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I could get a free haircut, coffee, or meal today. That is fantastic, yet I feel strange accepting those perks. I’ve had so much good fortune that my service account is embarrassingly full. I was paid for my service and educated in formal schools and through experience. I learned to fly airplanes and helicopters and then got to fly those helicopters around the Hawaiian Islands. I had my confidence boosted on the rifle and pistol ranges, while talking aircraft onto targets, and in running a fire support team and other military units. I have been around the world and collected priceless memories.
I will never forget the night I laughed as I ran to a gunfight because the Marine relaying our position to headquarters kept referring to the local book depository as a book suppository. I got to ride out a North Atlantic storm aboard a Navy frigate. From the bridge, I watched waves break over the ship. As we slid down the back of one wave, the next would loom over us, monstrous and black in the night. After the storm broke, the sea turned sapphire and impossibly calm, as if the storm had sanded and polished the surface of the water. That night, with no light pollution and a new moon, the stars shone from horizon to horizon in a greater abundance and brightness than I had ever imagined. My service account is filled with those and dozens of other experiences I would never have had outside of the military. It seems kind of selfish to also show up for a free meal. There are so many veterans whose service account balances are not so healthy, veterans who put more into it than they got out.
Of course, I would tell any veteran that service is service, period. It doesn’t matter what your military occupational specialty was or if you ever came under fire. It doesn’t matter whether or not you ever entered a war zone. You signed up knowing that you could go in harm’s way. You deserve that free coffee as much as anyone.
Now I sound like my wife. She insists that there were sacrifices and that my deployment to Iraq must have sucked in some way. The thing is, the more it sucks, the more you laugh about it later. A sandstorm roared in on my first night in theater and knocked down the general purpose tent where I was sleeping. As I flailed about in the hot, stinging dirt, I smashed my toes on a steel tent peg. It hurt so much that I laughed at the pain and my clumsiness and at how ridiculous I must look stumbling around with a t-shirt pressed over my face, except nobody there could see far enough to notice what anyone else was doing. The next morning, there was dirt inside my digital watch. That’s funny.
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While still in Iraq and for a while after I returned, I dreamed about turning over bodies in the Tigris River to discover my own children’s waterlogged faces. Those dreams were never particularly funny, even in hindsight, but they went away and left no scars. They barely put a dent in my service account.
I might go out this evening and have a free something with my meal. Couldn’t hurt to add a bit more to my service account in case that airborne fecal matter I was exposed to in Iraq gives me some kind of poop-lung disease or erectile dysfunction.
Serving was such a pleasure and positive force in my life that it feels weird to be thanked for it, but I’m glad it happens and that we celebrate Veterans Day. I wish all my fellow veterans and their families a great one.
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