Ten Years Ago I Re-Enlisted at 54

Ten years ago this week I raised my right hand in front of the flag in the lobby of the Aviation Armory at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. and re-enlisted. I left the Army Reserve in June of 1984 and spent the intervening 23 years as a bearded civilian.

On the day, if I remember correctly, the officer administering the oath was Frank Tedeschi, an Apache Longbow pilot. Other witnesses were Chad Hummel, who was the Training NCO for the unit I was joining, and Miguel Ramirez, an admin NCO who was one of my roommates during pre-deployment training.

My wife, Annalisa, and my son, Nigel, were also there.  I had put off the enlistment day until two weeks after I got the neck brace off from the crash in May that left me with a smashed C7 and nine other broken bones.  Everything healed up and I was ready to be a soldier again.

As soon as I could, I called my friend from the 70s Army, Abel Lopez, and told him I actually did it. I re-enlisted. I was back in starting again as an enlisted man, a Specialist.  I also pointed out that General David Petraeus and I started our Army careers the same year and both of us were still serving. He said, "You and him are a lot alike Gussman, except he's a Four Star General and you're a Spec 4." Once an old friend made funny of me, I knew I was really back in. As it turned out, Petraeus did not stay in as long as I did.

From Trying to Convert Each Other to Wedding Invitation

In 1979 I lived in the military housing area in the Wiesbaden Military Community. One day, a Jehovah's Witness came to my door. Back then, military housing was open and Germans came into the housing area for many reasons. The top reason was dumpster diving. The Germans thought (they were right) Americans threw away perfectly good stuff!

And then there was Martin. He was an earnest, committed Jehovah's Witness. He spoke four languages and wanted to convert Americans to his faith.  Martin was in his late 20s, tall, thin and very serious. He had thinning hair which he wore short, but not military buzz cut short. He looked straight into your eyes with his ice blue eyes and radiated sincerity.

When Martin came to my door, he started with his practiced presentation then went off script when he found I had actually read the Bible through in two translations. He was even more delighted when he found out I was taking a correspondence course in New Testament Greek. Martin was studying Greek. After 90 minutes of talking about how best to parse irregular Greek verbs Martin said he had to go, but said he would be back the next week. We set a time to meet and he was off to tell the rest of the housing area about his faith.

Martin came back the next week and every week I was in town for several months until I went home at the end of my enlistment. Martin was getting married the month after my discharge. He invited me to the wedding. I was sad that I could not attend. We continued to disagree about matters of doctrine until the last time we met, but at the same time thought that there was no way to be serious about reading the Bible and read it in translation.

At the same time I was studying Greek with Martin, I was visiting my friend Cliff every week in Darmstadt where he was a novice in the Franciscan Brotherhood at Canaan. Cliff left the American military on May 2 of 1979 and started on the road to becoming Bruder Timotheus, which he is now at Canaan.

While I was in the Cold War Army, I met many people who were serious about their faith. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I expected to find the same kind of people, but the world and the Army had changed a lot between the 70s and the Iraq War.  The "Whatever" culture affects everything. In the 1970s, there was a guy in our unit who could have been "Bible" from the movie "Fury." I never met that guy in Iraq.

Coffee in Iraq--Fred Lameki and Green Beans

In Iraq, good coffee was on one of the few pleasures that was not banned by order of somebody.  Green Beans Coffee was the place I would meet friends, enjoy good coffee and talk to the men who made the coffee.  Green Beans was mostly staffed by men from Nepal, but Fred Lameki was one of the baristas at Camp Adder, Iraq.

Fred is from Kenya where he currently runs a video and photo business. He is on Facebook where we have been friends since Camp Adder. Fred is the kind of person who can sense when someone is down. He would make a point of saying something to cheer me up when I looked down.  We also talked about public relations and photography.

He acted on what we spoke about, starting a communications company in Kenya.

It is one of the amazing things about Facebook and other social media that I can continue to follow Fred as his career goes forward and his life goes on. And if I ever get the chance to travel to Africa, the trip will definitely include a visit to Kenya and Fred Lameki.