I graduated from high school without much of a plan for the rest of my life. It was enough for me that I was done with teachers, some of them only four or five years older than me, telling me what to do and how to do it. I was tired of writing papers about things I didn't care about and I was tired of calculating how long the third side of a triangle was.
It wasn't that the schoolwork was more than I could handle because I'd made good grades in all of my classes. I just couldn't see how knowing how to do those things would help me through life. I didn't know what I was going to be, but I knew I wasn't going to be an engineer or a scientist and I sure as hell wasn't going to be a writer.
My parents weren't the type to keep supporting me financially. They made that very clear the day after my graduation party. Dad walked up to me when I was lying on the couch and watching TV.
"Marty, you need to make some decisions now. Your mother and I will let you keep living here, but we're not going to support you like we have in the past. You said you don't have any interest in any more school, so you need to find a job."
I started looking the next day and I found out there were a lot of places looking for people. The only problem was they all wanted either a couple years experience doing a similar job or some sort of higher education like either an associate's degree from a junior college or a four year degree from an actual college.
I did find a job washing dishes and pots and pans for a restaurant. It paid minimum wage and they'd only let me work about thirty hours a week. That way they didn't have to give me any benefits. I did work forty hours a few times when somebody called in sick, but never more than that so I didn't get paid overtime.
The other problem with my job was the schedule changed every week. One week I'd work Monday from noon through Wednesday and the next it would be Saturday through Monday. The week after that might be Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday. There was no way I could plan because the next week's schedule wasn't posted until Wednesday of the week before.
I was watching television one afternoon when I was off and a recruitment ad for the US Army came on. I hadn't thought about the Army because Dad had been in the Army and said it wasn't much fun. When I thought about it that day, I could understand why. Dad was an insurance agent who sat at a desk all day long. He didn't do any more outside than he absolutely had to.
I was pretty much the opposite. I liked camping and hiking. When I thought about it some more, that's exactly what the Army guys did in the commercial except they were carrying guns. The only shooting I'd ever done was at Boy Scout Camp, but I liked it and had always wanted to do more.
The next day I was off, I drove down to the Army Recruiting Office to see what they had to say.
What the recruiting sergeant said sounded great to me. I'd go through eight weeks of basic training and then another eleven weeks of training specific to the infantry. After that, I'd be assigned to an existing infantry unit.
He didn't say anything about any other type of military job, so I asked him if there weren't other jobs. He nodded.
"Sure, but if you want to be real Army, the real Army that defends our country and way of life, you want to go infantry. When the shit hits the fan, the President of the United States doesn't call up the cooks or the motor pool or the clerks. He calls up the infantry because he knows they'll get the job done.
"You'll be promoted faster in the infantry than in any other job and you'll see more of the world. Those other guys, the cooks and motor pool, their job is to keep the infantry fed and to give them vehicles to carry them around. I'll tell you, I went infantry and got my buck sergeant stripes after a year and eight months. Two years later, I was a staff sergeant and leading a combat platoon. The guys in the mess hall and motor pool are lucky if they make buck sergeant by the time their four-year enlistment is up.
"The infantry also trains you to be a leader, and when you get out, who will companies want to hire -- some guy who knows how to peel potatoes, change a tire, or type out a letter, or a man who has demonstrated his ability to lead other men and accomplish the goal?"
Well, all that sounded good to me, or at least it wouldn't be as bad as washing dishes for minimum wage. I signed up right then and there. Two weeks later, I'd passed the physical and was on a bus from the airport in Philadelphia to Fort Dix, New Jersey with a bunch of other guys.
That bus trip was the start of my twenty-year career in the US Army. I did think about getting out several times. My first tour in Vietnam would have been enough all by itself if it hadn't been for two things.
I'd been promoted to Buck Sergeant while I was in Vietnam, and when I left Vietnam I went to Fort Bliss to go through the Advanced Leader Course. Once I finished the course, I'd be on the promotion list for Staff Sergeant and that would mean an increase in pay that I couldn't ignore. I wouldn't be making a lot of money but the Army furnished me a place to live and three meals a day. When I compared my pay of about thirty-eight hundred a year to the average US wages of a little over six thousand, I figured I was about breaking even.
The second was that the world seemed to have calmed down as far as needing the regular infantry was concerned. Vietnam was winding down so it was unlikely I'd be assigned there for a second tour. Once I graduated, the Army would send me wherever it wanted and the Army had a lot of duty stations that didn't seem like they'd be all that great. If I re-enlisted, I'd have some choice in where I went. Germany, Okinawa, and Hawaii seemed like great places to spend my normal Monday through Saturday morning workweek and then have the rest of the weekend to do whatever I wanted.
The result was that I re-enlisted for four more years and specified that I wanted duty in Germany.