My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

I want to explain what that work is, because it is the whole hinge of this and almost nobody outside knows it exists.

A soldier who is about to deploy needs a will. A twenty-year-old with a wife and a baby and a deployment date needs a will, a power of attorney, and somebody to sit down and explain what those two things are and what they are not.

That is what the legal assistance office does. Every day, all day, for free, for anybody with a military ID.

I estimate I have drafted or reviewed something in the region of nine hundred wills.

I can tell you what most of them look like. A nineteen-year-old private with a savings account containing eleven hundred dollars and a truck he is still paying off, sitting across a folding table from me, being asked to think about a thing nobody that age should have to think about.