Читать книгу Blue Feather - Christopher A. Dennis - Страница 4
CHAPTER 2 10 Years Earlier
Оглавление06/01/2003. The day I turned 19 years old, I arrived at Fort Benning Georgia to report for basic combat training for the U.S. Army. Back then, Fort Benning was called the home of the infantry. It is still where all infantry soldiers are sent for combat training before being shipped off to their units.
Needless to say, the terror attacks on the World Trade Center had already happened. My sole purpose for joining the Army was to go to war. It bothered me on a level that I cannot describe to have witnessed foreigners come to my homeland and kill our people. I believe that those who have the ability to do something, should do something. I also think that was a quote from a president a long time ago. My alternative motives for joining the Army were also influenced by my lack of direction and purpose in life. I was an angry teenager which made the pride of serving my country an easy sell for my recruiter. From the moment when I stepped off of the bus, I was submerged into an aggressive and hostile environment that I was strangely comfortable with. I was used to being talked down to and yelled at. So in some strange way I felt like it was the perfect place for me and that I was supposed to be there. I soon found out that I had many names. Many of which were four letter words or creative and derogatory insults that I proudly accepted. Obviously the first goal of the drill sergeants was to strip any identity away from the individual and establish their authority over us by means of intimidation, threats, and my favorite, pain and repetition. I also learned that soldiers learn much like dogs. We received a verbal treat for doing the right thing and experienced an overabundance of physical exercise coupled with insults and threats for failing to meet the ridiculous standards set before us. For example, if we could not perfectly make our beds with 45° angle hospital corners, shower, shave, brush our teeth, put our uniform on, shine our boots, secure our wall lockers, mop the floor, shine the sinks, leave no trace of dust or dirt and report to formation in five minutes, then we would spend the next two hours practicing a modified version of P90 X and working on upper body strength until the drill sergeant got tired. Don’t forget about learning to count to three over and over again at the top of your lungs while it is explained to you just how much of a piece of trash that you are. And I loved it. The punishments were creative but generally the same. Mess up, miss the time hack, show emotion or attitude (other than aggression), or forget something that you were told, then you are about to get stronger. Me being me, I had a smart remark for everything and often smiled at the insults passed along to us. This had a significant role in the increase of my upper body strength and the development of my washboard abs. there was a guy in my platoon who lost over 40 pounds in a 14 week period, which is how long our training took to make regular young men from every walk of life into the next generation of highly aggressive warriors itching to go to war and kill everything. The drill sergeants would shout commands, and we would respond as one with a loud and thunderous “kill”! I understood that war is not a pretty business, and that this desensitization process was to ensure that not if, but when the time came to face our enemies that we would be especially ruthless and confident in our ability and willingness to take his life without remorse. One of the side effects of this type of training was the development of a rather sadistic sense of humor that is commonly seen among the most effective warriors. For example, if someone were to get shot in the head, instead of shock or some sort of fight or flight response, an infantryman would simply say “that’s not a way to get ahead in life”, or something along those lines. This lighthearted mentality segregated the differences between a warrior and a civilian and especially the P.O.Gs. P.O.G stands for people other than grunts. (Pronounced pouge) Grunts being the infantrymen and P.O.Gs being every other job in the army. Essentially the infantryman is the expendable fighting force which is supported by every other army job to include tanks, mortars and artillery. We were brainwashed into a pride of being expendable and therefore more important than anyone else in the entire organization. The bottom line is, without the infantry, you don’t win the war. You could even go as far as to say take away the Marines and we still have an army, but take away the army all you have is overcrowded boats. That sense of humor helped compartmentalize any emotion that would later affect a warrior’s ability to be the most ruthless and unforgiving fighter on the battlefield. This type of humor was like a shield for our minds that prevented some of the stress of combat and the uncertainty of life or death from effecting the overall mission success. I bought into this mentality as if a Spartan on a distant battlefield in the past. It was ingrained into us that the greatest honor of war was to sacrifice your own life to save another. John 15:13 says greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. this may have been the only bible verse I ever heard spoken during my time in the Army. I am excluding of course, outside influences and experiences.What I eventually learned was that the sooner I accepted my own tragic and glorious death, the more effective and fearless I would be in battle. What this ultimately turned me into was a fearless time bomb itching for a fight with the enemy, bloodthirsty and ready to kill and even more willing to have an opportunity to achieve glory by boldly and recklessly seeking danger to prove my worth to both my country and my comrades. This mentality was a service to myself in a common quest to lift my own name. What I did not understand back then was who God said I was, who God says we are today! Guess what? The first thing you need to know about Jesus is illustrated in Hebrews 13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and forever! Has anyone ever told you that Jesus loves you? Did you believe it? You should! Why? Because this is what it says in Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! Why would he do that for me? Ephesians 2:8-9 explains: for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast. What I knew from childhood sunday school but did not understand was that I was loved and given a gift that I could not earn and did not deserve. The choice was mine whether to accept that kind of awesome gift. That is real love man. Why then would such a ridiculous and crazy gift be given to me, for me? Here are some reasons.
