Text, for anyone who doesn’t want to click the link. Every once in a while I can convince myself I’m still a writer.

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“How did the 4 years in the #infantry change your life?”

Thanks for the A2A. It wasn’t four years in my case, only two. At that time the US Army offered short enlistment for various MOSs including 11B, and fortunately I took one.

I was a mediocre infantryman, to be honest. I was very good at what are perhaps the two most important infantry skills, marksmanship and road marching—but lousy at the rest of the job. In particular, I have a poor sense of direction so I get lost in the woods easily, I don’t tolerate sleep deprivation well, and I’m terrible at throwing so I was just hopeless with hand grenades. One of my best friends was a former minor-league baseball pitcher, and an absolute wizard with grenades as you’d expect, but a really bad shot. We made a deal that if we ever went to war together, he’d give me all his ammunition, I’d give him all my grenades, and we’d stick close together.

Fortunately we never did go to war: that had to wait until Desert Storm, by which time I’d gone over to the Air Force as a medic, a job which suited me much better. Two years in peacetime humping a rucksack, burning through ammunition at the range, and moving a whole lot of dirt with an entrenching tool didn’t make me some kind of super-soldier. It was a job, with its good and bad points like any other. I was glad I’d done it, and glad to leave. The big-picture outline of my life would probably be about the same if I’d never done it at all.

But it did change me, and for the most part I think in a good way. Infantry work requires a level of endurance few other jobs, military or civilian, can match. You don’t have to be especially strong or smart or tough to be a grunt. You do have to be to determined. To keep going, mile after mile. To find what creature comforts you can in the midst of heat and cold and mud and sand. To meet the worst the world can throw at you with tempered pride and a sense of humor. To not stop, no matter how much you want to, because you won’t let your fellow soldiers down. You can whine, you can curse, you can even cry. You just can’t stop.

I’ve been through other hard things in my life since then. Working in the base ER as a medic, and then as a civilian EMT, showed me more blood and pain than I ever saw as a grunt. My divorce and subsequent romance with the bottle came closer to killing me than any enemy bullet. Getting my PhD was a very long hump indeed, with plenty of agony along the way.

Through it all, I told myself: You marched through Georgia. You can do this too. One foot in front of the other. Rest and food are over the next ridge, or maybe the next one after that. You’ll get there, because you have no other choice. Infantry.