So I have been out of the military long enough to have neighbors who are moms and dads that are about the age to be my grown children.  Some of these moms and dads have kids old enough to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Anyway, I took a part-time job delivering one of the local advertising papers twice a week for exercise.  I won’t exercise anymore unless someone pays me I guess.  There are 300 papers to go to 300 house on my route, so I actually meet people in their front yards from time to time.  My mom used to say garages suck people in and the door closes behind them and you never meet your neighbors anymore.  None-the-less, the serendipity of this little exercise job is that I actually meet my neighbors. Mom would be pleasantly pleased.  Here’s how a conversation might start. 

   “Looks like you’re getting your exercise,” the neighbor dad will say from what ever he is working on in the driveway.

   “Yes, I have to have an excuse in my 50s to exercise,” I say.  “And,” I continue, “I am getting paid for it.” 

   “That’s not a bad gig then,” the neighbor dad will say. 

   Then I digress as usual.  “It kind of segues off an old philosophy I had after I got out of the Army,” I say as I reflect, and then continue, “When I hung out in a bar all the time I decided to get a job bar tending so at least I would get paid to be there.”  Then I quickly add, “Haven’t drank alcohol in 20 years though. 

   “You were in the Army? Say,” the neighbor dad says.  “My son is about to be deployed to Iraq.” 

   “Oh, I know the drill,” I say.  “I spent two Thanksgivings, two Christmases, and three Fourth of Julys over seas thirty-five years ago.”

   “Oh, don’t say that.  O'l dad doesn’t need to hear that,” he says.

   I quickly find a way out and say, “Oh but that was a time when it was harder to travel for military leaves home from overseas.”   Whew, just got out of that one.

This was taken by a friend of mine.  It is a photo of me at our field camp with some West German soldiers in the background.  This is somewhere in the vicinity of the part of West Germany that tucked in the general area south of the Czech border.  This is probably around 1975.  Interestingly, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment that my Engineer unit was attached to, wore black berets starting in the early 1970s.  Of course Special Forces and Rangers had been already using green and maroon berets respectively back then.  The whole of the rest of the Army apparently started using black berets 25 years or so later.

   I have had a lot of conversations like the one with the neighbor dad since September 11, 2001 and since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have followed.  There was the girl in the gas station I deliver daily news papers to that was worried about a class mate soon to go over to Iraq.  There is the dad in the bar I get Friday fish fry in that worried relentlessly about his son in Afghanistan until he came home. There is the neighbor mom who is distressed over her son getting pulled out of college in mid-semester by his Guard unit to go to Iraq.  They all seem to be like a lone passenger in a row boat on a raging river.  Everyone just drives on by oblivious to their stressful vigilance.

   But these exchanges with those touched by military service got me to thinking.  Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie A Few Good Men rings in my head. “You can’t handle the truth.”  And so it is that society glosses over the sacrifice, yes, isn't it so?  Perhaps its easier than dwelling on the 'what ifs" and impending dangers of military service overseas or even serving State-side in our own country for that matter.  Society pushes one to the middle before you leave for the military and drags one back to the middle after you are home again - Equilibrium Theory sociologists call it.  They also note the constant strain between the individual and the group.  They call that agency versus the structure.  I think of my own resume now that I have finished some college classes and I am looking for a better job in my 50s.  I think of how I have tried not offend anyone with some of the work I have done along the way in my life.  In the Army I was an Engineer.  We build things and de-construct things if needed.  And I would always leave it at that. 

   But, for 35 years I left something off the resume.  I was in a “Combat” Engineer unit - not just the Engineers.  One of our primary tasks, among many was to be prepared to kill the enemy and destroy his assets using a variety of gadgets that other military units did not specialize in.  We trained for it ad nauseam.   We used tools and weapons that if found in one's possession in the civilian world would put someone in prison for decades.  Yet in the military, 18 year old men and women are expected to learn the techniques of efficiently administering death to the enemy and then return home and pretend that world they just left is make-believe. 
   Humans as George Herbert Mead suggested with his theory of Symbolic Interactionism, love to assign meaning to words.  That word "combat" is loaded for meaning.  It can mean combat ready as in my case, and it can mean one saw combat.  Either way, it implies something uncomfortable to the folks back home. 
   So for thirty-some years when asked about my service overseas I’d always mention the baseball backstop my squad built one week in Germany.   I rarely mentioned the odious ‘Iron Curtain’ with its menacing guard dogs (I am sure the Russians probably fed badly), mine fields, guard towers, thousands of Czech and Soviet soldiers, and machine guns we worked in the shadow of.  It was that odious wall that divided Europe for decades. I rarely mentioned when I got home the 'what ifs' that so desperately haunted us all during that era.  People back home just did not seem able to grasp it.

This photo I took of the Wall on the Czech boarder in 1975. The tower is on the communist side and manned by Czech guards with AK-47 machine guns.  This part of the Wall runs right through a town. 

   It was also the end of the Vietnam era and when I came home a year after America’s involvement in that war had ended, I arrive home on a bus wearing a tortoise-shell colored sweater and a pair of jeans.  My uniform was tucked in my duffel bag.  I just did not want the hassle from anyone who might potentially give me grief.  I did not want to remind society about that other world out there.  Our society is much more tolerant of the military uniform in this current era.  Perhaps it is one of the few lessons we still carry from the Vietnam experience.  But then, at just 21 years old I was tired after my three year tour of duty on the fringes of the First World.  I just did not want to take on society on my own.  In those days we each came back to the "World" (a term we used for home) on our own as opposed to now when whole units arrive home together.  
   That colloquial and esoteric term 'World' is loaded with meaning as well.  I saw it as meaning that where we just came from at our overseas duty stations was not of the real world - science fiction if you will. Each duty station was its own little version of some off-world alien planet.  The real world was back home somewhere and we counted the days until we could see it again - "I've got 25 days and a wake-up and its back to the World, man." 

   There were contradictions everywhere at those duty stations overseas;like some of the American guys I served with could barely read and write.  Some of them came from dirt poor poverty.  Yet, the Germans we protected were all mostly highly literate and poverty was unheard of in West Germany by 1974.  Almost all West Germans had cars or scooters.  Yet, when we got away from our equipment, we often had no choice but to walk or hitch a ride. Few of us could afford a car or even a motor bike.    
   If I did hint at some of the peculiar contradictions of working near a potentially hostile border overseas, the usual response from friends and family was something like this, “Ya, but you had fun overseas right?”  

My squad mates are trying to tighten up our tent during a snow storm somewhere up in the general direction of the Czech boarder around 1975.

   So after thirty-some years I left the bitter truth off my resume – a minor omission lost to history.  But this Memorial day with my neighbors, who are of the age to be my grandchildren, being sent to far more dangerous places than I probably ever got sent, I put the “Combat” back in front of the Engineers.  In times of war there should be no reason to hid the cold reality of my own experience just for some notion of civility on a resume.   

   There is a reality to war that the rest of us here back home dare not imagine.   We send our children and grandchildren to fight wars and they at least deserve our sincerity.  They go to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, and Africa – places we use to call the Third World during the Cold War and Vietnam.  I call these places the ‘outposts of paradise.’  They are areas of death and problems far from our shopping malls, concert halls, athletic fields, and holiday picnics. 

   So for you my neighbors in your honor – the “Combat” is back on the resume.  Leaving it off has reaped me no particular benefits anyway.