I was active duty Army for 8 years and National Guard for 4 years, I still go through times were I miss the military, it’s in my blood. I miss the Army more then then the National Guard, being in the Army was a cool experience. Even though I took crap in the Army, I am glad I served in the Army, me and my wife move from Shreveport La, to Ft. Riley then to Ft. Wainwright AK.; I served in 1st ID (Ft. Riley KS, The Big Red One) and 6th ID (Ft. Wainwright Alaska). In 1st ID I as assigned to the 1st Engineer Bn (they were combat engineers ), working in the S-3 shop. One of my duties was to operated and maintain a Armored Command Post Carrier M577A2, I loved operating that machine in the field, it was great fun to drive on the tank trails. I had one scary event though, it was January or February and I was bring my track down an inclined slope what I did not realize was that the ground was frozen at the time, my track started to slipe and slide, but once I realized what was happening I was able to get control of track and get my track to the bottom of the hill safely.

We really like were we lived on Ft Riley, once they added on the living room we were quite comfortable in our house.

I then was assigned to 47th Engineer Company, Ft Wainwright and I had some interesting experiences there. Since I was the only draftsman on the post I was assigned to measure all the landing zones (LZ's) in the Ft. Wainwright area, which meant that I had to go physically to the LZ's and measure them. So for a few days I had a helicopter assigned to me to fly me around Alaska to the different LZ's. It was also 47th Engineer's job to clear the MSR's (main supply routs) during the winter field exercises, and since I was the CO's driver I really saw the raw Alaska, things that the normal person does not see. 47th Engineer Company also did ice bridging during the winter. There is nothing like driving across an ice bridge with 2 feet of water on top of the ice bridge. Another thing that was really cools was the northern lights. When you are in the middle of nowhere, no lights and it is 40 below 0, the northern lights are totally awesome. The colors, the way the lights dance, it can not really be described by words or pictures, it has to be experienced.