#SBRLLR: Loneliness

“Because you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hand,

when everybody’s fightin’ for the Promised Land…”

― Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Civil War”

I drove over the Kosciuszko Bridge and into the heart of urban New Jersey late in the afternoon on August 5, 2001.  After almost a year out of uniform, I’d been offered a job in New York City and—with some trepidation—had decided to accept. The drive up from Tennessee had seen me through the rolling farmland of western Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, but population had picked up steadily as I worked my way east.  Halfway through New Jersey I began seeing the unique urban cityscapes I remembered from my Academy days.  It wasn’t until I hit the bridge, though, that New York Harbor came into view alongside the Statue of Liberty and Liberty State Park.  The glass and steel skyscrapers of Manhattan’s skyline emerged when I crested the next rise, beckoning me forward as they have so many others looking for a fresh start.  

I was badly in need of one.

With Mike at Red Cloud Range, Ft. Stewart, Georgia.

I had an appointment with a temporary corporate housing agency that afternoon in Jersey City, but the next morning, August 6th, would be my first as an actual New Yorker.  I’d spent some time in Seoul, South Korea, as a young Army captain, but this, I knew, would be a different kind of urban adventure.

The Army had given me a good ride.  I’d spent three years at Fort Stewart with Brian and almost a dozen of our classmates, first in the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, and then in the 2nd Brigade’s Headquarters Company.  I’d roomed briefly with another friend, former Beast squadmate Ryan, in a three bedroom ranch we’d rented from a retired Army lieutenant colonel in nearby Richmond Hill.  In time, Ryan had gotten married and moved out, and my new buddy Mike, a Norwich graduate, moved in, cementing another eighteen months of non-stop partying.  Though our social circle was hardly exclusive, Mike, Brian, and I became an inseparable trio.  Mike and I led tank platoons in Bravo Company while Brian took a platoon in Alpha Company.  He went on to become 4-64 Armor’s Scout Platoon Leader at the same time that I became Executive Officer for Headquarters Company and Mike became the Mortar Platoon Leader.

I did an astounding eighteen months as a tank platoon leader, leading nineteen men mounted on five M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks⁴³, starting at the age of twenty-two.  In theory, we had to be ready to go to war on two hours’ notice.  By twenty-four, I was second in command of a group of more than a hundred soldiers, mounted on a mishmash of trucks, trailers, and M113 armored personnel carriers.  My charge as XO covered everything from vehicle maintenance to kitchen supplies, and it kept me driving the backwoods trails of Fort Stewart’s training ranges endlessly in search of spare parts.  After thirteen months of that, I was shuffled up to the Second Brigade staff, where I worked as Assistant Personnel Officer, an interesting but ultimately meaningless assignment meant to round out my professional education before my next round of official Army schooling.  

We worked long hours, but Mike, Brian, and I still made time for endless trips to the beach and hundreds of backyard barbecues.  We went on scores of small-time company and battalion-level field training exercises and gunnery expeditions, made two month-long trips to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and even packed our equipment away—twice—for would-be real world deployments.  Mike and Brian actually went on a half-year’s deployment about the time that I shipped out for a second stint at the Armor School at Fort Knox.

I also got married.  

I met Misty at church back in Tullahoma.  It was during my first stint at the Armor School when Ft. Knox proved close enough to allow frequent visits home.  My mother introduced us after service one Sunday, and though Mom turned on Misty when it became obvious that our relationship was actually headed towards marriage, I thought at the time that she was trying to use Misty to tie me to Tullahoma permanently.  That Misty was Mom’s willing accomplice was both blatantly obvious and totally unimportant.  My bride-to-be had long blonde hair and deep blue eyes, and she was short, standing just five-foot-two.  She was a painter and a flutist, and though I didn’t know it at the time, she was also severely dyslexic.  She had a beautiful, ready smile and familiar Southern manners, and—unfortunately, as it turned out—she was intensely eager to please.  She was exactly the kind of girl that I thought an up-and-coming young Army officer probably ought to want to marry.

We were a disastrous match.  Because of her dyslexia, Misty had long since convinced herself that she was neither particularly intelligent nor overly capable in any useful way, and her worldview extended no further than the Tullahoma city line.  From the outset, I saw her as trapped in a horrifying, dead-end existence, never realizing that this was the only life she’d ever known—or even wanted, really.  My own history, education, and career all had me pointed in a completely different direction.  That I thought my future was better went without saying.

