My Military Career

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.. The definition of unscathed, according to Webster, is without suffering any injury, damage, or harm. I sometimes wonder if this just means physically or does in include emotional wounds. Not saying that I have been scathed by anything I have been through or conquered, I’m just wondering. The definition of a combat veteran, according to me, is a beer drinking, flag flying, barbequing American. It isn’t someone who struggles time to time with where he has been and what he has done. I day dream frequently about choices that I have made and how outcomes could have differed if said choices could be altered. Until recently, I have wished for a chance to go back to …show more content…
I had followed in my father’s footsteps, who had followed his father’s footsteps, and joined the Army a year after High School. The difference between them and I was I had aspirations of becoming the man who would later break down Osama Bin Laden’s door. No, I was not that guy, there, or even in the Military when that happened. I just thought I was going to be the cool guy who would get that kind of phone call. I had the grades on the ASVAB, which is a placement exam used by the military to determine qualifications, to enter just about every career field. I just had tunnel vision with Rambo’s costume waiting for me at the …show more content…
I did not know what to expect and surely wasn’t ready for the culture shock and smells that come with a country that lives in a third world. All I knew was that I had a job to do and my newly acquired family was here to watch my six while I watched theirs. The first couple of months were adrenaline driven. The biggest threat at the time in Iraq was roadside bombs. It was hard to grasp the fact that surviving at times was a roll of the dice. We are trained to react to contact and out “gun” the enemy. With roadside bombs it’s either your day or it’s not. We had sat through hours of training that could help you spot and I.E.D, improvised explosive device. The difference between training and real life was the actual placement of the devices. In power point presentations that are thrown on the side of the road with a blatantly obvious detonation mechanism and stuck out like a sore thumb. In real life they are buried, placed inside dead animals, or mixed in with a pile of trash. Well, driving through Iraq at times looked as if you were driving through a land fill. Half of the roads were dirt and road kill was spotted