The Hard Is What Makes It Great

This is an update of a piece I wrote for Gun Rights Magazine back in 2013. It was lost in an unfortunate hosting service snafu, but I found a draft copy in my own files. So I’m dusting it off, touching it up, and putting back out there.

Veteran’s Day these days has (rightly) become a pretty big deal. There are free meals and special discounts offered, and social and mass media is covered up with thanks to veterans for their service. This is a very good thing, and it is wonderful to see. When I raised my right hand to take the oath nearly 40 years ago, it wasn't like this. We were in the midst of the Cold War, and memories of Vietnam were still fresh. I was a student at East Tennessee State University, enrolling in the ROTC program and beginning my journey as an officer in the United States Army at a time when at best the military was kind of...tolerated.

The Cold War was still in full swing when I entered active duty.

I graduated college, was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the United States Army, and went on active duty as an officer in a military that was still busy preparing to fight the Soviet bloc in Western Europe. I was trained in air defense artillery, the business of shooting down aircraft (and later missiles), and then went to Ft. Benning, Georgia for Airborne School. Once there, my classmates and I were smoked by "Black Hats" so incessantly that learning to "jump from an aircraft while in flight" seemed to be nothing more than a by-product of the torment. I hung around a little longer and went to Pathfinder School, where I learned to guide flights of paratroopers or helicopters to their drop zones and landing zones.

Then I returned to Ft. Bliss, Texas, and began the daily life of a platoon leader. Over the next several years, I moved through the "Green Machine," and the various jobs and experiences of an officer in what was mostly a peacetime Army. I deployed a couple of times, but I never went to war. Compared to what the young men and women in military service today go through, I had it easy.

Your truly manning a PATRIOT missile control van in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1993.

That said, even in peacetime military life is hard.  There are demands of your time, your heart and of your soul…physical discomforts and emotional struggles that just do not accompany most civilian jobs. My wife divorced me, and that wasn't a rarity. If you've never lived it, you cannot grasp the demands that military life places on you, every day. I wish I could adequately explain to you the daily hardships of military life, but the reality is that mere words cannot accomplish that. You have to live it.

I do think about a scene from the movie, A League of Their Own. In it, Geena Davis' character has decided that living the life of a pro baseball player is too hard, and she's going to hang it up. Playing the role of the manager who's trying to get her to stay on the team, Tom Hanks makes this appeal:

I spent nine years as an Army officer. It was hard, and it was indeed great. During that time, I was fortunate to meet a lot of men and women in uniform. Most were really, really good, and some were not so good.  Some were dedicated patriots, and to some it was just a job. But the one thing they all shared was that at least once, every single one of them raised their right hand and swore an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States." Maybe they meant it, and maybe they didn't…but what they did do was to step up and put on a uniform, and give a portion of their life to the nation.

To me, that means that you don't have to have been a career soldier or a war hero to deserve respect or thanks. Whether you loved it or hated it, or if you simply stayed and did the best you could…it counts. Whether you were a Navy SEAL, or changed tires in the motor pool; whether you flew an Apache attack helicopter, or worked a desk in a staff office...you served. If you lived the life...if you "walked the walk"...by serving honorably in the United States military, you have done something that about 98% of your countrymen will never do. You are my brothers and my sisters, and I love you all.

Hire a vet.