1
Oct
2014
A buddy of mine, Sgt. Jones, volunteered to be one of the drivers for the company’s M35 two-and-a-half-ton truck. Jones was looking forward to getting out of Iraq for a couple of days and taking advantage of the swimming pool at Camp Arifjan, a logistics base in Kuwait. He wouldn’t make it, though, thanks to some poor decision-making.
“Beat the heat” — those three words used to remind me of my early days in the military. Beating the heat could be the difference between life and death at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. However, this historic motivational quote took on a whole new meaning following what I consider to be the scariest moments of my deployment.
As the staff sergeant walked into the military courtroom to hear his fate, he had no idea what was about to happen to his military career. If he had only stopped and thought about what could go wrong, the sequence of events would certainly have been different.