A Soldier’s Story

Story by William Gutierrez

Most people I meet can’t believe that I spent four years in the United States Army. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself, but it’s true. From January 1993 to January 1997, I wore camouflage to work, ate in a mess hall and, according to the commercial, did “more before 10 a.m. than most people do all day.”

Joining the military wasn’t something I had planned on doing. As a kid I didn’t wear fatigues to school, own a gun or talk incessantly about being an Army Ranger. I didn’t like the movie Top Gun, I wasn’t a member of ROTC and I didn’t have any military training manuals stuffed under my bed. What I did have was poor grades, little chance of getting into college and a need to leave the small town that I had grown up in. After graduating from high school I spent a semester at community college. With no car, no job, no place of my own and no opportunities, I began to contemplate joining the Army Reserve or the California National Guard. It wasn’t long before an Army recruiter had my immature mind filled with thoughts of far away places and a beginning to the life I would never be able to find in Lemoore, Calif.

When the time came to sign on the dotted line, I had contracted four years of my life away to be spent as an U.S. Army Combat Engineer. I still look back on my decision with an odd sense of disbelief, but I know that at the time I thought I had it all figured out. I remember saying to myse

lf, “I was in high school for four years and it didn’t seem that long.” In the grand scheme of things I was right, but what I had forgotten was how I felt during the middle of my sophomore year, which was something along the lines of, “Oh my God, tell me I really don’t have another two and a half years of this crap.”

Now that I look back, it’s not really the four years that bother me; it’s the fact that I chose to do something so useless, and in fact, stupid with that time. In reality, a Combat Engineer is little more than a grunt who can put in and take out minefields. This really is as ridiculous as it sounds, but in my defense it was presented to me in a much more romantic way. Officially the job description says something like “builds and destroys obstacles,” and during the recruitment video I remember a lot of explosions and bridge building.

Mine removal or no mine removal, what I failed to ask myself was how would the skills I learned as a Combat Engineer transfer over into the civilian world. Well, for the last several years, I’ve put myself through school as a courier, so I guess crossing minefields isn’t a skill that’s currently in high demand.

Basic training was difficult, but I had done what I could to prepare myself both mentally and physically. What I wasn’t ready for was the extreme cold of the Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, winter or, as I came to know it, Ft. Leonard Wood, Misery. I never realized how spoiled I was living in California’s Central Valley. I thought that 40 degrees was cold and I never imagined a person could live, much less train for combat in the outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures. Weren’t wars put on hold when the weather got too cold?

It was during a particularly nasty ice storm while keeping guard in a foxhole that I began to wonder if I had made a bad decision. With frozen fingers I clutched my Army-issue canteen with the frozen water inside to my chest and several tears fell from my eyes. Luckily, it’s true what they say about crying in the rain; no one can tell that you’re doing it.

One of the funniest things about basic training was the people I met. It didn’t take me long to realize that for the most part the recruits that surrounded me weren’t what society might call “the cream of the crop.” However, you might not ever be able to tell this just by listening to them, because every single person I met had some kind of story, and these stories could often times be real whoppers.

Getting away from everyone and everything you’ve ever known is scary, but it also gives you a chance to reinvent yourself as whatever you’d like to be. I met a skinny white kid from Michigan who used to be the biggest gang-banger in town, an ex-bodybuilder who was days away from getting sponsored by Gold’s Gym and a Puerto Rican black-belt who had killed five people in a bar- room brawl. By far the most popular story was that of the high school sports star. The percentage of career-ending knee injuries that caused my peers to lose their full-ride scholarships to Texas A&M and USC was unreal. What did I reinvent myself as? I became a popular high school student who was handy with the ladies and real whiz at collegiate and freestyle wrestling.

After basic training and combat engineer school, I was whisked away to Germany where I would spend the next two years keeping the free world safe for democracy. Actually, when I reached my first duty assignment, I found out that keeping the world safe would have to wait. My first job as a combat engineer would be to clean tools…many, many tools. For some unknown reason that I still can’t fathom, I was sent to a post that was closing. Within the year that I arrived the U.S. Army would be packing up its things and turning the installation over to the German government. All the equipment from the base would be thoroughly cleaned, tightly packed and shipped to a giant boat that the military would be able to send anywhere at a moment’s notice. So instead of training, I scrubbed hammers, painted toolboxes and searched for leaks in inflatable rubber rafts.

