I did my basic at Fort Jackson in 1991 and this sure does bring back the memories. On the other hand, I've done my best to move on from the army as quickly as possible. In 2003, a few months after 9/11, I quit my job at an insurance company and signed up for an airline job that was in demand. In July of 2003, I found myself boarding an airliner headed to New York to work for American Airlines on my first layover. That was the last day I walked a military base. The next day I was flying to Tampa and it was all over. I can't say I liked the US Army, but I certainly did enjoy some of the great folks I met while I was in it, but that's probably not much of an endorsement as I still wonder if the folks I met there were really the right people to join up with. Now that I look back at it, I'm not sure of the motives and morals of a lot of the folks I did business with. That sure made for interesting reading over a bottle of Scotch. I'm proud of the fact that I never compromised my ethics and remained true to myself and what I believed in. My dad died during those first few days I was in Iraq, so it was hard enough dealing with the pain, watching my son grow, my mom go to Iraq to be with him, and just basically trying to stay alive for him. The worst part was, as soon as the plane touched down and my mom's body and the coffin with Dad in it touched down in the USA, I was separated from my mom and my little boy. It was bad enough before but it was even worse after. I think the next time I saw him was when we had to take pictures of the dead and get him "ready" for the funeral. It still bothers me that we didn't have any funeral or graveside services at home. It was almost Christmas so it was pretty hectic getting ready for my wife to leave. Then, it was time to go to Baghdad with her son. That was bad. We drove the six hours to Baghdad and got stuck in a roadblock. I know that most of the American soldiers in Iraq were well trained, but a lot of them were pretty stupid. I can't say that I blame them because they were under a lot of stress but they did not take their jobs seriously at all. One of the guys we were stuck with in the roadblock had a problem with me and he asked the translator to call me a "damn Yankee" but I told the translator to go fuck himself (no offense) and when my wife told me not to say that, I told her to go fuck herself. (again, no offense) She had the nicest words for this soldier and I told her just how he felt about me and the translator was saying "He's just stressed out." So, the poor guy was stressed out all right. I had already been in a situation like that in the middle of the desert when we were headed to Kuwait and when we were in Kuwait that situation occurred again. So, here I am, at the very beginning of my tour and I already have two "incidents" with US troops in Iraq. The translator, though, wasn't the first guy to insult me. Actually, my mom is to blame for that, but for me, she has been in Iraq since 1992 so I guess it was just natural for me to have a negative attitude toward the whole fucking situation. I'm sure that has more to do with the military than anything else, but you know how it is with all the drugs that are going around and all the sex and booze. It is almost a sure thing that you will either get involved in one way or another with drugs or you'll run into your share of the sexual opportunities in the army. I didn't get into a lot of trouble, but it got kind of serious with that one troop and if we had had any contact with the US military police before that, I'm not sure of the outcome. We got very close to pulling guns on each other when we got stuck at that roadblock, but fortunately, the translator told the other person to go away so my life was spared at that point. We got to Baghdad and we had to stay in a hotel that had an American and Iraqi guard at the entrance and it looked like they were both waiting for something, so I made sure I found a seat with a window in it so I could see inside without me being seen, which is a good thing to do in a strange country, I'm sure you can agree. I saw a black woman, and she was walking around the lobby and I thought, wow, she's big! Even though it's a small town, it's obvious there's a lot of corruption in Iraq and a black woman walking around wasn't really too unusual in those days. Of course, I didn't think anything of it, but the translator told me she was a prostitute. She must have realized that I was looking and she made her way over to where I was sitting. It must have been pretty obvious what she was, but you know how shy these women are, so she just sort of sat with her back to the wall and talked to me. I was pretty interested in what was going on, so I tried to talk to her a little and she kept telling me she didn't understand what I was saying. I didn't think much about it until some of the other guys from our unit started laughing. At that point, it seemed pretty obvious to me. So, I just left it alone and the translator told me that this guy had no idea who he was looking at. All he could say was that she was a whore, which is what we used to call a prostitute. That was pretty sad for me because this was the first time I had met a black woman who was not from the south of the USA. If you read this far, you know there are going to be a lot of times I will not be able to fully explain to you why I acted the way I did and why I acted that way to those people. The army has a lot of that on their hands and I don't know that I will ever fully understand that about me. Sometimes it is my mom who just wants to talk about all the bullshit going on in her life, but when she starts talking about the time that the Viet Cong attacked her home or other crap, I don't want to hear it. Of course, at that time, she was talking about other people doing the same thing to other people, so I don't know what the hell I was even thinking when I was a young teen and I would want to hang out with someone like that. But, she was a victim, too. She tried to get through college but she was a single mom so there was not a lot of money for her to do that and my dad never gave a damn about it. So, she took a job to make ends meet. She was more like my sister than she was a mom. I'm glad that I've been able to stay out of the military because I was a member of an airborne force and most of the members that were in that unit hated me so much, it was painful. One of the guys in that unit was a mean motherfucker, with all his friends and family behind him and I think he just would have liked me gone for all the shit I did. It's not an easy thing to say, but they were just some seriously messed up people and they could have cared less how their behavior affected other people. Anyway, it was late at night and a lot of the buildings in downtown Baghdad were off-limits because of security so we ended up staying in a hotel room with no place to really sleep. So, as soon as I got out of the shower and into the bed that had no sheets on it and some creepy bugs that I did not want to investigate because I knew there were fleas and stuff in Iraq, I closed my eyes. I didn't expect to sleep at all, but suddenly I was awakened by some weird noise. It sounded like footsteps to me and it was coming from the hallway outside my room. I looked out the window and I saw a guy wearing the typical American uniform with a gun and an American flag on his shoulders walking up the stairs to the second floor. I figured the guy probably had some business to take care of at some building across the street because most of them did. I just rolled over and went back to sleep. About the middle of the night, I was awakened by some weird noise that sounded like someone knocking on the door. I was a bit nervous because I knew there was only one guard on duty at that time and someone was banging on the door and I figured they had decided that one guard was not enough and now they had decided to take care of me, so I got out of bed and looked through the peephole. There was no one there so I looked through the spyhole and couldn't see a thing, so I opened the door. It was a man with a gun so I put my hands up. I could see that he was wearing a very nice robe and he had no pants on. He said that he wanted to go to the shower room. I had an inkling he might be a rapist or something so I pointed to a different door. He said "You will take me there" and I just pointed to where he should go and then he left me alone. That was pretty strange because I did not know if I could trust him. I could not understand why he just did not rape me or something because it is not like women can just come up with