Late 2005 I was assigned to 2-35 Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, HI. I re-enlisted into the Army after almost a three year break in service. On my previous enlistment, I served in the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment from the 82nd Airborne Division. All the new soldiers to include myself were standing in formation waiting on the Battalion Command Sergeant Major (CSM) to speak to us. I was the only Private First Class with a Combat Infantryman Badge, an Expert Infantryman Badge, and a combat deployment to Afghanistan.
Drill Sergeant Ross told us that, we won’t get bullets until we proved that we could be trusted. This meant to stay focus and not do stupid shit with our guns, like chasing each other around the camp. After getting our weapons, we lined up and started to march through the fields to continue our physical training. Jesse was behind me, and as we marched he began to tell me about the AM-15. He told me that “this gun could easily shoot 240 bullets within 50 seconds with a round drum on top” whatever that meant.
People form and change based on the events that they experience within their lives. How people react to these experiences is what creates a person’s personality and individuality. The most formative experiences I have had was my involvement with JROTC. JROTC taught me how to be a leader and improved my social skills so that I could become the man I am today. My transition into the man I am today started when I entered high school.
We all wait nervously, a room filled with six-hundred third graders but no one whispers more than a few words. Today we find out that twenty of us that will leave our families behind for the next two decades. Every year the government chooses twenty seven year old children from each school in the Providence of Britain and transports them to the United Europe Combat Forces (UECF) military school who will then become soldiers after their training. A strange woman walks up the mic, its the same women who dose the announcement every year. Our class has always joked and called her Drakula, due to her tall and skinny build, pale skin and big nose.
The transition from childhood to adulthood occurs when an individual is able to recognize the impact he or she can leave upon their community, gaining life skills doing so. An accomplishment that marked my transition from childhood to adulthood, would be best demonstrated by the process and completion of a leadership responsibility when I performed my Eagle Scout Project. I joined the scouting program when I was very young, and have been very active since ever. Becoming an Eagle Scout has many challenges that a young Boy Scout must undertake, including the completion of a community-based project, which is an important step in obtaining this notable rank. The Eagle Scout Project is designed for the scout to learn different leadership responsibilities.
My sophomore year in high school, I was nominated to be inducted into the National Honor Society. It was an honor to be chosen, seeing that the teachers had to nominate you. Now all I had to do was be accepted. Induction into the National Honor Society required an essay telling about yourself and why you should be chosen. I didn’t think I was very good at telling “why” I should be chosen.
How Being a Military Dependent Affected My Life Goals Being a military dependent is something I have known my whole life. My dad joined the Air Force in 1988 at the age of twenty-four. He initially joined the military to help people, but wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, this led him to fighting fires until 2010. I was born in the year 1999; I grew up with him working twenty-four hour shifts and then being home for twenty-four hours.
One of the most challenging experiences I have faced came to me in my JROTC program. In my junior year of high school, I was promoted to the rank of cadet sergeant major and given more responsibilities than I have ever had. I was thrown into a situation that I was unprepared for and given no training on my position. I was given the task to start and maintain a marksmanship team, while supervising the program’s supply room. At first, I was completely over whelmed, and did not know how to perform my duties, because I could not be in two places at once.
Loud noises seemed to scare me, I have no idea why but screeching tires, Revving engines, screaming children, and even the occasional barking dog will get me on edge and paranoid. In my younger years I joined the US Air Force as a way to get away from everyday life, I just wanted to get out of the everyday monotony of work, sleep, wake, repeat. The only thing that brought me any kind of variety was my sweetheart back home, Hazel. We met in high school when I was just 17 years of age, somehow we are still together today through the night terrors and struggles I constantly suffer.
I woke to to the smell of bacon. I assumed that Jenna had breakfast already made, as she always does. Bacon and eggs, every Sunday. I walk into the kitchen,
Fall Hike in October I’m running out of my house, slamming the door behind me and shouting, “I’m free!” at the top of my air-filled pink lungs. I get a few weird looks from the neighbors that are outside and a few from even the one’s inside but they’re used to my usual crazy outbursts. I don’t know if I should be worried by that or not.
It took 250$ and good deeds to create some doctor like me. Growing up I was the kid who looked at the world with open optimistic eyes. I grew up in a small city called Dora located in Iraq, the middle of three girls. I was born in the late 90s, I have been told that I was born "at the end of the good days". That's when Iraq's political circumstances were not at peace at all, at 2003 another war broke in Iraq.
From the moment I was born I was considered a military brat, I was born in Hawaii at tripler hospital because my mom was in the army and stationed there, my biological father was in the marines. When my mom remarried when I was 7, she married a man who was in the Navy. Everyone thinks being a Military brat just means you know more than other people because you 've been more places and seen more things and you get a lot of stuff you want. This is not true at all. Coming from a military background means you never have stability, you are held to a higher standard than all the other kids, and sometimes it makes you want to be in the military and only focus on that.
I don’t really enjoy picking fights, or committing any acts of violence. Truthfully, if I got into any type of conflict, my lanky body would probably give up on me halfway. That’s what my wife told me after I said I was going to be joining the US armed forces. “Mark, are you an idiot? You can’t even walk without limping, how will you serve our country?!”
Humans are commodities, we as humans don’t like to think of ourselves as something available for purchase, but we can’t deny that our lives hold value and sometimes others can put a price on our lives; whether it is our time or physical body. While our value can be placed in our time and attention given to corporations and their commercialist structure, our value can also be placed in our bodies. Prostitution is just one way, probably one of the first concepts that pops into our head when examining the price of a person, in which people’s bodies can be sold, not only as a service, but as something that is physically done to our bodies. Individuals could also be paid to partake in a medical experiment or receive a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card when