Although work was less than fulfilling, it was here that I got my first taste of Europe through a slightly clouded window. I met and became friends with two soldiers who had been in Germany for quite a while. One, an ex-skinhead named Gettino, was covered in tattoos, still wore his blue jeans tucked into combat boots and shaved his head on a daily basis. The other, Josh, was a weapons fanatic who, in a locker in his room, had enough ammunition, explosives and knives to arm a small South American nation.

Gettino and Josh had, sometime during their time in Germany, acquired an old van. This van, for reasons that I never understood, was blue and had the words “Flame Broiled” in red and yellow flames painted on its side. It was on the wooden bench strapped to the floor of “Flame Broiled” that I met the people and discovered the places of Deutschland. There was the time a German war veteran offered to buy me a beer for every German phrase I could say correctly, and the time the German police kicked us out of a sleepy little town and told us to not come back. There was Pepe, the dog of a German girl we met, and falling asleep in an old castle. My time stationed here was too short and, as my newfound friends were shipped back to the States, I was shipped to another unit in Germany.

I thought that I had seen some crazy stuff at my first unit, but it was absolutely nothing compared to what I found waiting in Friedburg, Germany. My unit here trained hard all the time. If we weren’t in the field practicing how to navigate with a compass, we were in the barracks calculating how much explosives it would take to make a bridge impassable, but no matter how hard we trained we partied that much harder. If I had to compare my time stationed here to a movie, it wouldn’t be Platoon or Full Metal Jacket; it would be Animal House. From the prostitutes of Amsterdam’s Red Light District and underage girls hidden in wall lockers, to trying to score hash and cocaine in downtown Frankfurt, there was nothing that someone in the unit hadn’t done. We acted as if some higher power had given us a license to do as we saw fit as long as we didn’t do it in uniform.

All this debauchery didn’t come without a price. There were so many emotional and mental problems in that unit that sometimes the barracks seemed more like a loony bin than a frat house. A private first class I knew jumped out a third story window and then ran away from the hospital where the Military Police took him. A giant of a soldier everybody called Cornbread went on a rampage and eventually put his hand through a reinforced plate glass window. Pfc. Watson and my roommate Matson were discharged for drug abuse. A guy who had only been at the unit for a short time proposed marriage to a 15-year-old girl and then tried to hide her in his wall locker during an inspection by the first sergeant. Someone in the unit got stabbed right in the barracks and another guy named Sal had his friends secretly videotape him having sex with a German woman. Me? I got away without too many scars, but in all honesty I hope I never have to live in a situation like that again.

By the time I left Germany I was more than halfway done with my initial enlistment. I loved Europe, but I was ready to return to the United States with all its crime, junk food and girls who were fluent in English. Texas wasn’t really what I had in mind, but I guess you can’t get much more “American” than the Lone Star State, so I didn’t complain much when I was sent to Ft. Hood. As I understand it, Ft. Hood is the largest military post in the world and, as such, it attracts every domestic and foreign dignitary, ambassador, politician and general who steps foot in North America.

Each of these people requires special treatment that for some reason includes, but is not limited to, a parade, one that somehow my unit was chosen to participate in. Please understand that this is not your typical clown and float infested doo-da parade. These parades required me to put on my best-looking helmet and my shiniest boots and to stand unmoving with my back straight, my stomach in and my arms at my side for hours on end while some guy with a star on his hat talked about how great he was. Invariably, many of these so-called parades were held under the hot Texas sun where the temperature in the shade was 305 degrees. During one particular parade/ceremony there were actual military medics on site so that when troops passed out from dehydration, exhaustion or heat stroke they could receive medical attention.

As my time in the service drew to a close, I thanked God I was never sent into any type of combat situation. Sure I was frightened for myself, but I was becoming much closer to the man I am today and I was questioning whether I could kill someone. Proving that you should never count your chickens before they hatch, with less than six months to go my unit was called into action. Saddam Hussein was sending his imperial army to the Turkish border to harass the Kurdish refugees and, after several warnings, President Clinton decided to send in the troops. In less than a week we were touching down in Kuwait and preparing for combat, but it was a combat that would never come. Saddam’s army pulled back, leaving the Kurds safe, me surrounded by miles and miles of desert and luckily no one to kill.

Instead of us jumping back on a plane and going home, a general somewhere decided that, after