Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
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Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
The Solo That Became a Symphony: Rick Teeter's 25-Year Military Career
"When I joined the Army Band, nobody told me I'd be probing for landmines in Bosnia or providing convoy security in Desert Storm," Rick Teeter reflects, his voice carrying the weight of unexpected experiences that defined his remarkable 25-year military career. Beginning with a cold call from a recruiter during his senior year in East Texas, Teeter's journey took an unexpected turn when he discovered the Army had bands—a revelation that transformed his two-year enlistment plan into a lifelong commitment.
As a bassoonist turned soldier, Teeter found himself at historical crossroads that shaped a generation. He walked the streets of Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, deployed to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and provided critical support during the Bosnian peacekeeping mission. His story demolishes stereotypes about military musicians, revealing how bands transition seamlessly from performance duties to combat support roles during deployments.
Particularly fascinating is Teeter's account of his time as drum major for the 1st Cavalry Division, where ceremonial duties included elaborate parade performances complete with period uniforms, Winchester rifles, and cavalry charges—a living connection to military traditions dating back generations. Later, his work with the specialized 09 Lima program recruiting Middle Eastern cultural and language specialists demonstrates how military innovation addresses emerging challenges in complex theaters of operation.
Whether describing the anxiety of being targeted by a T-72 tank in the desert or the simple joy of smelling "green" upon returning from deployment, Teeter's experiences resonate with authenticity and perspective. His journey reminds us that military service, regardless of specialty, demands versatility, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to something larger than oneself. What unexpected path might your own service story take?
Today is Friday, March 14th. We're talking with Rick Teeter, who served in the United States Army, the Michigan Army National Guard and the Louisiana Army National Guard. So good afternoon, Rick. It's good to see you. Thank you, Good afternoon. I'm sorry it's Louisiana, Is that how you say it?
Speaker 2:If you're from there, it's Louisiana.
Speaker 1:Okay, there's no E's in there at all. Yeah, that's correct yeah so we'll start out pretty simple, and then the questions will get increasingly difficult, maybe. I don't know when and where were you born.
Speaker 2:So I was born May 10, 1970, in Elizabethtown, kentucky, just outside of Fort Knox. My dad had come back from Vietnam and was serving his last duty station at Fort Knox. They allowed us to stay in married housing while they were waiting on me to be born, because he had actually finished his commission. He was the OIC for the CIF at Fort Knox and then he moved up to Detroit, but before that we were waiting on me to be born. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:So you never really lived in Kentucky then.
Speaker 2:No, I lived in Kentucky for about two weeks. Okay, moved up to Detroit. What area of Detroit were you in? Dearborn Heights, don't remember much about it. Family is from the south. So at a very young age we moved back to Arkansas, which is where our clan of the Teeters is from, grew up in Arkansas until probably about finished third grade and then moved to Louisiana in fourth grade.
Speaker 1:Okay, I've got to ask what part of Arkansas were you living in?
Speaker 2:Mostly on the west side Atkins, arkansas, for a little bit, and then Mena, arkansas, which is in the Ouachita Mountains Don't ask me to spell it and then yeah, pretty much. The Teeter family is from Russellville, which is a little outside of Little Rock, little outside of Little.
