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.

Reading Robert Alter: The Psalms and the Wisdom Books

  Over the past year I have read two of Robert Alter 's remarkable translations of the Hebrew Bible: The Book of Psalms and, more recen...