s-sister appeal. The main difference between them is that the girl in this week’s New Yorker photo is missing the fatigues, and a leg.

First Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell is 24. My scan doesn’t do justice to the photo Martin Schoeller snapped of her. It’s truly beautiful, even the gray sheen of the prosthetic.

She didn’t lose her leg because of me. She didn’t save me from anything. And unlike the girl I watched get prepped for Bosnia, she wasn’t averting genocide or promoting the greater global good. Even if one accepts the notion that Saddam’s atrocities had to be stopped, Stockwell’s wound, received this year, is emphatically not a part of that conflict, because she received it confronting an insurgency that simple planning, foresight, and diplomacy—instead of grandstanding on aircraft carriers—could have avoided. She was fighting a stupid war in an empty place correcting the errors of an unconscionable ideology laced with more than a dash of greed.

I’m not the person I was at 18. I’m a lot bigger, and better, in many ways. But a lot smaller, too. I don’t wish it were me and not Stockwell. I don’t wish I could take her place. I’m a small man—an overgrown boy—who likes my legs, and my life, and my new apartment and my new pool table and my new polka dot-dappled Waterford Martini glasses. I have no reason to fight, and it’s doubtful I will ever be made to—in another few months, at 27, that green draft slip I signed will be just a scrap of paper.

But I want, desperately, for Stockwell—for Melissa—to have her leg back. For her not to have lost it at all. For her to be whole.

I’ll always pull for equal access, equal rights, equal treatment…even on the battlefield. But deep down, I’ll never really buy it 100%. Because I don’t want women to be in combat. I don’t want any of us in combat. I want all the neighbors' little sisters home, on America soil, standing there with two legs, where they belong.