The Tripartite Soul

I appreciate this guy's motivation, from a New Yorker comment on Theatre Of War, a play about the Scottish regiment deployed to Iraq:

At least one veteran declared himself a conscientious objector to the general approval of the play. "I didn't join the Army because I didn't want to work the deli counter at a convenience store," Jason Everman, a heavily tattooed, bearded veteran of the Army Rangers and the Special Forces, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, said, referring to the play's depiction of soldiers as having been motivated to enlist by the lack of alternatives. "I joined the Army because I had a specific agenda: to develop the warrior aspect of my persona."

As a teen-ager living in Washington state, Everman explained, he had been inspired by the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini." "He was the quintessential Renaissance man: an accomplished warrior, an artist, a philosopher," he said. Everman had already taken care of the artistic aspect of his persona, a friend who was with him said, at which Everman admitted that he had been a guitarist. (No kidding: post-encounter intelligence reveals that in the early nineties he played with Nirvana and Soundgarden.) Having left the military in 2006, he is now studying philosophy at Columbia University. "It's the Platonic ideal of the tripartite soul," he said. "Wisdom, courage, and temperance. Those are Plato's words, not mine."

Here's the Cellini autobiography.