Misty was young and malleable.  She was not quite twenty when we met, living a lonely life in what I thought of as a nothing town.  She didn’t have any plans, at least none that I thought were important.  In a flash of insight, I saw a new and different future for her, and I immediately set about making that future her reality.  Misty would follow me to Fort Stewart and enroll at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  She would double-down on her painting, attain an education, and build a life for herself—with me—that far outstripped anything that she might achieve in Tullahoma.

That she would agree to all of this solely to make me happy never occurred to me.

I’d been at Fort Stewart for about a year when Misty finally enrolled at SCAD.  She and her friend Mandy moved into a little apartment in Richmond Hill, maybe a half-mile from the house I shared with Mike.  They got their own apartment for propriety’s sake, but really, they shouldn’t have bothered.  Misty spent almost every night at our house, living Three’s Company-style alongside me and Mike, and inertia drew Mandy into our circle and—eventually—into Mike’s bed.  

What a mismatch!  Mike and Mandy were both extremely intelligent, but Mandy held tight to her small town Southern dignity while Mike embraced his inner combat arms/Bedford, Massachusetts/college hockey meathead with every ounce of gusto that he possessed.  He drove poor Mandy crazy.  Not that she was in any hurry to go home.  We lived a life of non-stop parties, beach trips, and tank company field problems, and because Misty stayed at our house so much, Mike and Mandy were more-or-less stuck together inseparably.  Mandy never loved Mike—in truth, I don’t know that she really liked him—but I gave her credit for enthusiastically making the best of what could have been an unfortunate and lonely situation.  We had a lot of fun together, and in the end, what else mattered?

Misty and I got married at the First Christian Church in Tullahoma in May 1997.  It was a strictly military affair in which my father called cadence as Mike, Brian, Chris, my old roommate Matt and his now-wife Amber, and my platoon sergeant Jack all marched with sabers drawn to form the arch under which we proceeded as a newly married couple.  It was a fairytale wedding, and we had a week’s worth of honeymoon bliss in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  

We got back home, though, and started fighting immediately.

I had trouble separating my professional responsibilities from those of my home life.  Misty never paused to consider what she wanted out of life, and it mixed badly with her desire to make me happy.  As a platoon leader and then company XO, I was used to being in charge all the time.  The habits of command bled straight into my marriage.  I’d designed Misty’s life to suit my own needs, and I remained wholly confident in my ability to manage her life choices to their best possible fulfillment.  I never doubted my vision of her future, not for a moment.  She coped—eventually—by telling me whatever she thought I wanted to hear in the moment, regardless of whether or not her words were actually true.  That tactic bred distrust, though, and my mother, who by now saw the world through a haze of prescription pain medication and Xanax, went at that distrust with a crowbar.  

In my mother’s hazed-over mind, Misty became a rival for my affections at the same time that Misty and I were struggling for basic trust all on our own.  Misty and my mom fell out in the process of planning our wedding and broke into open warfare shortly after we were married.  The more I tried to paper over their disagreements, the more they went at me to choose once and for all which of them would be cast aside forever.

My mother would say, “I don’t think you understand how much she’s hurt me.”

Misty would counter with, “But I’m your wife.  I should come first no matter what.”

In neither case could I offer a reasonable response.  I loved Misty but didn’t have the heart to cut my own mother out of my life permanently.  I didn’t want to.  I wanted to find an adult-level compromise.  Misty and my mom were both interested only in vanquishing a rival.

I tried to ignore the problems, grew sullen, and eventually saw my work suffer.  Misty and I retained good physical chemistry, and we found ways to spend time together—we both liked pro-wrestling, for example—but this was not nearly enough to sustain an actual life together.  We spent nearly a year doing various kinds of couples’ counselling, but at the end of it, the only future I saw was an unending slog through emotional Hell.  I dreaded the idea that Misty might get pregnant.

My branch manager called shortly after I was shuffled up to the Second Brigade staff.  If I wanted, I could return to Fort Knox for the Armor Captain’s Career Course.  

I decided then and there that I wouldn’t be taking Misty with me.  

I left my two best friends, a life that I loved, a girl that I liked but couldn’t live with, and my first true home as an adult.  I cried hard for five minutes in front of the little house that Misty and I had shared for a year and a half and then wiped my nose and put my green Honda Civic into gear.  

I’d gotten my orders.  It was time to move forward.

