Fifty years
ago, I sat watching a black and white TV screen of wounded soldiers being
loaded upon a helicopter in Vietnam. The ducking soldiers during fire fights
and the corpse of dead Vietcong laying around burning villages and wondering
what it would be like to be there. Five years later I found myself stepping off
a bus into a dimly lit Army basic training reception station at Fort Lewis,
Washington, this seventeen year old kid was about to become a man. It was a
time of the draft and there were men who didn’t want to be where they were and
the fear of the unknown. The next eight weeks would bring out the best of each
man and as we all sat in a large assembly hall, waiting for our orders for our
next school, my name wasn’t called. As I sat there and wondered why, an officer
sat next to me and advised me, my school had cancelled and I had an option;
choose a different school or go home to the Army reserves; I chose the latter.
The reserves
didn’t fulfill my hopes and dreams and I found myself dreaming of active duty.
Why didn’t I choose active duty when I had the chance; I was seventeen and there
were thoughts of the teenage things I still wanted to do. The Vietnam War was
over and the image of the military was one of disgrace. Who would choose a life
in uniform; I did. Through the Cold War years of patrolling along the Eastern
European border, watching them as they watched us. The cold winds of the North,
blowing across the border of North and South Korea as we watched them watching
us. We trained with worn and broken equipment through the years, preparing for
battles which never came. The wall fell and there wasn’t as severe of threat in
Europe as it had been but we were still watching the border of Korea.
There would
be limited military actions, saving students on a tropical island, supporting
the UK during their Falkland’s engagement and then the Middle East erupts in
1990. As we prepared for war, the dream of going into combat was about to
become real. It had taken almost twenty years before my dream was to come to
pass and when it happened, the dream was not one I will ever forget.
Sleeplessness, fear, boredom and then action, only to be followed with
sleeplessness, fear and boredom. Then the final battles, with the sights,
sounds and the smell of death, which still resonates with me today. It’s been
twenty-five years since I’ve been to war. As I sit and watch the color, high
definition TV images of battles still raging in the Middle East and the corpse
of Isis soldiers, it all comes back to me as it did, fifty years ago, the
calling of the guns and war.
Veterans Day
is the one day a year, I meet with many of my brothers and sisters of arms. We
laugh, hug, shed tears and remember the days, long past but still burned into our
memories. If you haven’t been there, it’s difficult for you to understand, we
are family. Spend some time this Veterans Day and remember this, we were there
for you so you didn’t have to experience what we experienced.
