Most Life Changing Experience In The Army

Damien J. Martin
Ms. Tamira A. Cole
English 091
Most Life Changing Experience
My choice to join the army was my most life changing experience. I was able to experience things I would not have ever experienced, had I not gone into the army. A few examples would be, leaving home and being on my own, the difficulty of deployment and the price of freedom and finally the happiness of marriage and the heartache of divorce. Finally, the last thing I made a connection with is something no one or nothing can prepare you for. My experience in the army never taught me how to handle depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
For the first time, (besides when I would go to summer camp as a child,) I would be on my own I was responsible for
I joined the army in January of 1997 and was given a ship out date, just a few days after I finished my junior year of high school. Instead of spending time at the shore with my friends I would spend it in Fort Sill, Oklahoma completing my basic training. At the end of basic training I would come home to finish high school and then the following summer I would complete my training.
The first couple of weeks of basic training were difficult because the army is trying to mold you to be a soldier. That meant getting up at 5:30 am every morning for physical training. Most of the days at basic training consisted of learning military customs, drill and ceremony, marksmanship, hand to hand combat, and land navigation. I learned many different responsibilities such as having to make a bed the proper way, shining my boots, and taking my uniforms to the cleaners, and doing my own wash. In June of 1998 I returned to Fort Sill to complete my training. upon completing my scout sniper training and volunteered for airborne training while
As we got to our assigned area we would had to put up some tents and cots so and that we would have a place to sleep. The first mission we were assigned was to do a foot patrol in a small town were we met with some of the locals to find out if there were still any Serbian soldiers still in the area. While talking with the locals they shared their stories about what they had been through. They were even able to point out an area were the Serbian army had dumped the bodies of some of the men that they killed from the village. The site and smell of this mass grave made me very nauseous and was something that I would never forget. After that the missions didn’t get any easier. My next mission put me in the line of fire as I went into a mine field to save a young boy that had stepped on a land mine and he had injured his