* * *

The guys in my Career Course small group got me back onto my feet.  We hit all the old places and— I’m afraid—indulged ourselves occasionally with the ladies of rural Kentucky’s more attractive trailer parks.  I was lonely and unused to sleeping alone, developed sleep problems, drank too much, started journaling, and spent as much time as I could inside Fort Knox’s well-stocked weight room.  I somehow finished third in the Career Course’s tactics competition and second in the writing competition.  Armor Magazine published my research paper, “2 Para’s War in the Falklands,” giving me the cover of the issue dated September/October 1999⁴⁴.  This marked my first published work and was the first time since West Point that I’d had a chance to think of myself as either a writer or an historian.

I came down on orders to Korea.

I was twenty-five and didn’t know what I wanted.  That I couldn’t just drink and whore my way through the rest of my life went without saying.  Neither did I know what would have made more sense.  I kept the Army happy by wearing a pressed uniform, keeping my boots reasonably well-shined, and turning in excellent scores on the APFT.  But despite some small successes at Fort Stewart and a legitimately good showing at the Career Course, I didn’t feel like a particularly good Army officer.  I could write both quickly and clearly, and my education gave me a good sense of tactics.  Like my father, I’d become a reasonably good military planner.  Despite my staff work, however, I didn’t think I’d ever be the kind of combat commander that my dad had been.  Dad lived to lead men in the dark of night.  That was all he’d ever wanted.  I was and always have been more versatile but also much more academic.  This did not necessarily portend disaster for my Army career, but neither did I think I’d ever be selected to command a combat battalion.  Nor did I know what I could have done differently, save perhaps that I could have wanted it more.  The best officers were passionate about the Army and its soldiers.  I was more just hanging out, doing my duty but also very much looking forward to new personal adventures.  I wasn’t married; what else did I have?  I was ambivalent about command, save that I knew Troop Command would be an important stepping stone towards some indeterminate future.

For all its faults, Korea offered an adventure.  It also promised time away from my parents, something I increasingly saw as a necessity given my mother’s attitude towards my former wife.  Truthfully, I didn’t just want to leave Misty.  My goal therefore became to distill both the Army and my personal life itself down to their essential essences.  I would either extend and command, setting myself up to one day teach history at the Academy, or I would resign and take my chances out-of-uniform.  After eighteen years following my father’s military career, four years at West Point, and five in the military on my own, I felt like I’d proved whatever I’d set out to prove.  

I’d done my part.  Now I had to figure out what was best for me.

I went to the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry.  Three ground cavalry troops with tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, two aero-scout troops mounted in Kiowa Warrior helicopters, a headquarters troop, and a helicopter maintenance troop—almost eight hundred soldiers all told.  I was stationed with the heavy troops at Camp Garryowen, an all-male encampment just outside a rice-farming village some ten kilometers south of the Demilitarized Zone.  At the time, this made us the most forwardly-deployed cavalry squadron in the entire U.S. Army.  We were surrounded by rice paddies, village shanty-shacks, pig and dog-farms, and the ubiquitous tree-covered mountain terrain that makes maneuvering in Korea such an all-encompassing challenge.

I felt like I’d been exiled to the back of beyond.

With my good friend and former roommate Joe at a dining-out in Korea.

There were things that I loved about Korea.  The soldiers and esprit de corps of the squadron as a whole and the reality that we faced a legitimate, well-trained, and motivated enemy not ten miles from the camp where we lived.  However, I didn’t much care for the work, and that wore on me over time.  I spent six months as the squadron’s adjutant⁴⁵ and another six months as its tactical planner.  I rewrote our wartime operations order, led some of my fellow staff captains through various computer-simulated war games, and as a capstone to my Army career, got to lead a three-company Opposition Force task force in a deliberate defense against a mixed armor and infantry brigade during a large-scale field training exercise.  

My good friend Ned, from my old company at West Point, Class of 1994, commanded B Troop.  He and his men stopped the attacking brigade’s initial advance with a rock-drop supported by tank and Bradley fire, and I then bombed the unit’s hospital and fuel convoys with our task force’s unlimited notional artillery fire.  We violated Army doctrine by firing blind into positions that I only suspected of having the right targets, and then the referees had to step in to ensure that the attacking brigade could accomplish its training objectives.  They were flat-out astonished that we’d attacked their casualty evacuation (casevac) procedures.  That such a thing could happen seemed inconceivable right up until the moment that we’d actually done it.  No one had the first clue how to manage casevac for the casevac, and the ensuing staff crisis almost derailed the exercise.

