I joined the National Guard in January of 2002, a few days after my 19th birthday. I had graduated High school in Chicago the previous June and after an unsuccessful first semester at Northern Illinois University, my best friends David and Emily convinced me to follow them down to Florida.

Although I’d always been a bright student, poor attendance and a lack of academic focus had left me with mediocre grades, going to a mediocre school with most of my tuition being covered by student loans. So, when I decided to move to Florida, I had to consider how I was going to cover the added cost of out of state tuition. My friend David, who had enrolled in ROTC and fallen in love with the Army, thought that the Florida Guard might be the answer. He made a convincing argument about their 100% tuition coverage, the kind of deployments guard units do when they get activated, and the ease of the one weekend a month training schedule. I knew that paying for college with student loans, even in state, was going to leave me with a debt that would haunt me for years. So, within a few weeks of my arrival in Tallahassee, David and I were sitting in the recruiter’s office, mapping out our 6 year contracts.

Joining the Army was something I always thought I would never do. I’d had a fairly liberal, pacifist upbringing and couldn’t imagine myself as a soldier. Maybe that was part of the reason I joined, how ironic when the hippie’s child rebels against his upbringing and joins the military. It was an odd phase in my life. One where I wasn’t really sure where I belonged or how I felt about anything. I liked the idea of serving my country, especially with the events of September 11th still fresh in everyone’s mind, and the guard wouldn’t significantly disrupt my college plans. I knew that even if I did get sent overseas, the worse case scenario was a rotation in Bosnia, I wouldn’t be gone for more than six months. I was even thinking about doing ROTC to become a National Guard officer; that would only have me in the guard one year longer than I was already contracted for, plus it would keep me from getting deployed in my last two years of college.

I joined the National Guard in January of 2002, I left for basic training on may 1st, just days after the semester ended. I graduated in september, and since I'd missed the fall semester, I spent the next few months living off my basic training money. In December, David, Emily and I all headed back to Chicago for Christmas break. We had a good time, we visited with friends and family, went to some Hockey games, we had all kinds of plans till New Years. Then, on December 27th, I was sitting at home with my mother and my grandparents when the phone rang. It was my squad leader, calling to tell me we'd been acticvated.

David and I left a few hours later. We drove all night and into the next day to get back to Florida expecting our activation to be some stateside post duty somewhere. We spent a couple weeks in Tallahassee thinking we were gonna do a few months guarding a base overseas, then we spent month and a half at Ft Stewart doing our train up and imagining 6 months tops, in the rear in Kuwait while the rest of the Army stomped Saddam. We didn't find out where we were going officially till it was almost time to leave and we didn't knw what we'd be doing here till we got to Kuawit and were assigned to our Patriot Missile batteries.

You know, it's funny, while I was at Ft Stewart, my mom sent me a travel guide to Iraq and some Baghdad street maps. I called her up that night and I said "Mom, I appreciate the thought, but we're not gonna be 50 miles from the Iraq border, much less in Baghdad. It's funny how life works out sometimes.