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Show Tyler Jewkes 4 mb r 2009 then had about, it was about a week and a half to go home and then come back ju t aft r New Year's. JCW: Talk to me about, because once you're done with AIT, you're done with bo camp, you get to go home and you're basically a civilian again. Talk to me about coming home. Talk about the beginnings, a very patriotic community, with very patriotic parents, how did that make you feel to come home? You were a soldier now, you completed boot camp. How did that make you feel? TJ: Well, first it was good. My parents came out to pick me up in Oklahoma from graduation, drove out there to come and pick me up. Coming out of there, by the time I graduated I'd grown to five-foot-ten, so I'd grown a couple of inches. I gotten a lot thinner, a lot of muscular definition, so there was a lot of pride associated with my parents. You could see it in their faces. You could tell that they were proud that I'd been able to accomplish something like that, be able to complete something that is viewed as a pretty rigorous process. After that, though, coming home, I wouldn't say that I was very vocal about it. I didn't come home and let everybody know that I was in the military. I obviously still had a military haircut, but I wasn't very vocal about expressing to everybody that I was in the military and this is what I was doing. But I did run into a lot of people, and by that point people that had seen me just previously, I mean about six months to a year before, people that would see me all of a sudden didn't recognize me because I was taller, a lot thinner. A lot of pride that came to me is being able to see the changes already that people didn't even recognize. Although it was just physical appearance, it was kind of nice to be able to 13 |
