Politics & Power Quote by Leon Askin

Drafted into a machine you never asked to join, then discovering it’s oddly compelling: Askin’s line captures the slippery way war repurposes people, especially those whose lives were supposed to run on art, not orders. “I was put in the Air Corps” is deliberately passive, almost bureaucratic. It shrugs off heroics and centers the real truth of mass mobilization: choice is often a luxury. Then he undercuts any expectation that he arrived prepared or ideologically primed. “Never educated to serve” isn’t just about training; it’s about identity. An actor’s education is observation, empathy, performance - skills that sound soft until a military system finds uses for them.

The turn to “very interesting” is doing the most work. It’s not triumphal; it’s a slightly bemused admission that even coercive institutions can be intellectually and emotionally absorbing. That phrasing also functions as self-protection. Calling wartime service “interesting” keeps trauma at arm’s length and avoids the moral inflation that veterans are often pressured into performing for civilians.

Context matters: Askin’s life spanned collapsing empires, fascism, exile, and postwar reinvention in American film and television. For immigrants and refugees in particular, U.S. military service could be both proving ground and ticket of belonging - a complicated bargain. The subtext is assimilation with friction: the Air Corps doesn’t just draft him; it remakes him, and he’s honest enough to admit the remake had a strange allure.