I dated a little, but mostly I felt like I’d landed in a Far East military monastery.  I went out once with a major from the Division staff who showed up wearing an off-the-shoulder tiger-striped blouse done up in red and black sequins, skintight lycra pants, and giant 80s-style spray-teased hair.  She was a few years older, of course, but we didn’t hit it off.  Later, towards the end of my tour, I started seeing an American girl who’d come to Seoul to teach English.  But again, we weren’t so much interested in each other as we were mutually bored and stuck in the same far-away country.  

Most of the time, I lived a manly life surrounded by other men.  

Some guys really liked that lifestyle.  I couldn’t imagine spending three years like that, though, even if we did epic Ugly American Nights with enough regularity to keep ourselves entertained.  I also didn’t want to go back to the States, rejoin the domestic Army, and risk becoming somebody’s adjutant all over again.  Opportunities existed in the civilian sector in the late 1990s, and in the end, I decided to take the risk.  There remained the road not taken, and I was very keen on discovering what might lie along that other path.

* * *

I stepped off of a Korean Airlines flight from Seoul wearing my cavalry Stetson, a blue-green Hawaiian shirt, and my West Point class ring.  My folks met me at the gate, but after a year away, they looked old and haggard, and my mother walked with an ugly-looking limp.  We made small talk during the hour’s drive home, but they soon grew quiet despite not having seen me in a year and a day.  By the time we got to their house, I’d developed an ominous, uneasy feeling.

My mom pulled me aside shortly after we arrived, this time to a palatial, two story house in rural Manchester, Tennessee.  Following his abortive stint at MetLife, Dad had been hired to be Manchester’s city administrator.

“Your father’s been drinking,” my mother said quietly, well outside of my father’s hearing.

“What does that mean?”  I’d thought my mother was the substance abuser in the family.

Mom sighed.  “It means that this town’s mayor is a pain in the ass.  Your dad doesn’t like working for him.”

“So?”

“So your father wants to be in charge.  He doesn’t like answering to a man that he doesn’t respect.”

“Wasn’t he hired by the mayor?” I asked.  “This isn’t the Marine Corps.  Does he think he’s Manchester’s brigade commander or something?”

“Well,” my mom argued, “he kind of is.”

“Good grief, Mom.  Dad works for the town.  Why can’t he just get along with people?”

My mom pulled a long face and dropped her voice even lower.  “Your dad… found something.  Something irregular.  Down at City Hall when he was going through the town’s financials.  Some malfeasance or something.  He brought it to the Town Council, but they didn’t care.  He got into an argument, and…  Well, they say that he threw a chair at one of the councilmen.  I don’t know.  He says he’s started working to get this bunch out, to get a new set of officials elected to City Hall.  After the election, things ought to get better.  But your father hasn’t been handling it very well.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing, I guess.  Just… watch him.”

“Fine.”  I wasn’t at all sure how “watching” my father was going to help, but whatever.

It was weird because my mother was the one I’d been worried about when I left for Korea.  Dad had seemed happy.  Mom, on the other hand, had spent several days in the hospital on a morphine drip the week I left, complaining of unbearably intense back pain.  Her symptoms cleared miraculously once I’d actually departed, however, and in the end, I put the whole thing down to stress-induced hypochondria related to my deployment.

She looked downright infirm by the time I got back, though.  Over the course of the next few weeks, she was only occasionally out of bed.  Some days she’d just lay there, steady in the grip of prescription pain pills and valium, which she seemed to take near-daily “for her nerves”.  Given her obvious state of physical and mental distress, I wasn’t at all sure how much of what she’d told me would prove trustworthy.  By now, it had been a long time since I’d trusted my mother.

Unfortunately, I saw my father’s drinking for myself that first night after dinner.  We finished a nice, sit-down family meal in my folks’ breakfast nook, and then my father silently picked up a highball glass, filled it with ice, and took the glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels out into the living room.  He didn’t even turn on the lights.  He just filled the glass with whiskey, sat back in the dark, and started drinking in long, determined sips.  

Dad looked sullen to the point of despair.  Unsure what to do, I left him and my mother both and went upstairs to my bedroom.  Sixteen hours of air travel and over an hour in the car had left me jetlagged and exhausted.  I got up a few hours later to use the bathroom, though, and I was shocked to find my father still sitting there in the dark with his highball glass, his bottle now three-quarters empty.

