At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 2009 running the Army Physical Fitness Test
in a gas mask. My official job was Chemical Weapons Decontamination Specialist.
In the last blog post, I finally made the call to begin the
re-enlistment process. After calling the recruiter, I pulled together all the
documents I could find to confirm my prior service, scanned them and sent
them.
Two days after the call, I was the dog that caught the car. I thought, “What now?!!” What was I going to do if I actually got back
in the Army. I thought about volunteering for some sort of chemical weapons
job. Most everyone dislikes chemical weapons
in principle and in practice. Wearing a
gas mask and chemical protection gear is somewhere from uncomfortable to
horrible.
But the fact that most people don’t like the chemical
weapons branch made it attractive. It fit with the idea that I was replacing my
failure at community service with Army service.
Part of my thinking in re-enlisting was that I would join a
Type A group of people in community service.
I had tried volunteering with local charitable groups. I failed. The
people who run food pantries and women’s shelters and adoption support groups
are really nice people.
They drove me nuts.
When I volunteered, I just wanted to do something useful:
Stack boxes, sort cans, something. But volunteering with nice people means a
lot of hand-wringing. Also in the first years of the new century the economy
was good. It was artificially good as it turns out, but in 2007, the economy
seemed good, the terrorists had not attacked again.
I wanted the organization I volunteered for to have a goal
and fight for it. The Army was in two
wars and needed soldiers. The change in
recruiting age that would allow me to get back in was proof the Army really
needed soldiers. By simply showing up I
could definitely do one thing that I had done in 1972: Show up. If I was in the Army, the Army needed to
recruit one less soldier.
So if things worked out and I got back in, I would volunteer
for chemical weapons protection of some kind.
But first I had to get in.
