February 1990 - May 1990
Basic Training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, B Co. 4/30th Infantry as an Indirect Fire Infantryman (Mortarman)...more fondly referred to as a"mortar-maggot" by the riflemen!=)
June 1990 - July 1990
U.S. Army Airborne School, Ft. Benning, Georgia, C Co. 1/507th Airborne. For those of you that have earned the "Silver Wings", you know how I feel. For those of you that haven't, or otherwise haven't been in the Army... this is one of the high points of my life, learning how to fly by leaping out of U.S. Air Force C-130 and C-141 aircraft with nothing but a pack of nylon parachute to keep me from slamming into the earth at terminal velocity....!!!!
July 1990 - April 1991
I reported to my first assigned duty station with the famed 82nd Airborne Division out of Ft. Bragg, NC. I was assigned to the 3rd battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as the "Panther Brigade". I wasn't even there two weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It;s funny in a way, the day that Saddam invaded, we were out in the field, (on training excersises in the woods for civilians that read this) we were getting DRENCHED by torrential rains, and we were told that we would be going back in early, that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and that there was a small possibility that we would be deployed. Badda bing, badda bang and two weeks and a whole lot of immunizations later, I was on a C-141 flight to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia via West Germany. Well, without going into a whole lot of details, we came, we sweated, and we kicked some Iraqi tail. Some people will always look back at that war and ask why we left Saddam in power. I tend to think we should have taken him out myself. Of course, I might not be here to type this if we had... my unit was 40km from Baghdad when the cease-fire was called, and I can't imagine that anyone else was much closer than that. Overall though, our mission was to remove Saddam's forces and restore Kuwait to it's previous government. I would say that we succeeded 100 percent on those two goals. There is one thing I don't like about this in light of the current situation there. Whenever I had fear or doubts during the months leading up to Desert Storm,I always told myself " If WE (I) don't do this now and succeed, it could be my brothers doing it in 10 years." Well, that turned out to be a premonition of sorts. As of right now (Jan 2003), one of my younger brothers is an infantryman in a unit that stands a strong change of going if we go to war again. I won't say which unit, but I will say that he just got back from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan a few months ago
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