Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered what it would have been like if you had made different decisions? You could have chosen a completely different spouse, home, university, or career. For a fresh out of high school Ryan Phillippe, his life almost took a completely different turn in an army recruitment office.

“Out of high school, I didn’t have a ton of options because my grades weren’t the best and I didn’t come from money,” he tells Entertainment Tonight. “When I graduated, it was around the time of the first Gulf War and I did go and sit in a recruitment office and got the T-shirt and everything.”

However, it just wasn’t meant to be for the now 33-year-old. While the young man who went in with him ended up serving in the Gulf War, Ryan ended up doing something else on the other side of the world. “I went to New York to be an actor instead.”

Fortunately for us, Ryan only walked away with a t-shirt, not a profession. It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Ryan Phillippe, his ex-wife Reese Witherspoon, and their two little children.

Ryan would almost definitely have children though, he says that fatherhood comes completely naturally to him and it’s his first priority.

“You try to make it (media interest) seem as commonplace as you can,” he says. “That’s sort of the approach you have to take with all of that stuff, with the press, with the paparazzi. You kinda just say, ‘Well, you know, Mommy and Daddy do this certain kind of job and it creates an interest in the public,’ and you minimize all of that stuff as much as you can.”

Paparazzi or not, nothing can take away the joy of fatherhood for the actor.

“Being a father is by far my greatest achievement and the most important thing about me,” Ryan says. “My mother had a day-care center in my house growing up and I come from a big family on the East Coast. We grew up helping take care of and raise kids, so it’s second nature to me.”

OK! Magazine

Ryan might never have had to explain to his pre-school children what paparazzi are if he had chosen life in the armed forces – but he would have been dodging shots of a completely different kind if he had served in the Gulf War.

Ryan plays a soldier in his latest film Stop Loss. It is out in the US on March 28, and is not getting positive advance reviews. Here’s the trailer:

And here’s Ryan Phillippe at the Stop Loss premiere yesterday, thanks to PRPhotos. Ryan’s on-off girlfriend, Abbie Cornish, co-stars in the film but was not at the premiere from what I could. Ryan is rumored to have had an affair with Cornish toward the end of his marriage to Reese Witherspoon.