nonfiction
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.
Email: jeff@jeffcircle.com
Links: www.jeffcircle.com
