'Risk Everything, Regret Nothing'

"What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask the Queen..."Oh, things that happened the week after next." the Queen replied.

Serendipity Uber Alles. Or, 'Unless you look for the unexpected you'll never find it.' (A poster in a 5th grade room: site of a Sunday evening AA meeting, which I attended).

Getting out of the service was indeed living a serendipitous life. The days of shooting craps in a latrine, on our knees, in Korea were long gone. The Army no longer made plans for me. Life was all on me; sink or swim and I did both.

When we got out of the service (No one 'left the service. Got out were the operative words.) our lives took on a rocket-like aura. All the vets of WWII had one mantra, 'make up for lost time'. That included getting married ASAP and making breeding machines out of our wives. We created the so called Baby Boomers. The Ruptured Duck in our lapels made us feel very special and fucking omnipotent.

We thought that we had seen the worst that life could throw at us. A gunshot wound was annoying. Luckily for me that the God damn bullet went through my leg not my scrotum, which would have been really bad news. One of life's great lessons relearned by me on Okinawa was that as bad as things seemed, things could have been worse. My great Pop initially taught it to me. There is always an alternative, he would tell me. My Pop was the eternal optimist, until he wasn't.

Yeah, I was free to make my own mistakes. Take fucking adventures of my choice. 'Sameness' was a dirty word. Anything to get away from what I thought at the time was the drabness of Army life. In retrospect, much of my time in the Army was anything but drab. I managed to offset a lot of boredom with keeping my life and mouth in motion.

I was damn lucky not to have been court marshaled more than once. Not having a filter between my brain and my mouth was not, is not, a formula for making friends or success in the Army or anywhere.

Post Army decision making for me, and other vets, was easy. We were all fucking tough, smart and survivors. The word 'uncertain' was not in our dictionary. How else could a Bronx Jew, like me, end up slopping fucking hogs on a farm in Iowa?

Or being a 'schmatta salesman' traveling the Mid West? Or deciding to raise a fund to drill oil in Israel, knowing full well that Moses should have turned left, not right?

Curiously, the Army is where I learned to be right or wrong but never in doubt. Six 'careers' in my first 14 years of marriage speaks to that principle. My motor mouth earned the lifelong resentment of me by the Princess.

We, who were in WWII, were lucky. We didn't know from PTSD. 'Shell shocked' a carryover from WWI was the operative phrase. Also, Section Eight if you had turned goofy. Lots of guys bucked for a Section Eight discharge to get back to the states.

But with perfect Army logic, the doctor told Orr, in turning him down for a Section Eight, that 'If you think that you are crazy you must be sane, how else would you know that you are crazy'...Perfect Catch 22...

Capitalizing the A in Army is a natural for me. The Army, for me, was not a lower case experience. You were always thinking the impossible, whenever you happened to be thinking.

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