Thankfully, the closest I ever came to deploying was Grenada in 1983. Being the only military police unit trained in POW ops (and a reserve unit at that, go figure), we were 72 hours away from going to the party before another unit was fingered for the job.
My reasons for joining were purely mercenary, a $3,000 signing bonus being a nice incentive in the economic wasteland known as the Carter Administration. My scariest moment happened early on in my budding career. It was the height of the Iran hostage crisis and Reagan was just elected president while I was in basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama.
We had just lined up for breakfast after PT when one of the girls in my training unit came out of the CO's office sobbing her eyes out. The senior drill said something to the effect of, "Private So-and-so has something to tell you all."
"Aw ****," I thought, in my best pre-salvation vocabulary, "...we're off to ******* war." You could feel the same tension course through the rest of the unit as well.
As Private So-and-so took front and center, she sobbed out, "Somebody shot John Lennon last night."
With all due respect to Mr. John "Imagine all the people/more popular than Jesus Christ" Lennon, the collective "What the..." that went through my unit, followed by the myriad ways we were disemboweling our little Private Benjamin in our minds for putting us through the wringer for that bit of info, was quite palpable.
For the first 6 and a half years of my hitch, I was the perfect picture of the south end of a north bound horse. The transformation wrought in me after one night alone in my tent with God did not go unnoticed by my superiors though...it wasn't long after that that I was made lay chaplain in my unit under Chaplain Lee, where I finished out the remainder of my 9 years as company RTO. In the end, I finished that race as it should be done in Christ, with no regrets and a healthy respect for those who take it on full time.
To all our vets, big and small, thank you...
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