The Things We Left Behind

These Are My Guys

I went quickly from growing up in a small town where everyone was someone to being in among the masses where no one was anyone. All those days of wanting to be grown and gone flashed through my memory. Wanting to be somewhere bigger where there was some level of anonymity had suddenly lost a great deal of its appeal. It was at this point that I realized that big crowds actually bothered me. I realized that I had probably been something of a lone wolf all along.

I had never been more than a hundred miles from home before. I had never flown before. I had a chance to once on a small crop dusting plane as a part of a Sunday school contest. But even though my mother and sister went, I passed. This chapter of my life might have been easier had I liked to fly. It might have been easier to be up there somewhat above it all where you weren't in so many face-to-face encounters. I had little if any experience with war. There were no veterans in our family. My father was the only son of an only son who grew up farming so they were needed at home to help with the farm. That was the way it was done back in that time. Now land had been sold and livestock had been sold. Farms had either become big business endeavors or they had dwindled to be more of a hobby than a source of income for an existence. The only veteran I really knew, I knew precious little about.

That was Mr. Taylor. He was nice enough, often more like Mrs. Taylor's oldest kid than an adult. He seemed to avoid most serious conversations and he liked to have fun, at least my idea of it, hunting and fishing often. I guess from my new adult perspective, he was gone a lot hunting and fishing and didn't work very much so he might have avoided responsibility. It's also possible that he drank too much as well in an effort to avoid reality. As a kid, he seemed like a mans man. As a man, he seemed much less of a mans man and more like no man at all., not even to his self. I guess perspective can really color your view of reality much more than I realized before this.

Once we actually got through all of the poking and prodding of being prepared and assessed, we got shipped off. Often it felt like we were being herded through various chutes like cattle being loaded up for transport. The background noise might as well have been an auctioneer's call in my mind. At least we got settled in, so to speak, as a part of a smaller group, not too small but still more manageable. For the first time I better understood why Paula was so adamant about having a bedroom that she didn't have to share with other people. At least I understood that better, but I still didn't understand why she seemed so distant when I had to leave. She acted as if I wanted to go. That couldn't have been further from the truth. Sure I acted tough like it was no big deal because that's what I was told I was supposed to do. I was being strong for her. At least she wrote a lot back then so it helped to keep me in touch with home.

I started to make friends. We would talk about our childhood when we had time. With a few breaks from our training, we talked a little and trained a lot. We also talked about who was waiting at home for us. As usual I worked hard during our training. I had watched enough to know that it might be wise to be in the top of the class in this case. It seemed smarter to be able to give orders instead of just following them. I even took the time to figure out the type of guys I might want to have in my platoon. All those unrelated, or so I thought, past experiences had taught me a thing or two about military strategy. All that hunting and playing in the woods with hideouts and trenches went a long way to bring me through this war and out the other side. I needed someone fast. I needed someone strong. I needed someone really smart. I preferred guys who grew up hunting because of the things it taught them. My planning was all well and good but the army had other plans. Basic training was tougher than any football practice, hunting trip, camping trip, or track meet I had ever participated in all rolled into one. It did help to weed out the weak among us. All I could think of anytime I had a fleeting weak thought was Dad. While he wasn't a veteran, he was the strongest person I knew. I never saw him face any task that he couldn't conquer and I wanted to be just like him.

All the voices you hear at basic training are designed to break you so that you can be rebuilt as a soldier. I did what I was told but the voices I heard were from growing up. I had convinced myself that the ability to do anything I tried was an inalienable genetic predisposition, coupled with the fact that I was raised in a strong Christian family where I was taught that I was a redeemed child of God. That said, I couldn't have actually been scum, lower than dirt, and such as they kept on telling us. I knew I was supposed to respect those in authority but that didn't mean I had to believe everything they told me. I knew who I was and whose I was. This doesn't mean I didn't change while I was in basic training, but I didn't change as much as most of the other guys, and this was really just the beginning.