Will, William, and Billy

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps In this petty pace from day to day." Ah yes, the sound and fury of Macbeth. Sorry, not exactly.

On this date, fifty years ago, I awoke before daylight and in one of our last joint moments on this planet, was a passenger as my father drove me to the railroad station in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I boarded a train that (eventually) stopped in Newark where I disembarked and made my way to the Military Entrance Processing Station.

In a cavernously large room with hundreds of other-still-only-half-awake (mostly) young men, I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. The final results aren't yet tabulated, but with the benefit of hindsight (so far) it seems I did okay with foreign but far less than that with domestic.

After enlisting, we were separated by service, and a dozen or so of us were bussed to Newark Airport where we flew to San Antonio, Texas, and met by people wearing Smokey the Bear hats, and Air Force uniforms who did nothing but yell from the time our feet touched the tarmac until they had tucked us into our bunks in our barracks at Lackland Air Force Base. Welcome to BMT, Basic Military Training..  

The following morning we traded our clothes for a wardrobe larger than anything I'd ever owned (or wanted) and received a shearing haircut that reminded me of little else except the pictures of inmates in prisoner-of-war camps and asylums. 

For the next few weeks that felt at times like an eternity, we walked nowhere because we marched in unison (or so it seemed) everywhere. We learned how to make our bunks so that a quarter would bounce off the blanket (take that, Ivan!), how to pick up cigarette butts with our fingers, referred to as 'police call,' to never, ever put our hands in our pockets at any time and to truly believe "Whiskey No Good, PT so good." 

When BMT concluded, I was shipped to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indianapolis, Indiana, for a summer in the Defense Information School that did nothing to prepare me for an assignment north of the Arctic Circle at Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) Sondrestrom, Greenland. From there, I headed south and east to Frankfurt am Main in what was then West Germany and the headquarters of the American Forces Network, Europe (AFN-E).

I decided in September of 1983 to not be greedy and to let someone else serve their country and remained in Germany with my wife and our still infant son, to be joined some years later by a daughter as I worked in Frankfurt, then Schwetzengen and then for the Aerospace Audiovisual Service (Combat Camera) at Rhein-Main Air Base. 

As part of the overhead that NATO trimmed after winning the Cold War, I was relocated (with my family as collateral damage) to, of all places, Connecticut (but not the Gold Coast part but the part more resembling the Jersey Pines) and a civilian position as the public information officer for the US Navy's Submarine Force training command. 

On my first day, I was stopped by what I learned later was a Commander (all the rank insignia looked the same to me at the time) exiting the Commanding Officer's Department Head meeting (I was the special in special assistant as it turned out) who wanted to know where my uniform was.

He seemed surprised I didn't have one and that I was a civilian ('like my wife?' he offered). He asked what my job was. I told him to explain people who look like you to people who look like me. He was less than impressed, a reaction I grew inured to in the course of the over a quarter of a century I worked there until retiring in July 2018. 

I've read a lot about the road not taken, and about the other lives, but for our choices, we could or should have led. I leave all that to those with big brains. For me, today is the next day in the only life I will ever know. Carpe Diem et adducite proximos quinquagintaet vel tristitia vel euphoria!
-bill kenny