What Is The Experience Of The Military Experience Essay

Being a soldier with multiple combat tours I have seen in some cases the worst humanity can offer. During my last combat tour my experiences helped myself define the direction I wanted to take, both in the military and eventually when I transition back into the civilian world. I made the decision about month six of my tour that I wanted to stay in the Army, but above all that I should return to my roots as a professional computer nerd. In 2009 I was running my own Information Technology Company and doing quite well financially, but I felt something was missing. On a whim, I contacted the local Army recruiting office and scheduled my ASVAB entrance exam. Shortly thereafter that I signed my first contract to enlist as a Combat Engineer, subsequently six months later I was standing in my very first formation, being reminded how equally worthless we all were. One Station Unit Training shaped and molded my views to focus on the team and those around myself. No longer was I thinking about myself only, but I was thinking of those to my …show more content…
This was a huge eye opening experience. For a person from small town America traveling to the other side of the world and seeing a culture completely foreign to anything I had ever seen shocked me. Consequently about the same time the Occupy Wall Street movement began in New York. As soldiers who were living on a base that would receive incoming rocket fire, eating the same meals week after week and going out on route clearance patrols looking for IED’s. Even as a Private First Class I was making the correlation between a valuable skill set and income. This is a well-known correlation, but as a Combat Engineer I knew the skill set it offered while valuable to the military was not very valuable in the civilian world. During this deployment I attempted to re-enlist as a satellite signal operator, but unfortunately the course was full and I simply re-enlisted to continue as a Combat