Ephesians 2:10 says for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Galatians 3:26 says for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
1st Corinthians 6:20 says for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
2nd Timothy 1:7 says for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
Psalm 139:14 says I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
Jeremiah 1:5 says “before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
It is interesting to me that most people, including myself, search their whole lives to find their purpose. Most of us rely on other people to tell us who we are and what we are not. In my case I was looking for someone or something to tell me who I was, tell me that I was important and tell me that I was needed. In the absence of my known purpose, I found that the military was completely capable of providing me with a purpose. One decorated with glory and honor. The only downside to this is that they have to transform you. They have to reprogram you. They have to make to you new in order to be able to serve that purpose effectively. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a soldier, sailor or marine and serving your country, but it would have been nice to know what I know now and how that journey would’ve affected who I became. My service was filled with honorable things and honorable actions, but the price I paid in character became an obstacle course instead of a hurdle in my road to God. Let me tell you something. It has been a very long road.
After airborne training and a longer but shorter than expected stay with the 3rd Ranger Battalion, I soon found myself assigned to a unit of about 300 infantrymen situated on the 38th parallel demilitarized zone (DMZ) Camp Greaves, Republic of South Korea. In other words, the very front line with the unstable, hell bent communist state of North Korea, mine fields and all. I remember my first formation as a brand new paratrooper in an airborne, air assault unit. Half of the 300 men were swaying back and forth at the position of attention. Honestly, it smelled like a liquor store. It was clear to me on day one that this lifestyle was going to be about drinking, fighting and sex. We sang songs about this kind of stuff in training after all. It was ingrained into us that to be a real infantryman, or man for that matter, you had to be rough and mean, tough, able and willing to fistfight at the drop of a hat, drink heavy and try to have sex with every pretty thing that moves. This is now my world. Some of the first rumors I heard about on the flight into South Korea were about the hookers and prostitutes that were so readily available to soldiers. The prostitutes would try and make a young private to marry them so that they could get a green card into the United States and have citizenship. At which point they left the soldier and usually stayed in the prostitution line of work. I confirmed the rumors to be true when I landed and received a briefing along with a handful of condoms and told “don’t marry them because they don’t love you”. They told us not to contaminate government property and practice safe sex. they also told us it was illegal to mess with the prostitutes so they were sending a mixed message from the start. Remember now, this is the first time in my life that I am free to make my own decisions and live life the way I want to live. So the motto became train hard and party harder. It did not take very many months for me to realize that I was a weekend alcoholic. A proud one at that. Every weekend had its own new story. I would wake up in turtle ditches not knowing where I was. I would find my buddies passed out buck naked on some laundry machines in the middle of nowhere and often experimented with giant black sharpie markers and the shaving of eyebrows to those who passed out early. The whole goal was to drink more than anyone else and not pass out first. I visited the clubs where you paid the prostitutes or “drinky girls” $20 to give you a lap dance when you drink and at the same time they keep feeding you drinks so that you keep buying lap dances. I wasted a ridiculous sum of money on things that never satisfied me, not even in the moment. Now, I never did get crazy with a prostitute, just lap dances but that’s because I was too young to understand STDs and honestly I thought every prostitute had them. Frankly, I did not want HIV so I stuck to alcohol. Eventually, for one reason or another I was roomed with the chaplain’s assistant. Most of the barracks had about four to five guys in one room meant for two, so I managed to work a deal where I could room with the guy no one wanted to room with and only have one roommate and therefore more space. I was cool with that. If you didn’t know, the chaplain’s assistant is basically like an army pastor’s secretary. The funny thing about the army chaplain is that he is every denomination. He is Christian, Baptist, Catholic, Muslim and Jedi knight if you need them to be. So there I am roomed with a very goofy and uncoordinated socially awkward fellow from New York who was in his 30’s. He explained to me one day that he had never had sex or even a kiss from a girl. It then became my mission to change that. So one weekend, after spending 30 days in field training exercises, we were ready to drink.I gathered some buddies and told them about the chaplains assistant’s predicament. we decided to pool our money together and change what seemed like this guy’s bad fortune. When we arrived at the clubs, we found out that he had never been drunk either. My friends and I continued to buy him shots until he was completely annihilated. After about 30 minutes of throwing up outside we hailed a cab to go to a place called Hooker Hill. When we arrived it was dark and there was a small street with glass bay windows out front with about ten to fifteen different places to choose from. The neon lights were on and women were standing where manikins would normally sit dressed like what you would expect. Then there were women coming out of each establishment pulling on us to try and get our business. They even began to fight one another. In the end we paid a very large sum of money to make possible what I am now ashamed of being a part of. Back then though, I did not know what I was doing. We continued to drink until morning where my last memory was throwing up on a prostitute, then sitting on the curb outside of the club and then in a waiting room in a hospital lobby. As I came to, I learned that the chaplain’s assistant was lying on a table in the operating room getting his stomach pumped. My head hurt so bad that I had no idea where I was or how I got there. You can imagine my surprise when the next person I see is my commander standing in the hospital lobby. He was asking me questions I didn’t understand. Eventually I just said, I’m hammered and I don’t know how I got here. I knew I was in deep trouble, all of us were. But during the ride back to our 300 man outpost, the commander just said “you owe me for 2 hours of driving”. The next weekend, the four of us pulled some weeds around the company headquarters building for about 45 minutes and that was that. I share that story with you because in my youth and in my wandering I have done things that I am most certainly not proud of. Even still, we can find grace and mercy at the foot of the cross because Isaiah 53:5 says but he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed! So you see that as my environment shaped me and told me who I was supposed to be, without knowing the truth, I conformed to it because of my selfishness and arrogance. Don’t be fooled into what others want you to be or who you think you are. Instead be the person God says that you are! Your slate is clean. Yesterday, today and always!