Driven

I served on Active Duty Army for 5-1/2 years. I was initially supposed to do 4.....got stop-lossed right at the end. A lot of who I am today came from my Army experience, but not in the way most people would think.

The Army life for me was awful. Waking up every weekday at 6:00, PT (physical training) from 7:00-8:00, one hour after that to get cleaned up, eat, and get to work at 9:00. Work from 9-12, go to lunch for an hour, work again from 2-5:30. Next day, do it all over again. Why is that awful? It wasn't the schedule that was so terrible. It is what went on in between. Every day, it seemed, someone got on my ass about something. Never was there a day when someone didn't get mad at me. Whether it was missing a spot on my face from shaving that morning to "half-assing" cleanup at the end of the day (put in quotes because I thought I did a good job). That is known as recurring crap cause it happened every day.

There is also the stuff that didn't happen every day, but just added fuel to my fire. Some mornings, my squad leader would come through our (me and my roommate's) room. I haven't been the best organizer, and my room has clutter once in a while. The rest of the room could be clean...but the clutter that had no real place to go was just there. If it wasn't clutter, then it was something else, but room was never right. If it wasn't my room, it was out bathroom. I have a tendency that if I get yelled at about something, I put all my effort into fixing that thing and end up forgetting everything else. Anxiety? Well, it probably was, but I never knew that for years.

The thing that got me the most was that intermittently when all these chew-out sessions were happening, I'd always hear stuff like "What would your family think about all this?", "What makes you think you could handle engineering in the civilian world if you can't handle your shit in the ARMY!?" "You'll never amount to anything out there....you'll just come back to us on your damn knees cause nobody will take your shit," "You can't follow directions....what makes you think you'll pass college?"

........well......for one thing, my family never served in the Army. Nobody in my family particularly worried about every damn thing that the Army wanted me to keep in check, and personally, I got so fed up with trying to please everyone that I stopped caring. And all those quotes, give or take a few words, were actually said to me. I know who said them.

Some people tell you to stop living in the past. Why though? Sometimes the bad things of your past push you to do great things. As stated in my first blog, music is a big part of who I am. A few songs come to mind when thinking about moments like those in the Army. But one stands out the most. "Beg" by Saliva. In my take on this song, the lyrics are sung in such a way to express the frustration and the release of it all.

Lyrics to this song are posted here

The verses are saying (in my interpretation) that here I am, trying to do all this work (break it down) to keep you Army people off my ass (so you can go down).

The chorus is like a fast-forward to the present, and I picture them trying to be friends with me, saying that they seriously cared about me and blah blah....this is after I have found success and am making it in the world. I tell them "I'll bet you'd beg if you were serious. So break on down!" After all the crap I took from them, they'd better get on their knees and beg for forgiveness....I mean hell, they told ME that I would come back to the army on MY knees.......

The bridge is my favorite part. This is if they don't get on their knees and beg for my forgiveness, like why should they have to do something so degrading.... "For every time you punished me....for every time you laughed at me....for every time you beat me down.......LOOK AT ME NOW, BITCH!" I'll have proved everyone wrong...... it does seem a little immature....why do I need to prove anything to them? I should be proving to myself. Well, I'm not the one that needs convincing and all the terrible things that were done and said to me....I do have some animosity built up.

Beg Video Here

Sometimes, it's your past that drives you. It's all the people, good and bad, that shape you into the person you are today. I have learned something from every bad person I knew in the Army, and all the friends I made as well. As much as I hated the Army, it was probably the best thing that happened to me.