“Good Lord, Dad!  What are you doing out here?”

He smiled drunkenly and leaned forward.  His face caught the moonlight when he looked me in the eye.  “I’m winning, son,” he said, slurring.  “Winning.”

“You should go to bed.”

He leaned back in his chair.  “In a little while.”

I shook my head and left him to it.

To my unending amazement, Dad seemed fine the next morning.  Having been home for all of a day, I didn’t know what to make of what I’d seen.  In the end, I decided that my mother was probably right, that things would—hopefully—get better after the next election cycle.  But my father’s drinking remained constant.  He would put down a couple of drinks, get maudlin about his time in the Marine Corps, and then drink more as memories or perceived slights had their way with his weakened, inebriated mind.  Sometimes he told war stories.  Sometimes, like that first night, he just sat there and drank by himself in the dark.  

Over time, Dad’s drinking had become a self-reinforcing cycle.  My mother’s casual reliance on pain and anxiety medications had normalized intoxication in my parents’ home, and Dad wasn’t doing anything that he thought of as wrong or abnormal.  He was dealing with his problems in the way that all Marines had done since back in the day.  This meant self-medicating, treating problems with alcohol rather than attempting to express or confront them.  I would learn a lot about this in time.  In the moment, I was simply stuck on the couch, trying to decide what to do with my life.  

I went to a hiring conference for former military officers in Atlanta a few weeks after I got back, saw a number of my classmates and others that I knew from back at the Academy, and eventually got a job as a relocating logistics consultant with a firm called Kurt Salmon Associates (KSA).  My first project took me to Boston, and by that time, I was all too ready to head off on my own for another adventure.

Unfortunately, the experience of becoming a relocating consultant was the loneliest yet.  There were a half-dozen or so young consultants on my first project team, all of whom were decidedly friendly and outgoing, but they were a bunch of recent college graduates with comparatively little experience out in the real world.  They had little in common with a divorced Army veteran fresh from a tour overseas and had no way of getting to know me on terms that we could all easily understand.  I lived for two miserable weeks in a hotel outside of Boston by myself before breaking down and asking to move in with one of the other consultants on the project, a guy who’d rented a temporary place up in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  I gave him credit for trying to accommodate me, but he was decidedly put-upon by my request to share his space.  We eventually made it work, but I never really felt like I could be myself in Boston, and my relationships with my co-workers were occasionally strained.  In contrast to the comradery I’d known at Camp Garryowen, this was not easy to accept.

After Boston came a stint in Hartford, Connecticut, and thirteen weeks in and out of hotel rooms all across the state.  I got along better with that second project team, all of whom were older and the leader of which was a fellow West Pointer, but then the Dot-Com Bubble burst, and KSA started the first of what would prove to be many rounds of layoffs.  My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the same month that my company put me on the beach.  

I had no choice but to go home.

Prostate cancer destroyed my father’s already fragile emotional state, and then his “outsider” political candidates lost Manchester’s the next local election.  The town’s mayor let my dad go through a vicious public attack that absolutely scandalized the city newspapers, and suddenly my dad had nothing but drinking, his regrets, and too much free time.  Professionally, he landed on his feet.  He got another city administrator’s job, this time in the town of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.  But it soon became clear that he would never be able to get along with the people who’d been elected to lead a city that he himself wanted to command militarily.  More to the point, he now drank all the damn time.  

My mother went straight to bed to avoid dealing with any of this.  She got up at most every third day.  When my father tried to talk to her about his fear of cancer, she’d inevitably say, “Oh Tom, this isn’t Cancer with a capital ‘C’.  This is cancer, with a little ‘c’.  Quit complaining.  You’ll be fine.”

Her lack of empathy was remarkable.  She just didn’t want to do it.

Dad couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to me, my mother was rarely out of bed, and I had nowhere else to go.  I tried exploring town, meeting people, and perhaps beginning a new life locally, but this proved impossible.  Lawrenceburg’s small-town folk were invariably mistrustful of anyone with a neutral accent.  A few times, I tried explaining to people that I’d spent the last nine years in the Army, that I wasn’t really a foreigner, but this proved to be a wasted effort.  People literally would not talk to me.  I was an outsider, full stop.  Most wouldn’t even look me in the eye.  The only person who enjoyed my company was Dixie, my parents’ dog, and even she wasn’t much for conversation.  I was finally, formally laid off two weeks into my enforced vacation.  

