Thank you, David, for your very profound and thought-provoking comments here.

You write that Sartre does not care about the 'how' of the decision-making, but only that we not hide from the necessity of making decisions.  But he would care about the 'why' of it, wouldn't he?  What I'm trying to get at is the motivating force behind a given decision, the engine that propels us from a state of passive Spectatorship to the Act itself.

I believe that what human beings most want is the knowledge that our lives have been significant--meaningful--in some way. Of course the individual definitions of what qualifies as meaningful or significant vary tremendously, from the criminal and crassly acquisitive to the public-spirited, charitable, family-nurturing, artistic, altruistic, and so on.  The common denominator, though, would be the self-perception of meaningfulness.  That would put me smack in the middle of the Viktor Frankl camp, since, as you know, he even founded the clinical psychology field of logo therapy, which helps people perceive the meaning in their lives.  I read his book Man's Search for Meaning a long time ago, but I remember loving it.

The scenario you painted, in which the military brats at a civilian high school skipped by the locals to become the stand-out students, athletes, actors, leaders, and went on to adult lives of similar stand-out status, is a common one.  It's true that brats tend to jump right in and "make our own," and those accomplishments are real and meaningful.  But I suggest it would not be fair to conclude that the locals, by default, lack the will to make their mark.  I think there are two things at work here:  First, the locals are at a disadvantage when faced with the transient brat's tremendous need to achieve personal significance in short order.  Second, locals who give way to the onslaught of brat super-achievers learn to find their meaning elsewhere--and I suspect a thorough study of the lives of such locals would show that they had learned to seek avenues of meaning that had not been singled out by ambitious brats.  It comes down to the 'why' of decision-making, and I'd like to bring up something from my book that I think is relevant.

In the chapter "Military Brats as Nomads," I wrote that military kids are often perceived as more outgoing and assertive than other kids.  "These kinds of attributes, in children who are not troublemakers, are often favored by teachers and parents, who tend to interpret them as signs of well-adjusted, thriving, spirited individuals. The point here is not to deny that these are signs of healthy adjustment, but to advance an alternative notion--that, like the military brat antenna and the ability to mimic, these are behaviors acquired for social survival.

"For military brats, time is always short.  They can't afford to wait around to be noticed or for invitations to drift in.  So they often force themselves to take the stage, stand out int he crowd....  Or as the son of an Air Force sergeant commented, 'The military life either makes or breaks your personality.  It will force your personality to change.  If you're outgoing anyway, you're lucky.  But what if you're a homebody type person, and you're forced to move around?'

"The lively, bold behavior observed by teachers and others is what I call forced extroversion:  extroverted behavior whether or not the individual is an extrovert naturally.  That would account for the often frenetically outgoing nature of military brats, many of whom are in effect forcing their personalities into an alien style.

"...Forced extroversion has its useful side in later life:  The behavior becomes so tried and true that even if our extroversion goes underground in adulthood, it can be pulled out when needed.  For some military brats it becomes such an important ingredient in their identity that it shapes their lives.  The constant role changes, the re-creation of self in new environments....  Military brats grow up learning how to put themselves out there on the social stage, gambling everything on their skills at attracting attention, winning approval, getting over an image.

"...In its most positive manifestations during the school years, the forced extroversion of military brats propels them beyond grade-getting into the rarefied company of high achievers in activities requiring public performance.  Many tell of going all out for awards, school office, athletic teams, band, drama, and other clubs as a means of integrating into the group in short order.  As with high grades, adults interpret this as evidence of superior ability and fine character.  They are not necessarily wrong about that, but it might be more in line to view these things as evidence of the skill military brats perfect in answer to a desperate need to g ain social footing on new ground.

"Military brats learn fairly quickly to exploit the comparatively relaxed environment of most civilian schools.  Awards, leadership roles, parts in the play--all are pretty much there for the asking if a kid wants them badly enough and is willing to put in the hard work needed to get them.  Other kids by and large fall back in the face of the hard-driving ambition of the military brat....  A number of military brats told of running for--and walking away with--class offices, sometimes within weeks of arriving in a new school.  An Army major's daughter, a talented artist, said, "I knew that by using art, wherever I was, I could plug in.  We [military brats] were like the traveling Jews:  You pick up your violin, and the next place you go, you can join the symphony.'"

In conclusion, I would say that on some deep level, a brat walking into a civilian school--probably in the middle of the school year--perceives that, at a time of life when social networks are everything, the local civilian kids hold all the cards.  In such a setting, there are only two ways to become somebody--with personal significance that is publicly validated:  be very, very competitive in order to go the high-profile, high-achieving route; or go directly to one of the out-groups, which always accept new members, in order to go the high-profile, low-achieving route.

If we brats outstrip our civilian peers in the quest for social significance, it may or may not be because we are more talented--but it sure as hell is because we're more desperate.