Thursday, April 5, 2007

First call to my recruiter

After thinking about joining for way too long, I called SFC Kevin Askew on Maundy Thursday, April 5, 2007, and asked him about joining the Army National Guard. We talked for more than a half hour. He told me that the Army National Guard has a unit that both looks for WMDs and provides Hazmat response support in the region. He said to send in my DD214s, pay statements and any other paperwork I had that would establish my prior service and he would determine if I could actually join. I collected the papers over Easter weekend and started faxing them on Monday morning.

Stalingrad: War and Peace for the Twentieth Century

Vasily Grossman ’s Stalingrad is an ambitious novel, and remarkably, it succeeds in its vast ambition. When Grossman set out to tell the st...