Well folks my 13 year detour from normal life has come full circle and dropped me off back on the main road just a few miles from where I started. I am jobless, newly married, and have no college degree.

          I don’t want to give the impression that the Army was a bad thing for me by any means. The Army gave me the opportunity to meet and work with literally thousands of people over the years in circumstances running the gamut from the posh muffin-scented surroundings of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade Maryland to one of Saddam Hussein’s aircraft hangars in Balad, Iraq.

          The Army has given me a perspective on everyday life that most folks seem to lack. It has pulled back the curtain and shown me that while fretting about reality TV might be fun for a minute it has no bearing on the important aspects of human existence.

          The Army showed me how far down the ladder of human misery people can sink and still retain their dignity and joie de vivre. The Hondurans don’t give two small damns about Brad and Angela, the Koreans care a bit but the subject of reunification holds far greater sway over their lives and draws much higher ratings on TV, Iraqis are far less concerned with Sharia law than they are feeding their families and ensuring that their children can have a good education so that they don’t have to struggle their way through life by subsistence farming. They have had their priorities straightened through more adversity every single day than most unemployed Americans experience in a lifetime.

          While my situation now may appear to be largely congruent with my position immediately following high school graduation I assure you that I wouldn’t give up those 13 years of context for all the tea in China.

Regrets? Sure, I got em…

I regret that I didn’t go to college first on fat student loans (that the Army would have paid off) but who is to say that I would have had the necessary mental fortitude to make it through a degree program back then?

I regret that I didn’t pay more attention to the “me” stuff the Army had to offer during my tenure but if I had been one of the “Army of One” type of soldiers I do not think that I would have had the respect of my peers and subordinates (the majority of my superiors despised me) that allowed me to have the minor impacts I have had on Army intelligence collection (a subject I care about deeply).

I regret that I didn’t do more for my soldiers over the years, things that might have cultivated a few more of them to stay in the Army after my time had passed (to those of you who did stay in: Thanks) but in the final analysis I think the change in Army culture that I and many of my friends have struggled against in a losing battle for so many years is far more to blame for low-quality and lower-quantity re-enlistments than I was.

While I will not miss the early morning formations, false motivation runs, and the incredible disconnect between commissioned officers and reality I will miss one aspect of the Army… the soldiers.

Certain political elements of this nation like to portray soldiers as illiterate morons who are preyed upon by the evil crypto-fascist military-industrial complex but they couldn’t be farther from the truth… lets examine a few notables shall we?

·       Jeff ‘Doc’ Brown : A lawyer from Tennessee who joined the Army as an enlisted man preferring to serve where the rubber met the road. Hard working and selfless he threw himself into every task the Army had with the same level of determination and efficiency that he learned while going through law school. (Anecdote time : Jeff had so little time in law school due to his packed schedule that he had to time everything he did to make it fit into his schedule down to exactly how many seconds it took to wash and dry a plate (17 seconds)

·       Kevin ‘King of Wisconsin’ Masrud : Mathematician (Masters Degree) from the cheese head state and also a Korean linguist. He consistently threw off the officer class’s worldview by having more education and culture than any 3 of the “landed class”. Despite his partial homeschooling weirdness and Wisconsin supremacist views he was a voice of reason amidst a cacophony of self-aggrandizing pseudo-sophists and wise counsel for young soldiers.

·       Quentin ‘Q’ Fuller : One of my earliest projects Quentin was one of those kids that you just can’t keep a grip on. A bad drunk (he simply had no tolerance for liquor), a perpetual deep-sleeper, and prone to speaking without a hint of tact he was nonetheless a SIGINT genius in the rough. All it took was a power vacuum in the wake of my departure from Korea and his elevation to Sergeant to make him one of the best Collsups in the business (and a pretty fair iconoclast as well)

·       SPC Egregious : Looking at this kid you probably wouldn’t think he could be trusted to mow the lawn without intense supervision but give him the reins and someone to articulate his jumbled thoughts into coherent “officer friendly” buzzwords and he is a SIGINT force to be reckoned with no matter the target, team of folks, or equipment hurdles.

     There are a ton more folks I could list here but this one is getting a bit long in the tooth already. There are certainly folks who fit the public’s perception of soldiers (I for one am fat, uneducated, and have a drinking problem) but by and large they are simply marking time while folks like the aforementioned are busting there ass and making vital missions happen. The same applies to combat units, they are supported not by stupid “grunts” but often are led by well educated, charismatic, and highly intelligent men whose natural aggression and patriotism make them born to be an Infantry Sergeant.

     I may be done on active duty but I doubt I will ever be able to fully leave the military behind. I just won’t be dealing with it at 0530 at PT formation anymore. Thank