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Show John Reed 2 R 2009 onofabitch stands up with a B4 rocket. .. " which is a RPG2 and fires it right thr ugh hi door. It didn't arm, which is kind of similar to a scene in "Blackhawk Down." It didn't go far enough to arm, but it punched through his door and blew out a kidney and three or four ribs, and here he is looking like a shark took a bite out of him. So I'm looking at this guy and I'm thinking to myself, oh, shit. I got over on this guy. I didn't literally get over on him, because he was already six years older than I was, but the guys that were in Vietnam in '69 and '70, and '71 were there because I wasn't there. What that means is that I, that's something I'm going to have to think about. As I got closer and closer to age 31, 32, 33 where most services will not take you as any form of officer, I thought faster. Then I realized, look ... and I had no wife at that time. I had no responsibilities, really, that would prevent me from doing it. I just realized I had to have the experience. Now if you were to say, "Well, John, does that mean that you would have felt less a man?" The answer is yes, for me. Now, I've liked firearms my whole life, I've liked hunting and camping. I'm not a pacifist. The only thing that would have argued against me doing it was that I was a person of the left, to the degree that I understood that when I was in college. Today I'm a card carrying New Deal liberal. So politically it was against my grain, but it was not against my grain in any other way. It was actually going with my grain, except for that one, that one little, well, gosh, what if I'm sent someplace to kill a bunch of Third World people that don't need killing. Well, I got lucky because that only came up at the very end of my service. At that point I was able to ... well, I don't know what I was able to do. But the question of not going once mobilized as a lieutenant colonel was just off the table. So, therefore, I went. 24 |
