A Navy baby who dreamed of joining the Marines but then lost all interest in the military until my daughter Kate was born. I joined the Alabama Army National Guard to have enough money to pay for her daycare. I had been in the Guard but five years when I was going to Annual Training at Camp Shelby, or Summer Camp as it was commonly known in the past. Bruce Cyr was my military career adviser at the time or at least the military was a common subject of our office conversations. My unit was participating in Vulcan Knight exercise, which involved a return of forces to Germany to fight the Soviets. A number of German Army officers were going to participate. Bruce made a reading suggestion and gave me his copy of Panzer Leader by General Heinz Guderian. If you are not familiar with Guderian, he was instrumental in developing the tactics and the overall concepts of the use of armor in the German Army in the 1930s before WWII. He was a great soldier. So there I was, at the JAG table during the Vulcan Knight Exercise, August, 1990, reading Panzer Leader when several German officers walked through the area. The name tag of one of the officers stated Guderian. What a coincidence! MAJ Guderian was a grandson of General Guderian. He and I chatted and he autographed Bruces book, which was a first edition. That AT period changed my life because my unit, 167th Support Command (Corps) was alerted for Desert Storm and we left the exercise to return to the armory in Birmingham to prepare for deployment. The unit was not mobilized because it had too many general officers for the Active duty Army to stomach at that point in the evolution of the relationship between the Guard, Reserve and the Army. So, I volunteered to make myself feel better, so that when I was old I could tell myself, it is not your fault you didnt go to war because you volunteered and the Guard just didnt need a JAG. Yeah, right. Volunteered on Monday, was told on Wednesday that I assigned to the 226th Area Support Group because it needed JAGs for its deployment to Saudi Arabia. I didnt know it but my real Army career was about to begin. In the last 15 years of my 20 years in the Alabama Army National Guard, I spent almost 4 years on active duty, went to war twice and lived in Army tents in Middle Eastern deserts for two years, even got to go to Egypt twice, German, Romania, Texas (sometimes it feels like another country) and the Dominican Republic. At times I hated it, but overall, it was the best experience of my life. Some of the things that I experienced brought more joy and happiness than you can ever imagine, the joy of the first letter from home, the first hot shower in six weeks or more, the joy of getting off an airplane to see my children and family waiting on me at some godawful time in the middle of the night, seeing the Pyramids, seeing a sandstorm march across the desert, hearing the morning call to prayer for the first time, being in Bavaria, Grafenwoehr, Nuremberg, Neuschwanstein Castle, looking up at the stars in the night sky in Iceland, on and on and on.....I met Janet because of the United States Army. Heres to the 226th Area Support Group, Alabama Army National Guard, which was the best damned logistics headquarters in the Alabama National Guard and which has been reorganized as the 226th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, currently in Afghanistan on its third deployment since 2003, and to the rest of the Alabama Army National Guard and to the United States Army. HOOAH!! Thanks for the time of my life. This is the original Army song... youtube/results?search_query=caissons+go+rolling+along&sm=1
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 14:07:16 +0000
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