Here are more military stories. I have a decent backlog of stories and am working on a special “Our Military,” but I’m always accepting more. If you’d like to give your own explanation of why you joined the military or have a military story, please e-mail me with the subject “Military”. Thanks.

Dennis writes about his past experience and how he is continuing to try to serve today:

I’m an old guy, so this’ll take a little.
Graduated High School in 1972 and knew I’d be going in the military. Oh, the draft was there but my number didn’t get drawn till the next year. There were 11 other kids in the family, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up but I did know a stint in the military would give me a chance to see some of the world and figure out what I wanted to do.
Wanted to fly helicopter gunships but the Army turned me down, said they had too many pilots already.
Found the Coast Guard was running river and coastal patrols. That looked like fun! Enlisted.
Halfway through boot camp, found out that the Coast Guard had completed its mission regarding the small boats and had turned all vessels over to the South Vietnamese Navy. Was now a waiting list for the few billets left in country. (rumored to be seven years) Shifted my sights to become a helicopter Search and Rescue aircrewman and served four years on active duty, mostly on deployments on icebreakers. Finally got out when I decided the pilots were insane. (in the wrong way, insanity on it’s own doesn’t bother me.)
After three years of being away from active duty, I was getting homesick. My evil older brother talked me into joining his National Guard Infantry unit. The following year, I paid him back by talking him into going to OCS. We became “those crazy lieutenant brothers”.
Twenty three years after our commissioning he’s retired but I’m still in, now in the Army Reserve, trying to get deployed at my advanced age.
I’m obviously insane myself, because I’ve never worked so hard to go do something that I already know I’m not going to enjoy. Duty does indeed call, now if it would only buy me a ticket………….

Rob writes about the Air Force and how it has affected his patriotism:

There are countless reasons why I enlisted in the USAF. Just a few are:
extreme love of country, college help, top-of-the-line technical training, pride in seeing a US military uniform, paid travel around the world, and need of a steady paycheck. Let me give you a bit of foreshadowing.
I was laid off from Sprint in the fall of 2001. I had a job there that I dearly loved and I wanted to continue working in the networking field.
I put the words “telecom, networking” into job search engines all over the place and in every single search the Air Force would pop up with jobs available. At the time the military was pretty far from my mind, even with the 9/11 attacks. So after months of fruitless searching for a new telecom/networking job I went to college in January of 2002. I did a year in college and did very well, but it just wasn’t what I needed to do. Just before classes ended in December of 2002 I started searching hard for jobs once again. The Air Force kept rearing its head all over my job searches. I grew tired of not being interviewed for jobs I was well-qualified for and said “screw it, USAF here I come.”
I talked to a recruiter in January of 2003 and was put on delayed entry.
I really wanted to get into satellite communications since I already had good knowledge of terrestrial communication technologies, why not branch out and expand my knowledge? My recruiter helped me find the SATCOM job, but there were no openings in it until very late 2003. So I went to basic training as an Open Electronics in the hopes I could land the SATCOM job, however unlikely that would be. I went to basic in late March 2003.
During the 6th (really, it’s the 7th) week of basic training all of us “open” career people found out our jobs. I got SATCOM! I was thrilled, ecstatic even! On a side note, I earned the name “Old Man” in basic due to my elderly age of 25 and many white hairs scattered on my head.
After basic I went to Keesler AFB, MS for basic electronics training then on to Ft. Gordon, GA for SATCOM training.
I graduated SATCOM school in December of 2003, took some leave, then reported to a USAF base in the United Kingdom in early January 2004.
I’m once again doing a job I love in networking, satellite networking to be exact, and it’s guaranteed I’ll be in this career for another three years! Well, that is unless I get killed in Iraq/Afghanistan.
But that’s ok, I’ll die doing what I love for a country I love. How many people can say that?!
It’s amazing to say, but my love for America has grown exponentially since joining the USAF. I didn’t think I could love my country any more than I did before being in the military! But it’s true, I fallen deeply, honestly, and truthfully more in love with this country. I’m proud to serve in the greatest military of the greatest nation in the world.

Robert writes about his experience of a “more sensitive war” in Germany:

Baseball Bats and Terrorists
Normally I don’t care about politics except to throw out the occasional cynical comment or two. I’ve been cynical since 1973, when they replaced a whole summer’s worth of Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo with the Watergate hearings. There’s nothing like listening to endless testimony from Ehrlichman and Mitchell– when you were expecting Mr. Green Jeans and Mr. Moose– to make a kid cynical.
I soon figured out what all these world leaders were after was power and/or money. In my arrested 5-year-old view, politicians want power over ‘the masses’, to bend them to their will, to control their thoughts to some degree. You can see this on a small scale in any family, any playground in America. So an election, to me, is about selecting the power-hungry guy whose views happen to most closely align with yours. It never feels good because you can never be totally aligned with your ‘leaders’ and you have to constantly resist their attempts to morph your thinking into their thinking–wrap your head in tin foil if you have too.
However, a post by Evilwhiteguy, pointing out Kerry’s asinine statement about running a ‘more sensitive war on terror’ brought up some suppressed memories of my time in the Army. I had intentionally blanked out those memories– from the time I got off the bus at Basic Training to that glorious last day four years later when, during the exit process, some scumbag stole the clothes out of my suitcase– but this ‘sensitive war’ thing brought back memories of my tour in West Germany.
I was in Germany, West Germany then, for 3 years– around the time when the Red Brigade and other terrorist cells were sporadically car bombing US bases in Europe. I don’t really care why they were targeting us; it’s all the same isn’t it? Some little guy feels powerless so he lashes out any way he can. Ultimately, the little guy wants to be a big guy and have some kind of power, some kind of control. Never, it seems, is any terrorist fighting for the freedom of individuals to make their own choices.
Anyway, I worked at a network control station, relaying information to a network of mobile Pershing missile units. Our site was not mobile, it was fixed, occupying of about 10 acres in a German forest, with plenty of little deer and wild boar wandering around the RLP antenna field.
Now, our leaders knew these people were out there targeting us. Every month or so, someone would drive a car up to the gate of a military base and blow it up (literally the gate and maybe a few guards). They had even bombed some radio installations, knocking down an antenna at another site. So our leaders put as on alert. They had us patrol the perimeter of our 10 acre site night and day–carrying baseball bats. I’m not kidding–BASEBALL BATS.
The thinking was that since tensions were high, if we had real guns and real bullets a dumb soldier might get jumpy and accidentally kill some poor German out hiking through the woods. I’m not saying that wouldn’t have happened; there are some dumbasses in the military, no doubt. But we were in Germany to do a job, our radio site and our lives were in danger, and we kept our weapons and ammunition locked in a safe while we walked around the fence–with baseball bats. I don’t know about you, but I doubt terrorists would have respected our commands to “Stop! Or I’ll–sswingg batter-batter sswiingg.”
If (and that’s a big capital ‘IF’ that depends on many factors and should be weighed very carefully), but IF you’re going to commit to fighting a war, even a war on terrorism, then fight likes it’s a war. Don’t make it more sensitive– war is not sensitive. Don’t make it safe for the enemy– make it as safe for your troops as you can.
(Ah, if only there were blogs back then. Now back to my real pastime, commenting on how the proliferation of Half-Baked technology will soon lead to an 8 hour work week.)