It felt like my world had ended.

Something had to change.

Dixie, my best dog.

I dragged my semi-conscious mother into my car and told my dad that I’d see him in a few days.  I could only hope that he and Dixie could survive for a while unsupervised.  I then drove straight to Panama City, Florida, where I checked my mother and me into a cheap beachside motel.  I deposited her in bed, hid her pills, and walked down to the beach with a book in one hand and a folding beach chair in the other.  Then I waited.  My mother staggered down to the beach fully three days later, sober for the first time in maybe a year or more.  She had the grace not to ask me where her pills were.

“I’ve had an epiphany,” she said seriously.  “I’m going to have to divorce your father.”

Fuck, I thought, really?  I looked at her, feeling both surprised and a little confused.

“What?” she asked.  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I want you to be sober.  You need to be able to take care of yourself.”

“Exactly.  You want me to get a divorce.”

That wasn’t what I’d said, nor had it been my intent.  But I quickly realized that it was going to be a side-effect of my intervention no matter what else happened.  My mother spent the next three days writing feverishly in a yellow legal pad, chronically my father’s many sins, both real and imagined, in exhaustive, retributive detail.  I listened to her read them in a scratchy monotone as we drove home.  This about the man who’d seen her through a kidney transplant in her mid-thirties, who’d retired to the middle of nowhere on her say-so, who’d worked to give her everything.  Now that he needed her, she was going to bolt despite thirty-two years of marriage.  

Still, my mother was at least nominally functional again.  I therefore listened with as much patience as I could muster.  I saw this as the price of her moving forward.

We got back to Lawrenceburg, only to discover that my dad had gotten higher than Hell.  I had no idea what he’d taken, but he was running around the house like a maniac, chasing the dog—who delighted in the game—yelling, “Come on, Dixie!  Let’s go!” over and over and over again.  He and the dog tore ass around the house, leaping onto the bed, running down the hall, and then hiding beneath the furniture like a pair of five-year-olds.  They were completely oblivious to any and all attempts to restore any sense of calm or order.  My mom and I watched horrified, but Dad was completely out of his mind.  

He didn’t come down until late the next afternoon.  By then I wanted to be anywhere else on Earth.  I’d seen more of my father’s demons than I’d ever imagined possible.  

I tried to repeat my trick.  I threw my Dad into the car and drove him over his strenuous objections to the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.  I then sat with him for over an hour while he rigidly refused to admit that he had a problem.

“These aren’t my people,” he said repeatedly.  “I have nothing in common with any of them.  This is not who I am.  This is not me.”

I didn’t know what else to do.

In the end, I took the GMAT, scored 650, and started the process of applying to Vanderbilt Business School.  Lacking other options, I decided to move to Nashville, get my real estate license, and put myself through B-school as best I could.  That would at least give me some measure of space, and I thought that maybe having some sales experience would improve my resume.  Dad’s prostate cancer went into remission following radiation “seed” therapy, and for a while it looked like maybe my folks were going to land on their feet despite everything.  My mother had gotten—relatively—sober, and my father was cancer-free, if not sober himself.  He still had a job, and he started seeing a psychiatrist.  Whatever happened next, he was going to have to make his own choices.  I needed to move on as well.

The economy was dead, but I went to another hiring conference and surprised myself by getting an offer in New York.  I would be managing overhead electric construction in the South Bronx.  This seemed wholly outside my comfort zone save that I would be doing what I thought of as manly work, mostly in the company of other men.  I met a handful of West Pointers and a huge contingent of Navy veterans on a recruiting trip to the City, and all at once, I felt good about my future again.  The company offered to put me through business school, and I decided to take my shot.  

What would New York City hold?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.  

Coming down off the Kosciuszko Bridge, I looked out over the island of Manhattan and saw the Promised Land.  I would start again on my own terms, and I was confident that I could make it if I could just get out on my own and show what I could do.   

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43. Including the Battalion Operations Officer’s tank and crew.

44. Captain Daniel T. Head, “The 2nd Parachute Battalion’s War in the Falklands: Light Armor Made the Difference in South Atlantic Deployment,” Armor Magazine, September/October 1999. http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/1999/SEP_OCT/ArmorSeptemberOctober1999web.pdf

45. Part commander’s aide, part unit human resources officer.