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The military discriminates against uncloseted gays. I think this is pointless. But it doesn't make me want to jump in bed with law professors who, upset by this injustice, tried to ban recruiting on college campuses. What burns me is recruiters who hide the welcome mat when older folks roll by.

I'll leave the arguments in Rumsfeld v. FAIR to the legal geniuses. That's the case in which the Supreme Court ruled last week against the profs and in favor of the Solomon Amendment, which requires schools that accept federal money to let recruiters do their thing on campus.

Schools ought to welcome recruiters. I just wish recruiters - who sweet-talked one of my four daughters into the Army for the past eight years (with my blessing) and who hit on the others - would welcome me.

I'm not kidding. I've made serious, cunning attempts, using connections, appeals, etc., to muster up. No dice. At 53, I'm way beyond the official age limit.

My friends might find this pursuit odd. I'm not a hyper-patriot, a macho man or an adrenaline junkie on a quest to relive youthful delusions of glory. I'm not a fan of President Bush or his practice of preemptive war. I don't do vengeance. I favor negotiation and nonviolence over war.

I was in college near the end of the Vietnam War, which I opposed, and got a draft number, but then the draft ended. That was fine with me; I was on another path. Others took my place. Some say shut up: You blew your chance back then, when you were needed. But "back then" I was young and untarnished by compromises with the real world. Love would conquer all. I've learned since that neither the world nor I are pure enough to realize that ideal. I've seen idealists do atrocities and soldiers do good.

If so, then it's wrong for me to leave the hard, dangerous and psychologically taxing work of warfare to others, when I am capable of doing it myself - more so than many young people my daughters' ages.

Others like me are out there, I suspect. We've kept physically fit. We have well-honed skills. We've seen life and death and handled both. We haven't yet taken our turn. We understand what we're asking for. We can stand in for young people who don't, yet. We can do this for them.

The military knows what it wants, and right now this doesn't include people like me. As James F. Dunnigan, author of "How to Make War," notes: The military, with thousands of years of experience, understands well how to get what it needs, in ways the young recruits it favors never will.

But older warriors have their historical uses, too. Victor Hanson, in "The Western Way of War," notes that the ancient Greek hoplites, on whom our methods of warfare are based, obliged men to participate in the carnage of the phalanx up to age 60.

Older hoplites took responsibility for their war decisions in ways filmmaker Michael Moore, in "Fahrenheit 9/11," shows our elders don't. Members of Congress can only blanch when Moore asks if their kids, let alone they, are serving in Iraq.

Recruitment woes have the armed forces lately pushing their age limits to 40 and beyond - way beyond for doctors.

They'll take ex-cons. I don't see why they won't take strong, accomplished, mature folks like me. I wish our state's National Guard, for one, would take up our cause.