Not to sound like I'm ripping off a line from Goodfellas, but as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in the military. As a kid, I'd watch a ton of the old 40's and 50's war movies, and I'd get my dad flustered with all the questions I'd ask, "How many bullets does that rifle shoot?" "Why couldn't that bazooka blow up that Tiger Tank?"Rev. Jordan T. Maxwell wrote:Mike, we've talked about your experiences in the military here and there, but how did you first get involved in that field?
My parents didn't have much experience with the military outside of the stories that my grandparents told them. Dad was hit in his right eye with a stick when he was a kid, so the resulting blindness kept him out of Vietnam - he did show up when he was drafted and went through all the processing not protesting or even telling anyone that he was blind in one eye, so they had him pegged as a radio operator before the Eye doctor classified him as 4F. Mom was almost a pacifist, as she didn't like watching the love news coverage and seeing other people's children get killed on the evening news. So whenever I talked about the Army or the military, mom would change the subject and dad would just answer my questions until he got tired.
I went to High School from 1984-88, the Reagan years, and the height of the Cold War. "Ivan" and his buddies were either going to invade Europe or nuke the hell out of us. "Red Dawn" had me and my friends stockpiling food and every hunting knife we could find in our basements. In my Junior year the Armed Forces recruiters came around and held a testing day - for me it was 5 hours out of classes. I signed up to take the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) and my dad signed the permission slip. The test (for me) was easy as hell. Basic math problems , timed math drills, memorizing 5 digit numbers, and word-association drills filled the test, and I finished each part with huge chunks of time to spare. I thought nothing of the test until the recruiters started calling the house 6 weeks later. Dad got the first call from the Navy and they had offered training as a nuclear engineer. They informed him I had maxed out the test (Perfect score) and that there were only 2 perfect scores out of the 4 schools that took the test when I did.
I knew I wanted to enlist after High School. I just felt this pull towards military service. I wanted to at least pull one of the available 2 year enlistments that were being offered, then maybe reenlist at the end. Mom went nuts, and wouldn't talk about it. Dad was the one who had to drive me to the Recruiting center on a monthly basis to visit recruiters or to take more tests. After 1 month I had crossed the Air Force and Army off my list. Just wasn't interested in the Army and the Air Force seemed too much like an officer's club than a branch of the military, and once they told me I couldn't be a crew member on a "Spooky" Gunship, I decided to go elsewhere. Navy was out- I didn't want to wear bell-bottoms, and though they offered me a Military Police MOS, I just didn't think I'd fit in the Navy.
Both parents freaked when I told them I was going to join the Marines. I had seen the commercials, read numerous books, and wanted to be a part of this force that made other country's military forces panic. The folks brought up the barracks bombing in Beirut, and the casualties in the Grenada invasion, but my mind was made up. (Not to mention after watching Full Metal Jacket, I was quite taken by the culture and brotherhood of the Marines. *Trivia* - When you graduate Marine Boot Camp you have earned the title, Marine. This sticks with you until you die, as the Corps refuses to acknowledge the term "Ex-Marine' You are always a Marine once you earn the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor)
The folks tried to talk me out of enlisting but I wouldn't budge. They wouldn't sign me up ( I was 17 when I graduated HS) and I told them I'd wait until I hit 18 then go myself. They eventually gave in, and helped me try to apply for Annapolis for both an education and a Officer's commission. Unfortunately, an 80 average isn't good enough, so I was declined.
I enlisted November 14th 1988, a week after my birthday. I walked in to my local recruiting office, sat down, and knocked the Sgt. over with this statement: "Save the speech, I'd like to enlist. I want to go infantry, and I'd like to leave as soon as possible." The recruiter though I was joking and made me repeat myself to the 1st Lt. working in the office. He thought I was drunk.
After twenty minutes of convincing them I wasn't drunk,, on the run from the law, or mentally unstable, they handed me the necessary paperwork to sign and I had picked put my Specialty : 0300 Infantry. My 3 Sub-specialty choices were M60 Machine gunner, Anti-tank rocket operator, and basic rifleman. - They would ignore these and assign me to Mortar school. (Damn aptitude test had shown I could calculate the info faster in my head than they could with their charts, so I got assigned to mortars. - this was before they started using hand help computers in the mid 90's)
I did more in those 2 years I was enlisted than most of my friends have done in 20 years. I got to blow stuff up, visit the Caribbean and Europe, became a 'shellback' (Crossed the equator on a US Naval Vessel) and I can say I completed 13 of the toughest weeks in my entire life. My parents still didn't like that I was in harm's way all the time - They got the unfortunate surprise of watching my unit walk on to helicopters to assist the US embassy in Liberia in 1990 CNN was on our ship and caught all of us deploying into an area where it was mostly chaos.
Had I not torn my ACL and most of the cartilage in my knee in Africa, I'd have been able to remain in the service. That's my main regret in this life - I wasn't able to keep up with the intense physical demands due to the injury and I was honorably discharged. But if I were 20 years younger and a ton of weight lighter, I'd get my knee fixed and reenlist in a heartbeat.
i think i've done a good job of that so far, for better and worse. 
i suppose it was always there. i've always been a shy kid at heart, but i compensated by acting out, telling stories, playing make believe, coming up with different characters and voices and bits, mimicking what i saw/heard on movies and TV. my parents love to recount the hours i'd spend playing (alone) with my various toys and doing "all the voices," as they put it. but the first time i remember really wanting to be an actor of some kind was when i was 6 years old and i had just seen Top Gun. it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world, because you could be and do ANYTHING! it arose again when i was 8 and read Romeo and Juliet for the first time. then when i was 11 and got put in theatre arts for a middle school elective, and the next year when i saw a 12 year old Ben Sterling play Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird in our school cafeteria. by high school, the universe had primed me enough and i started studying and doing theatre seriously (or as seriously as one can), got cast in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and i never looked back. 
