Of course it changes you.  Anyone who says differently is lying.

That's to be expected, of course, since lies are practically our stock-in-trade.  It's not so much the overt lies you have to watch out for.  It's the partial lies, the half-truths, the sins of omission, questions without answers and answers without questions.  For every truth you learn, there will be three more you didn't.  Whoever is doing the telling just decided to let the least damaging secret slip.

Take, for instance, the Garden Precepts.  I'm sure you can recite them by now: "Work hard, study hard, play hard."  As long as you do those three things, you're more or less free to choose your own path.  You can even have friends on the outside, right?  Well, technically, you can.  But they don't tell you what it's like trying to pretend you're a normal kid when you're really a trained mercenary.

How do you explain to your friends, when you walk into a restaurant, that nervous flickering of the eyes as you size up the room in the first instant?  What do you tell them, when they ask?  "Oh, the man at table three has a concealed gun, but he doesn't know how to use it.  The man behind the register is unarmed, but he knows how to handle himself in a fight."  Do you tell your friends that you need to sit facing the door, in case of ambush, or do you fight the urge and put your back to the exit?  Then, when they ask why you're tense, you just casually mention that it's because every muscle in your body is screaming, "Escape, escape!  There is danger here!"

When your friends come visit you some Friday, how do you tell them that you'd love to go to a movie with them but you're currently booked to put down a rebellion?

They're busy focusing on fashion.  You're counting the number of ways you can kill a man with a shovel.  You go to the mall.  They reach in their pockets, pull out their wallets, and pay for something.  You reach in your pocket and pull out brass knuckles, a length of piano wire, and a bottle of chloroform.  Just in case.

And then, the clincher.  Any of us who've had a friend on the outside have gone through this.  Sooner or later, one of your friends will make a joke, "Ooh, look at the big bad mercenary.  How much would someone have to pay you to kill me?"  You'll shrug and reply with some witty bullshit like, "I never mix business and pleasure," and everyone will have a good laugh and life will go on.

But sooner or later, he'll ask again, and eventually, you'll run out of witty bullshit.  And that's when you tell him.  You'll tell him exactly how much his life is worth.  You'll say, "If someone paid me enough money, I'd stab this fork in your eye and you'd be dead before you hit the ground."

Then comes the uncomfortable silence, which you will try to fill by adding caveats and exceptions.  Of course, I'd never kill you.  As long as you stay out of the military, our paths will never cross.

This is more bullshit, because what you know – and your friend knows it now, too – is that if he ends up on the wrong side of a political rally, you'll shoot him like a dog in the street.

People don't stick around long after that.

So yeah, you can have friends on the outside.  At least that's the theory.

You think you'll get through it unchanged, that none of this will happen to you?  Let's talk about that after you start live-fire exercises.  You come and talk to me the first time you see one of your classmates take a round of hollow-point ammunition in the gut, when you hear him crying because he won't last through the hour, let alone reach his thirteenth birthday.

Then we'll see who's changed.