Gangbangers often say that, where they grew up, gang membership was somewhere between necessary and inevitable. Ice T— an L.A. Crip, a gangsta rapper and for years a policeman on TV's Law and Order— writes that, when he was a boy at Crenshaw High, “it was mandatory to be connected to a particular set, or unit, in the gang.” But sociologists tell us that this is, in fact, a popular misconception. Even at the height of gang activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, relatively few inner- city boys became members of street gangs. A study conducted in these years in Denver (one of the cities then most troubled by gangs) estimated that just 7 percent of high- risk, inner- city juveniles were gang members. Other studies suggest about the same percentages. Colton Simpson tells us that his father played baseball for the California Angels, his uncle was a lawyer working with Johnny Cochran (of O. J. Simpson fame), another uncle was a policeman; his mother worked as nurse (no. 61: 11). Simpson's grandmother, worried about gang influences in the neighborhood, paid to send him to a “predominately white” school in the suburbs (27). Simpson wants us to know that he had choices— but he did not take the easy way: “Bangin’ is more than my career. It's my refuge, the ultimate getaway. The choice is mine” (47). He chose the excitement and danger of gang life. Gangbanger autobiographers usually emphasize that there was something inevitable in their choice. They were following promptings from deep within. But they were making a choice, the Warrior Choice.

If we want to understand this choice, we might begin with the choice of Achilles. One of the most affecting passages in the Iliad is Achilles's account of how he came to be what he is, how he came to devote himself to the pursuit of glory, and so to war: