Category: army life

Godspeed

On By Donny Lee DukeIn army life, PoetryLeave a comment
the new recruit, the author (18), basic training photo

As a member of Together We Served, the largest U.S. Military veteran’s site, I recently participated in a monthly writing competition, my entry below. Each month they ask a different question, and there is one winner and five runner ups, and they give prize money to all. I did not even get runner up. Click here to see the winners of June 2025. (If it’s been awhile, you’ll have to click on the back pages at the bottom of the page to see the winners)

The question for June 2025: “Lessons Learned Advice: What advice would you give a new recruit just starting out their military career? Please describe any specific lessons you learned the hard way from your own service!“

Godspeed
Wow, the question:
what would you say to a new recruit?
I'd light 'em on fire
with the spirit of the ages
guardin' humanity wore,
put them in a soldier’s uniform
to bring them round to themselves
the substance of that uniform,
the evidence they need to survive.

The secrets of the army:
let's go up the ladder;
Abraham Lincoln,
look it square on.
He was the underdog.
Even his boots laughed at him.
He needs to get its specification places.
How tall is that lamp
if it’s minus airborne freeze?

Get into the business of the army.
You’re not there pullin' teeth.
No matter how wide you have come,
how much this will do you in civilian life,
be unto the army the soldier it needs.
Any specialty can wear Airborne.
Educational benefits aside,
that Airborne's a gig.
You have an opportunity to face yourself,
learn how you grow.

Test yourself,
be that Ranger,
that Green Beret,
if you re done with paddy cake,
if you want to climb the world,
go the distance.
I can t hold you close.
Everybody's their own mood.

Alright you're an orderly,
or a vehicle repair specialist,
or get into computers.
We need those too.
See how you tick.
Be an army specialist.
Let that uniform wear you.
Volunteer for field duty,
sleep out in the cold.

Your entire life will talk about this moment,
and you're setting its patterns now.
Your time in service
is an aquifer
you'll draw from all your life.
Test yourself.
Know your limits.
Repeating that's good practice,
the best boat you could drive
over your troubled waters.
It s what you're here for,
the army your qualifier.

If you haven't done it before,
challenge that square one of yourself.
What does it mean out of the hand,
this frozen,
your stamina?
Can you get past that point?
Can you teach people to do that too
when all hell breaks loose,
when you engineer combat?
I'm a survival parade.

This is soft stuff.
Alright commando,
what has she seen with you,
the modern warfare?
You can sure run amok.
You’ve done it,
you’ve bloodied corpse,
pinched some ears off
tearin' apart civilian lives.
You would not want to kill civilians
or cause mayhem.

Would you ever,
would you ever brush your teeth in it?
Human rights law,
and let that be your guide.
I found someone needed to be intensity through now,
the cutting edge of that battlefield,
goin' on main street
doin' the duty
that lifts apart your life.

Habit something else.
About time is it.
Bring the money,
payin' for the part.
Can you advance as a human being?
I don't think this is rank put on,
but certainly a sergeant
has peaked encountered himself
at the role of that rank,
and a captain has gone beyond
the pettiness of himself,
and yes ma'am you wear rank too.
You certainly do.

Yes sir you certainly have,
gut in the garden,
you pull out pearls.
Mirroring enough NCOs,
we knows we have to count Brunos,
a dog that rides shoulders with the army.
This will happen
while we attack
we give everybody a hard time
as if it shouldn't be
some stupid protocol.

Well you've got it.
Learn how to be
I'm glad to be here,
and I'm getting good food anyway.
Perfect,
you're in the army now.
It’s costly.
Wide the terrain.
It will shape you for the rest of your life.

Write All the Paper

Full of self-importance, and there being no doubt in my mind that I should be chosen as a squad leader, I went to the platoon leader’s room at the back of the barracks to tell him, not worrying about anyone hearing, that a ruckus was happening he should attend to. I actually said it outside his door loud enough so that people could hear it. I thought I was showing my leadership skills by taking responsibility here.

It was a one-station-unit-training, basic and infantry school combined, at Harmony Church, Fort Benning, 1979, and it had just started. It was after lights out, and almost the whole platoon had gathered to watch a fight in our barracks. After I told the platoon leader what was happening, a new recruit also but one near 30-years-old, he put an end to it, and we all went back to bed, and nobody suffered any consequences, and I knew they wouldn’t, he being one of us. All stupidity aside, my action really did have a lot to do with not wanting us all to be outside in the push-up position for however long the infraction called for.

The next morning my whole world changed. The entire platoon was seething at me with one word, rat, and it took days to even get my best buddy back at my side, although some weren’t involved in this, but I couldn’t see those people for trees. The fight hadn’t been a fight but a mock fight involving the new recruit at the top of the pecking order, not in anything to do with the army but was some carry over from the popularity status of high school, the most of us being just fresh from that. He was play fighting with his best buddy, and the whole platoon wanted to watch, minus recruits I hadn’t noticed they were so, how can I say, mature for their age?

There then ensued two months of day and night harassment and bullying that took on TV proportions. Begs, the popular kid, made up this ongoing role play. I was Frank Burns of M.A.S.H., and Begs was Hawkeye, of course, and his best buddy was Trapper, and others had other roles. I can’t give you the awful enormity of this. It was played out to the tune of me just wanting to kill myself. My pride in myself, and my self-respect, I lost one day when I just broke down and cried in front of everybody, like an eight-year-old, after being lured away from my unlocked wall locker so that I’d get in trouble when they told the drill sergeant I’d left it unlocked. But my crying only made it worse. Soon after, one night while sleeping, I got my hair filled with shaving cream, and it was so strange to me how that made its way into my dream and became a part of it before I woke up, seeing that culprit shrinking off, and I can go on and on, but the worst would happen in the cattle car going back to the barracks at night after a long day of training.

One night, Begs had made up a song aimed at me, and the platoon was singing it, and with so much glee, some popular tune I don’t remember that he’d ill-adapted to fit his nefarious needs, but you had to hand it to the guy; he was creative. I looked on in disbelief, just silent now with all the abuse. Then out of the woodwork and out of nowhere two normally quiet recruits stood up and put a stop to it, one engaging the mob and the other bending down and making me feel better, they both befriending me and remaining near me watching my back until the end of the course. Heroes there were to me then and still are, gentle souls but with sharp teeth. They went to the drill sergeant when we got back that night and told him what had been happening, and he locked the platoon’s heels and made sure I wouldn’t be harassed anymore, and I wasn’t.

I might add that I graduated ranked third in the platoon, won an off-base pass, but no one said a word, and in subsequent Jump School, I didn’t get a gig the whole time but had somehow been overlooked and didn’t get a white helmet, and because I saw how harassed the white helmets where, I didn’t say a word. I was soldier of the year of lll Corps and Ft. Cavasos, 1981, had dinner with that general more than once, and I graduated on the Commandant’s List of the Special Forces Qualification Course, 1982. Hawkeye got an inability to adapt discharge while we were in Jump School.

The moral of the story is be very careful in telling on anyone, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do, and I’m talking about those two heroes in that cattle car, not what I did, which could remind you of Major Burns.

An American Story

On By Donny Lee DukeIn army life, Non-Fiction StoriesLeave a comment
John Wayne in The Green Berets, 1968

The Service Reflections of Donny Duke

(These appear on and were written for the website Together We Served)

Have you ever heard the term military healing? We know we need cops; we just need the whole cop thing to be healed so police keep us safe and not hurt or kill anybody, unless they absolutely have to to keep us safe, having tried their best to keep the person they’re policing safe. Many people are right now trying to define what that police healing would look and sound like on the streets. But what about the military? Can you be opposed to war but still support the institution that carries it out? If you hold your humanity close, put that before your own sweet self, and by humanity I mean not the group but that higher part in you that does not act like an animal, is never a beast, you just want to end war and not prepare for it, but let’s be real about this: if we didn’t have a strong defense our humanity would be in danger of being wiped out. Okay, so how to be a beast and at the same time wear your humanity, if not on your sleeve, then at least in the restraint of your hands and in the feel of your heart? I think I can answer that. The book I’m introducing is a genuine book of healing, military healing.

All to do with an interview.
Round to the streets,
it’s easy for me
I’m a poet.
Throw me aside, will yah?

To read my reflections click on the link below

Click to access an-amercan-story-2.pdf

A Brazen Whistle Brawls

On By Donny Lee DukeIn army life, childhood education, ego activism, PoetryLeave a comment
Photo by Douglas, celebrating my latest (62nd) birthday with him, Mithun, and Nithish
Evil our times.
It’s all our jail. [vision accompanying first two lines of one of the questions on the Together We Served Service Reflections interview I just re-posted on their site, as if this was an edit for the beginning of the answer, which one I don’t remember]
I said it right on Amazon.
He’d like to name you a place
where we could find ourselves.
It’s growin’ to war.
Delete that.
Don’t stick your fingers into your reflections.
They’re good.
They’re history,
of your own personal.
You just need them read.
Well let’s see how big men are,
how soft
on the board counts.

Life is a divine work until it’s finished.
It’s great in jars.
How much pepper spray?
We get lost here.
It’s not a divine moment
in everybody’s underwear.

And you said it:
we have to hate sex.
No, one just talkin’ while we stab each other with it,
or a hole grabs us and leaves.
You take care of man.
We beat each other with it,
but that’s not my lifelong toy.
I play with myself because of it—
some child grabbed his gun.

Now, if we’re just a folded joy,
we can get along better in the streets.
We can cash in on tomorrow.
We need to get rid of sex—
I think the mature person said this
about who they have become.
Do we get rid of it?

It’s just a football field.
We learn to outgrow it.
We put it down.
We do not condemn it.
It’s a mature decision we make.
We expect no one to follow us but us.

Well I think I’ve sowed my wild oats.
No one’s ever blocked sex from me.
I’ve had partners all my life.
I went from childhood memories
about our lust room
we had fun in
to a teenager doin’ it right.
I was a young adult party sex.
No one stopped me.
I never got punished for it.
I’m clear and easy on sex.
It’s not a hole in the ground.
It laughs in the breeze,
and it really feels good, you know?

We take it off now.
What am I, 30?
You’re not a kid anymore.
You’re at that mature age where life makes sense.
You don’t go screamin’ down the street if you cut your finger.
You’re not a nightclub in the kitchen anymore.
You’re free
from have to be with your buddies.
You’re doin’ sadhana.
It’s become the aim of life
God realization.

This is not boring, religious, clap trap.
You get long lasting ecstasies
in your body at times.
You’re inner life has opened to the Infinite.
You see visions
that represent things
that you need to grow.
The inner voice has taking you by the hand
and introduced you to life
where God leads it.

It’s an offer I gave you a wall but nobody’s comin’.
Your mind can stay silent sometimes,
and you love the world.
It bothers you less and less,
other people’s behavior.
Even your mistakes
are no cause for alarm.
Patience is painting your room,
and kindness drapes your social interaction.
You’re a strong person
that knows how to look at things.

You’re gettin’ trapped by sex now.
It’s spills you.
It does not hold your hand.
It’s a life force squeeze.
You’re tired of its pursuit.
How did we come here?
From all walks of life.
It’s an everybody does,
when they get old enough
to only pursue God.

This changes society.
Nay, this reinvents society.
We are bigger than machines.
We know how to handle ourselves even in love.
We’ve grown oceans bigger
than anything we look at.
The world is ready to evolve.
We can do this.
We can be free from sex,
if we know when the time has come to do so.
No premature ejaculation.
It has to be the right time.
It has to be real.
It has to be what we’re doin’ in life
to find God,
and you will hear it in your soul to give it up now.

You are the soul of society.
They’re uneducated,
anybody who denies this.
They don’t know what’s goin’ on.
They just want to stay kid.
How do we handle this with them?
With patience and honesty.
We don’t force them to comply.
World force does that,
as the soul force it truly is.

We’ve got such a long way to go
to reach our evolutionary path
mountaintop,
millennia,
and I’ve just given you a key ingredient
to get that done.
It’s wonderful you know?
free from sex.
You’re unhampered by life
in its sticky points.
You stand tall, proud, and free,
and you know the other half
and don’t have to mate with it anymore.

You are as much male as you are female
in the essence of yourself,
as you meet the world.
The gender of the body leads you,
but it doesn’t rule.
You’ve achieved balance in time.
This is cool.
You’re Hercules
and Diana.
You are fit do some dangerous big knife
or stay at home
and take care of the kids.
Now can I counsel you further?

Oh I’m around,
even in narrow we meet.
Come to my other business runners,
how the tackle game
plays with children,
or how dogs become human,
or how enlightenment speaks.
Join me will you,
on some other poem
battles down life
to a node.

They got a skinny little net,
the literary art house,
so you won’t find me there.
I’m on blogs and such
in my room
right here in front of humanity.
Let’s see this through:
no sex
when we get old enough to drop it.

Asses the future risk of poetry.
It will just sink.
It won’t even cut corners.
It will just sit there unread.
It’s just a bunch of words in a blender.
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
And now we’re in our teens.
It’s not innocent here.

They do it
despite we want them to stop.
It unbalances them.
Makes them crow.
It changes their minds.
It gives them a safe outlet
for their demands.
Now we’d need to stop pregnancy and disease,
not have them harm one another,
make it slightly difficult to get to
but not prevented or prohibited.
What have I said?
Teen sex.

We’d account for this
by all the kid sex they had,
where they’d learned to take turns
and be nice to one another,
before their genitals became armed.
Now I’m a roll in a hat.
End sexual hangups please.
In all this here we do that,
got it figured,
got it right.

Now you’ll blast me
with everything you can throw at me.
Now hear me out.
I’m in wisdom’s barn,
but I’m not settin’ down rules.
I’m understandin’ the animal we are
and seeing how we get beyond it.
You got it all wrong.
It’s not hide the genitals.
Let them play,
where appropriate does its measure
in the right age group,
where we are not keen on sex;
we just wanna feel down there
and have fun
with ourself or with friends.

We grow out of it you know.
You’ve seen it in this poem.
Has it terrified you?
Has it done anything at all but look at you?
Can we get over it.
Can we just make sex the plaything it was
before don’t do that got ahold of it
and put it down
when we’ve gotten bigger than ourselves?

Now test me please.
See how this works in public.
Under the right conditions
we are healthy human beings.
Some people are still reading this.
Some people have thrown it away.
Are you just afraid it’s a masturbate cushion?
If we stop right now
we’re at the end of the poem.

A risk teenager said.
Is it better to freeze?
We’re gonna try
hoppin’ a poem on Earth’s wheels.
The SF engineered
a better to see me with
well together we served.
Let’s see.

A military airlift,
hands brought me the breeze.
That’s the shot fired.
The bulwark of the law
has to undergo a transformation
in order to fit this into place.
Can you imagine the changes involved?
They’re bigger than sin.
They make us right
in our social relations
where we see attraction laid eyes
and mounted genitals and hands.
It changes us at the core
of our manipulable social relations.

We’re there
stuck at a roadblock,
women screamin’.
men peein’,
and everybody mad at one another.
Can you see that?
It’s right there in front of you
on communication.com,
on the nightly news.
It grabs the literary page
and hits up movie after movie
and theater television.
It’s a regular guest
on sope operas.
It’s everywhere we look
anywhere we got eyes
on the society of us.
it’s too tiring to see,
and we still keep it up.

Can we take it down,
when we get back to our old self
that has other gauges for life than sexual sin?
Pretty much all about Eve
is a sexual trauma notebook.
i don’t think this is smart land,
and here we go again another scandal in the news
this present poet creates.
I could’ve just stayed offline,
not bothered with dense matter,
and do my thing.
Am I stupid?
I’m not dumb.
Transparency
is the easiest way
to finish the world
a miracle on earth
enlighten us.

The Eye of the Tiger

On By Donny Lee DukeIn army life, ego activism, Non-Fiction Stories, Poetry1 Comment

August 2023 Military Memories Competition
(on the internet site Together We Served)

Which song do you connect most to your time in military service? What specific memories does this song bring back for you?:

Aug 17, 2023, 3:43 AM

The Eye of the Tiger

It was a hot June afternoon at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, and we shuffled off the buses amid the yelling of NCO instructors shouting for us to line up shoulder to shoulder, our bags at our feet. It was a scurry; it was a hustle; we were hassled. There were over two hundred of us, not enough room for the place inside the gate we were, and so the line was a long L shape. I could feel my heart in my throat. This was it, what I’d been waiting for since I was seven and saw John Wayne in The Green Berets at a local drive-in. The Duke looked like a giant on that big screen, his green beret the headgear of a hero. At that moment, 1968, the Vietnam War was a nightly feature on the six o’clock News, small clips of U. S. soldiers at rest and in misery a staple of my childhood. At the movies it was just my dad and I, as this was a man-thing between us, and you must pardon me for such a masculine pronoun. He had wanted to join SF when it was being formed, or somewhere around that time, but he had decided not to reenlist.

The aspiration came to me. Sitting there absorbing every minute of that movie, it hit me like a self-realization: this was what I wanted to be. I don’t think he realized the weight of that in my consciousness because, when I told him, he looked down at me—we were in the front seat of a 1965 Mustang—and he smiled that patronizing smile adults give little kids when they are so earnest at being ridiculous. I was pigeon-toed and had asthma, a very small, little thing of a boy. “You know son, they select only the best for that.” He tried not to let on that he thought I was a weakling, but it came through in his incredulous smile. It didn’t matter. I knew I would be selected because I was the best. Of course I was. After all, I was the center of the world. At least that’s what my eyes and ears told me, seating my vision and hearing in the dead center of everything; smell, touch and taste put me there too, not to mention my thoughts, as you only hear your own. Those cheats—it’s a big and very disappointing fact of childhood that you discover your senses have been cheating you; you are not the center of the world, or, to put it more how it is: everybody else thinks they’re the center too.

One SF instructor was coming down one side of the L, and another was coming down another. They would stand in front of the SF candidate (we have to get one thing straight: the term Green Beret is for Hollywood; it’s called Special Forces, SF for short, and no, Rangers are not Special Forces). He would look you up and down and move on. The one that stood in front of me began to laugh. I became indignant, but of course I couldn’t show that. He said something like, “You, you want to be SF?!” I heard some splashes of laugher down the ranks. I burned inside. I think I said, “Yes sergeant!” but I don’t remember. It happened that I no longer had asthma, but I was super skinny and was still pigeon-toed, which really showed when I ran, and we’d had to run to get in line. I wasn’t the smallest in the class, but almost. The smallest guy had made the mistake of getting the SF patch tattooed on his arm before starting the Q course, and folks, you just don’t do something like that. He was hounded by the instructors until he quit, which did take awhile. I think he got to Phase II, as I remember him being hounded on a ruck march on Smoke Bomb Hill back at Bragg. At any rate, I don’t remember anyone standing in front of him and laughing on that fateful day (they hadn’t seen his tattoo, I gather), a day I’d be grateful for. It gave me the gumption to keep going. I had something to prove.

Enter “The Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. It was 1982, and that song was at the top of the charts. Cliché today, back then that song was real. Incidentally, that was also the year the movie First Blood came out, and I saw it in a theater full of SFers, SF candidates and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. When the line in the film was spoken, “Those Green Berets, they’re real bad asses,” the theater erupted in the spurious noise of young men trying to sound like beasts. You know, that never sounds right. Anyway, right there in that line of men, just inside the gates of the greatest challenge in my young life so far, to win the green beret, I started singing that song in my mind. It was the part, “rising up to the challenge of our rival,” that really got me motivated. I have to explain here a little of the layered workings of our minds, specifically that mechanical part that just starts repeating things in the background of our conscious mind, especially songs, in odd moments. If you take the time to consider the moment, chances are it’ll be one that relates to that song, not in every instance, but in many I’ve found. Anyway, [1] it set a president. Anytime I got into trouble or wanted to quit, which was damn near every day, I either played that song in my heart and mind, or it just rose up in my mechanical mind playing on queue. I let it move me. It gave me strength; it gave me hope. I rose to that challenge with the help of that popular tune. I became a Green Beret, and you’ll have to pardon me for sounding Hollywood. It sounds so much better now than SFer in the early evening of my life.

It did fail me once though. I was in Robin Sage, Phase III. The G chief had given me the task of doing a recon before a body snatch mission, and that means kidnapping someone. I was a Sergeant E-5, an 11B2P, airborne infantry, and I was supposed to have a lot of experience in the field in my m.o.s. I had very little. I’d spent a year in the Horse Cavalry Platoon at Ft. Hood (now called the Horse Detachment), and other than being on a runaway wagon an hour before the Inaugural Parade for Ronald Regan, in Washington, D.C. in 1980, I hadn’t really gotten my juices going, and after that I spent about a year in a Pathfinder section doing mostly static line parachute demonstrations for Ft. Hood, never going to Pathfinder school, with very little actual field duty. As an SF candidate on a mock A team, composed of 12 people, I was in charge of half of the team. I was to lead my half on the body snatch mission, and so I had to go and get eyes on the target, alone and in the dark. That usually wasn’t a problem for me, like it was for many of the candidates. We as a species are so herd sour it’s not even funny. My dad had made me walk alone in the woods at night, or ride a horse alone for miles in the darkness, and if I didn’t do it, he’d threaten to whip me with the belt he had in his hand, not the best way to overcome fear, but I did get used to being alone in the woods at night. It’s off target, but he also made a slide for life over the pond we swam in (I was 10), so to get me to overcome my fear of heights. He was a serious man-maker, and I don’t cuss him for it, but, like I said, it wasn’t the best way to overcome fear, using the fear of a whipping to get me to face my fears. When he whipped me, he left welts on my legs and butt, and a bucking horse, the dark, or a high place were preferable to that.

So normally I would’ve been fine, but this time it was different. There was a Christian militia out there beating up SF candidates and taking their weapons. That news had sent a shiver of fear through our Robin Sage. I dreaded going out there on that recon, some several klicks from the G base. It was a mostly follow the railroad tracks sort of journey, and I arrived quite easily at the road the jeep was to be going down carrying the person we had to snatch, which was to be at 9 o’clock the next night. I hid in the bushes and mixed coco beverage powder, milk powder, and a couple of sugar packets together, making a Ranger pudding. It was my favorite thing to make out of a C ration, a comfort food that didn’t give me the comfort I wanted in that instance. I tried to shake off my fear, but then I heard men running on the tracks, and I looked, and sure enough, there were two men hightailing it down the tracks from the direction I’d come. It was the Christian militia looking for me. They must’ve seen me somehow. “The Eye of the Tiger” played in my mind, and whether I actually played it or it just played in my mechanical mind I don’t remember, but whatever the case it didn’t work, and I ditched the song in my thoughts, replacing it with, “Oh my God they’re after me!” And I got the fluff out of there, after a little wait to make sure they were far enough away. I think it was about 8:30, just a half hour before the scheduled jeep. I arrived at camp sometime later, relieved I’d made it, and I went to report to the G chief the militia were in the area. He wasn’t there, but one of his assistants was. “You idiot! That was the G chief going to town.” He had gone on a pogey bait run with an assistant. “You mean it wasn’t the Christian militia?”

It bears mentioning that, under interrogation by the local Sheriff, the SF candidate that had started the whole Christian militia thing had confessed he’d made it up to cover up having his weapon stolen from a wall locker in the 82nd Airborne barracks.  He’d left Robin Sage and gone to meet some friends in the 82nd, to have a night on the town, stowing his M-16 in his friend’s wall locker. Big mistake. Someone stole it. After an initial, “What the hell do I do” moment, he concocted the plan, or that was how it was told to me. It’s amazing how such fine details go through the ranks. He had his friends rough him up some so to look like he’d been beaten up, and he went back to Robin Sage and told the G chief and his team leader, a captain, the big lie. Officers had recently started going though the Q Course with the enlisted, to make it harder for officers, who had up to that time gone through what was termed ‘The Gentlemen’s Course’. All this happened because a female captain had passed the course, and in those days, that was not to be, and they ended up failing her on a technicality after the fact. (For the record, I think she earned the beret.) I never learned what happened to that poor fool who just had to go party with the paratroopers. (82nd infantrymen were our OpFor during Robin Sage.) He did not become an SFer I’m pretty sure. What a gust of fear he stirred up, as I wasn’t the only SF candidate to swallow it, but I might admit I swallowed hard. Yeah, fake news is dangerous.

Hands down, the most poignant and pressing moment when “The Eye of the Tiger” saved my ass was back at Camp Mackall, at the end of the course, negotiating the infamous SF obstacle course. I swear to God, I heard a man break his thigh on the Dirty Name two events from there. The snap sound was sickening. My biggest moment of truth of the whole six months of SF training was a piece of cake to many if not most other candidates. You had to crawl 10 or 20 meters (it was miles to my mind) through a culvert that was about a meter underground, and it was full of SF candidates moving very slowly. I was so claustrophobic I could hardly ride an elevator without panic rising. I had a terror of tight places. There was an instructor at the top of the pit that led down to the entrance to the tunnel, and there wasn’t one at most of the other events. It seems I wasn’t the only claustrophobic candidate. I went down and looked into the tunnel and saw the men on their hands and knees moving slowly in it, just enough to make me hop back out of the pit and beg the instructor to let me skip it. He told me if I didn’t go in I didn’t pass, and here we were at the end of the course, and did I want to fail now? He wasn’t a jerk. Well, the only thing to do was play the song, this being the rival of rivals, and I made a conscious decision to play it in my mind; it didn’t just suddenly start playing in the mechanical mind. After a moment or so of letting that song motivate me, I jumped down there and went into the tunnel. About halfway I panicked, just went berserk, the men behind me groaning and complaining, as I’d come to a complete halt, but in my thrashing around, not going forward at all, I hit my head on the concrete above, and that snapped me out of it, and I made it through that tunnel. Everyone behind me was relieved. The feel of the open air after that battle, it did not smell like horse dung or the fear of night, let me tell you.

Our class was 6-82, the numbers designating the date, month and year, of that class of the Special Forces Qualification Course. When we came to attention as a class, we yelled, “6-82 WETSU!” the acronym meaning we eat this shit up, and I really did eat that shit up. When we first started the course, we were taken to an auditorium at the JFK Special Warfare Center. Some field grade officer stood at the mic on stage and told us to look at the man to our right and left. He said at the end of the course they wouldn’t be there. Sure enough, when we graduated, they marched us back into that auditorium, and two thirds of us were missing. I got a big surprise and made the Commandant’s List; the top 15% of the class. It happened too that I was called upon the stage to receive an ARCOM for becoming the Soldier of the Year of III Corps and Ft. Hood. I was so embarrassed, and the surprise on my fellow classmates’ faces, well, it didn’t say I was the best among them. The center of the world thing, it had vanished a long time ago. Every single day through that course I was sure I’d fail. I just racked up a lot of points. When others were kicked back in their tent during land navigation, let’s say, where we lost most of the class, I was out there doing it, every practice run. Pardon me if tears are welling up writing this. I am very proud to have won the green beret.

You know how it is as you get old. You look back on your life a lot. If I could pick a time to return to in my life, it would be to be back in the Q Course. That was the time of my life, and I only knew at the time it was tough, and I couldn’t wait for it to end.  Isn’t that just so human? I’m listening to “The Eye of the Tiger” now, my headphones on as I write this. I’m in that tiger’s eye once again at 62. I’ve just published three books on most of the major e-book sites on the net, and I’ve stood up and spoken my own personal truth, with courage and sincerity, without hatred and anger, but I have little doubt most of you will not think me the best among us, but it’s in self-sacrifice that we are at our best. I’ve been seeking spiritual enlightenment for these past 30 years, and that’s not something you get to by rules and regulations, or even the one, two, and three of steps. You wing it in such a way you win it. Life is so short to live in line. You must understand that Green Berets aren’t soldiers who always go by the book. We are unconventional, and that means thinking and living outside of the box. SF, please don’t ever forget that. In any event, you can read my military memoir here, which is patterned after the service reflections of Together We Served, called An American Story: https://harms-end.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/an-amercan-story-3.pdf

[1] I’ve edited the story since the competition, from “I have to explain here…” to the word “Anyway,” and in the three other places the mechanical mind is mentioned in the story, the first later in the same paragraph and in the 6th and 8th paragraphs.