For a brief moment my son John and I got President Clinton, Oprah, Bush Senior, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush and W Bush to all agree with each other and with Jim Lehrer (of the News Hour). What they agreed on was that in our book Keeping Faith—A Father-Son Story of Love and the United States Marine Corps, John and I had told the truth about the anti-military snobbery that faces those who volunteer for service from the upper (and educated) classes.

I know these living symbols of left and right wing politics agreed with our book because they all wrote to me to say so and/or had me on their TV shows and said so. Keeping Faith generated the handwritten notes from Clinton, the Bush family members, and our appearances (talking about our book) on Oprah and the News Hour followed. And now both President Obama and the First Lady are working hard to restore the place of our military in the mainstream.

What all these symbols of left/right politics all had in common was the fact that they were moved by the father-son story John and I tell where we discover that being part of something bigger than yourself can change you for the better.

President Obama made the same point we make in our book when he went to Columbia University, during the 2008 campaign, and challenged the school to readmit ROTC to campus. (The school's president then wrote an open letter in response point blank refusing to do so!)

President Obama knows that it is time to grow past two wrong "reasons" for why the upper classes usually don't encourage their children to volunteer: post-Vietnam lefty residue of anti-military bias and upper class snobbery.

Too many Americans believe that the military is a place for people with no "better" options. And the gays-in-the-military issue has just been the latest excuse for privilege factories, such as Harvard and Columbia, to use to make sure "our kind" are never even asked to volunteer. "Let the little people serve," has been the unspoken reality upper crust attitude. (The gays-in-the-military issue is the responsibility of Congress, not the military.)

Now we have a progressive president calling all Americans to serve their country from Teach For America and the Peace Corps to the military. And we are in the midst of an economic meltdown closely linked to selfish excess, greed and the "me" generation. It is time we all discover what my son and I discovered when he unexpectedly joined the Marines: the person standing next to you is as important as you are.

What Wall Street became, what Bernie Madoff represents, what is wrong with the wealthy elite, the fact our country has turned into a plutocracy, the class and social divisions… can all be healed if we Americans change our attitude to service -- and that includes the military. When we wrote Keeping Faith it was in the context of the Bush presidency and the Republican free for all of deregulated sanctified greed and selfishness. Bush said it all when he told America to go shopping after 9/11, while he asked military people to risk their lives. Where was the level playing field of shared sacrifice and service?

I hope people read (or reread) Keeping Faith in the context of the Obama moment when we are all being asked to sacrifice, and learn why I was so horrible and selfishly ignorant of the military and too much of a snob to approve of my son's volunteering and why and how we changed. I had no picture of how things would go once John joined. I vaguely imagined John leaving for boot camp, then being sent off to the ends of the earth the day he graduated. I was having an easier time imagining flag-draped coffins than visits to John's base or ninety-six hour passes and trips home. Why the hell was John going into the Marines?

It had been hard enough sending my two older children off to NYU and Georgetown. All I knew was that lots of Marines got killed. The idea of John going straight into the Marines after high school was disheartening. It was also embarrassing. Wasn't the military there to help poor kids "make something" of themselves? I did not relish the prospect of answering the question, "So where is John going to college?" from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard.

I didn't know any other parent at the upper crust progressive private school my kids went to (north of Boston) whose son or daughter was going into the military. I'm a writer. I never served. My son's little adventure – as I thought of it -- was humiliating, especially since he'd done so well in high school. And this was back in 1999. We weren't at war. And Clinton was president.

The very words "boot camp" were pejorative, conjuring up "troubled youths at risk." "But aren't they all terribly southern?" asked one parent, speaking of the Marines. "What went wrong?" asked another parent. The filmmakers of "American Beauty" made the villain an ex-Marine, complete with Nazi memorabilia and a terminal case of homophobia. It would be unlikely that any of my friends in Boston, New York, or LA would actually know any Marine serving. These days "our kind" did not mix with "such people."

Fast forward to the day John graduated from boot camp on Parris Island:

They sky was slate-gray. It was cold. I left my wife Genie sitting alone on the stands overlooking the parade deck. For a long time nothing happened as other parents began to arrive. Then we heard the platoons singing cadence as they began to form up in the distance. Before we could see them their voices floated to us on the chill wind. I squeezed Genie's hand.

I took a deep breath. I was happy. John was graduating! He had made it through boot camp!

Then came the parade and the saccharine upbeat canned speech sounding like something the Disney writers might have come up with for a new USMC ride about "your Marines." But nothing could cheapen the fact that there, on the parade deck, was the small red guidon snapping in the wind displaying the number 1093. Third man marching from the front, top of the row was a tall Marine, my son, in step with the rest.

I wiped my eyes and looked around. It occurred to me that this was the first time I'd ever been in an integrated crowd of this size dedicated to one purpose and of one mind. I had lived and worked in Africa for a year with a mixed-race movie crew back in the days when I was a movie director. I'd been in plenty of ball parks, concerts and mixed-race events. I had black, Hispanic, and Asian friends. This was different. The parents and Marines on PI that morning were not only of many races but were representative of many economic classes as well, from the very poorest who had arrived by bus or crammed onto the back of pick-ups to one or two parents who wore expensive suits and cashmere overcoats.

We were white and Native American. We were Hispanic and African-American and Asian. We were old Marines wearing the scars of battle, or at least baseball caps emblazoned with battles' names. We were southern white crackers from Nashville and pierced skinheads from New Jersey and black kids from Cleveland wearing ghetto rags and big white ex-cons of no fixed address with ham hock forearms defaced by jailhouse tattoos. We were fat mothers poured into bulging sweats and we were thin twelve-year old little sisters with big hair in miniscule skirts and skimpy tank-tops, coatless and shivering in the steady cold wind.

I heard many languages. Families full of brown babies, squat wide mothers and dark-skinned weather-beaten grandfathers were speaking Spanish. The aluminum stands groaned under the weight of large southern white tribes, their video camera-toting women painted gaudy, hair exploding in haloes of blond above huge bosoms, the guts of their men hanging over American eagle belt-buckles.
A Native-American with turquoise and silver braided into his...