Independence Day

I’ve been waiting 8 years for this date.

Okay, maybe not 8 years exactly, because I didn’t understand the length of my contract entirely when I signed my name. The state of the world at that time didn’t indicate any particular dangers that would cause me to worry for 8 years.

But here is June 30, 2007. For the past three years, I’ve cringed at every report on the growing threat of Iran, every rumored North Korean missile test and every article explaining just how thin the US Army has been stretched.

Today, I am free of my contract with the US Army.

I didn’t sign up for the active Army. I signed up for the National Guard. I enlisted because my prospects were small, my girlfriend at the time had broken up with me because she felt I just wanted to stay in Portland my whole life (and who could blame me?), and I didn’t have an aim. My friend Dave, who was killed a couple years ago by an incident involving a roadside bomb in Iraq, told me I should join the Army. I told him I didn’t want to join the Army, so he told me about the National Guard, and I thought, “Well, that’s not so bad.” I visited the recruiter, who was about as stereotypical an Army recruiter as you could find, and I looked through a book of Military Occupational Specialities (MOS). The intelligence field appealed immediately, especially the job of a 97 Bravo, US Army Counterintelligence Agent.

So I signed up, at the tale end of the Clinton administration. The world was peaceful (which isn’t to say attacks weren’t being planned, but it at least felt peaceful). I was proud to serve, because my dad served as an Army weatherman in Alaska after Vietnam, and both of my grandfathers had served, and though I love the comfort of life here in Portland, I wanted to continue that legacy and experience things that only soldiers and Marines and airmen and sailors experience.

My service worked like this: I signed up for 3 years of active National Guard duty, which entailed basic training (9 weeks at Fort Jackson, South Carolina), Counterintelligence School (16 weeks at Fort Huachuca, Arizona), one weekend per month and two weeks per year of actual service. What you’re not necessarily told, or told in the minimal language legally obligated, is that your contract actually extends for 8 years. In my case, it was 3 years active and 5 years inactive.

After my time in South Carolina and Arizona, our unit was called-up for service as peacekeepers in Bosnia, so nearly of my three-year duty ended up being in active service. At the beginning of our Bosnia deployment, while in training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the September 11th attacks happened. By the end of our deployment, all Army Intelligence MOSs had been stoplossed, which meant I couldn’t leave, even though my first enlistment was nearly over. That initial enlistment was extended from 3 years to 4.

So then I was out for a year, but a scare hit when an article ran in The Oregonian that a call-up of the Inactive Reserve was imminent. Rather than risking the uncertainty of the Inactive Reserve, where you can be called up to any unit any time, I enlisted for another year with the Oregon National Guard and the unit I knew.

That unit was called-up for duty in Afghanistan, a tour from which they just returned. I got out before I had to go, though sometimes I wish I had gone, because I would’ve made a lot of money, and my friends that were there sent me pictures occasionally, and it didn’t seem too bad.

So that’s the background, but what I mainly want to talk about is what I learned from the Army. The Army was my college, and most of the time I’m glad it was the road I took.

Here’s something I believe: the Army should never be used in diplomacy, except as a bargaining chip behind the scenes. The armed forces of this country are comprised of men and women who are very young and often poorly educated, with little understanding of foreign culture or the machinations behind world events. They are often unable to see the world through another people’s eyes, so everything is filtered through American ideology.

Stories about Abu Ghraib and the Habitha massacre didn’t surprise me. Some of the men and women who join the armed forces have enormous problems. Some are sociopaths, or at least so trapped in their insecurities that opportunity to humiliate or destroy other individuals, especially individuals that look and talk different, seem remarkably tantalizing.

Since I was serving on active duty during the September 11th attacks, the horror of the event took a much different form: I was never angry about it. I was deeply saddened, certainly, but as we sat in the mess hall and I heard the soldiers around me fill with rage as we watched those towers burn and fall, and as I heard them talk about the “ragheads” and “sand niggers”, I couldn’t get angry, because how were we behaving any differently?

There ARE ways that we behaved differently, of course. We don’t target civilians, for one.

But with all the bad folks, there were certainly great people I met, men who have become life-long friends, even if we’re separated by miles. The Army was a cacophony of strange and lovable characters, guys like Pvt Long, a guy I went through basic training with who would make his body completely rigid, laying on a table, and you could push his legs down and he would move like a board. There was our drill sergeant in Arizona, a wiry, wild-eyed Jack Mormon who ran faster than anyone I’d ever met.