Great Expectations
by Jeff Circle
I joined the Army during my junior year of Bible college. The military
had never been an option since I was expected to finish seminary
and enter the ministry like a good boy. But somewhere between Old
Testament Synthesis and The History of Baptist Beliefs, I decided
that a future of offering plates and legalism was not for me. Inspired
by an afternoon screening of the movie Top Gun, I rushed to the
local recruiting station. At the sight of my coke-bottle glasses
and the utterance of the words “fighter pilot” the Navy
laughed me out of its office. So, with a parting shot about their
bell-bottoms, I went next-door and enlisted as a spy for the Army.
My recruiter had promised I would meet new people and see the world
in glamorous, James Bond-esque style! He let me believe that as
an intelligence analyst, I would jet set around Europe for clandestine
meetings with rogue Soviet agents in swank enclaves of Prague and
Paris. A strategic intelligence assignment with accommodations in
an elegant Swiss flat surely awaited my expertise.
You’ve heard of Lake Geneva, Switzerland? How about a squalid
outpost named Camp Hovey in South Korea, just within firing range
of the DMZ? A quick analysis of my new ramshackle surroundings suggested
that Hovey might be the namesake of a fallen soldier who’d
given his life defending…what? One of the many chicken shacks
surrounding the post?
The locals, who owned the chicken shacks, would have preferred
we let them sleep, rather than “defend” them with our
noisy pre-dawn running cadence or tank deployments. Was this the
height of my recruiter’s promises? Where was my Bond girl?
My shoe-phone?!
Before long I was ordered to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert
Shield. The prospect of a new assignment was exciting, as I packed
my floppy sun hat, a crate of lip balm, and an appetite for Mediterranean
cuisine. But the first thing I saw when I got there was, you guessed
it, a chicken shack. I spent the next six months in a desert foxhole,
not exactly a step in the direction of Swissotel, and my high-tech
spy gear had apparently been traded for an M-16 with sand down the
barrel.
So, as I see the almost daily deployments into the same region
for what seems an inevitable conflict, my heart goes out to our
men and women in uniform. Even the ones with the “glamour”
jobs.
|
