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.

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.

The forms take about forty minutes. The conversation takes as long as it takes.

I have had three of those young men come back afterwards and sit down again and tell me things that had nothing to do with a will, because forty minutes across a table is longer than anybody in their family had spent asking them a direct question in years.