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Lifestyle of a Active Duty Soldier and Veteran

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Lifestyle of an Active Duty Soldier and Veteran
Keri Reeves
ENG 121 English Composition
Prof. Ginger Marcinkowski
October 4, 2015

The lifestyle of an Active Duty Soldier and Veteran is an experience I will never forget. Imagine this, you just graduated from high school and ship out the following month to boot camp. You are eighteen-years-old and officially on your own. You have a purpose and a new career ahead of you. You just joined the United States Army, congratulations kid. Till this day, I remember when I signed and swore in on my contract. I didn’t see myself going to college like most kids did and I did not want to be the kid that still lived with their parents. You are about to encounter the lifestyle of an Active Duty Soldier and Veteran, carry on. I did ten years in the Army as an active duty soldier. My first tour was in South Korea. I worked there as a medical supply specialist for one year and traveled around the country while I was there. I didn’t appreciate that tour then as much as I know I would have now. I suppose that is what happens when you’re young. When my time was up, I left to go to Fort Drum, New York and served two and a half years there. That same year we left for a fifteen month deployment to Iraq. During the time of our deployment, I was attached to a Scout element and was the female searcher for them. As a female assigned to a Scout unit, I learned very quickly the male soldiers were not allowed to search woman and children, so that is the reason as to why they needed me. Also, I wasn’t allowed to search the men in Iraq as it was against their custom so the male soldiers handled that part. There were times when I was gone on these missions for up to thirty six hours. In the dark, I would walk out there in the fields with the scouts just as if I was one of them. I used to think of movies like Black Hawk Down

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