Speaker 1:Rock, okay, my family's from Mark Tree, arkansas, okay, and Kent, missouri. So all from that area is where they came from. So from there you moved to Louisiana Yep, as us Northerners would say. And so tell me a little bit about what it was like growing up for you, because I'm assuming by this time you might have some memories about being a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, dad had his degree in. His first degree was in music with Arkansas Tech, and his second degree was in accounting, and so he was an office manager for electrical co-ops. So from my earliest recollection he was an office manager for Rich Valley Mountain Electric in Mena. And then we moved to Natchitoches, louisiana Don't ask me to spell that one either and then he actually worked for a co-op there too until he was called into the ministry, so he became a student pastor for the United Methodist Church, okay, and so that took us all over the place. While he was still a student pastor, we moved to Gina, which is a small, small town in central Louisiana, small town in central Louisiana, and he had become a licensed insurance agent for Shield of Shelter which I'm sure they don't have up here and then decided to go to seminary and they moved us to Shreveport and Bossier area, so lived in Bossier city where dad went to Southern Methodist university.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, I was in high school at that time. So, uh, I remember living in Gina. We had, um, a very rare snowfall and uh, actually made the newspaper because we had taken a sled from Detroit down to, you know, back south with us and mom had always was going to throw it out. For some reason she did, and we had the only sled in town so I made the paper Wow, that's my first claim to fame Make you popular. Yep Grew up in you know high school band and stuff like that. Dad wanted to move closer to seminary so he would go there for the week and stay in a dorm and then come home on the weekends and then preach. But they were able to find us a spot in Texas. So I actually did live in Texas for about sophomore, through my senior year, lived in two more towns in Texas and actually enlisted into the Army out of Tyler, texas.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to ask what was it like for you If you removed minister and put in military? It sounds like you bounced around a lot, just like any military kid would bounce around. What?
Speaker 2:was that like for you? You know, growing up especially, you know grade school wasn't bad, but I would say junior high and high school you had to start over, you had to prove yourself. Every time, you know, in middle school there's always somebody that wanted to kind of pick on you and you know, see what your metal is like, and and so, yeah, you end up in some scrapes and and you're not from around here, you know you're, you know you're in a small town infiltrating their, you know their ecosystem. So you know, I never really had a childhood friend because of that.
Speaker 2:But I also did gain a lot of experience. You know, I saw a lot of things, have been a lot of places, so good with the bad, but yeah, we probably moved about every three years. Well, so even in Arkansas we had, we had moved to a couple of different places Louisiana, you know, three or four different places. Texas, two different places.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so did you play in band like all through middle school and high school. Yep, what was your instrument?
Speaker 2:I started in sixth grade. I started on bassoon.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Which was they had to measure my fingers to make sure my fingers were long enough. Okay, which was? They had to measure my fingers to make sure my fingers were long enough. So the band director wanted me to start on saxophone until I could grow into it, but my fingers actually were long enough. I remember when my brother was in high school, in a high school band in Mena, I was infatuated by the bassoon player for some reason, and she let me play it and honk on it or whatever it was, before she put it away In her case and for some reason that just carried through. So when it was time for me to think about what instrument I wanted to play, I immediately wanted to go for the bassoon. I've been playing it ever since. Okay.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because usually when you talk about high school band it's like oh, I played the trumpet or the cornet or the saxophone, but not the bassoon.
Speaker 2:I insisted on it, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, you got to do what you got to do, right, yeah, yeah. So you graduated high school, and this was in Tyler, texas. Is that where you graduated the?
Speaker 2:recruiting station was out of Tyler. I actually graduated from Winsboro High School, um, and that's in wood, county texas, I'm not. I think quitman is the county seat, but tyler's the really the larger city. That's near everything. There's nothing in east texas but pine trees, okay.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, and football lots in football yep, yep, we were the red raiders and to this day, we're still the Red Raiders. Despite all of the you know, political, whatever connotations that it comes with Small Eastern Texas town, they're still the Red Raiders. Yeah, they're probably not going to change their name. Probably, probably not.
Speaker 1:So what made you decide to join the military and head out to Tyler, Texas? It was a cold call.
Speaker 2:It was my senior year. I had moved my senior year to a new town and a new school Winsboro High School and Greg Tillotson Staff Sergeant. Greg Tillotson was my recruiter. He called me up and just asked me you know what recruiters would ask right, what are your plans for the future? You've thought about the Army blah blah, blah. Well. The army blah blah, blah. Well, first to contact, first to contract.
Speaker 2:Uh, my dad was a vietnam veteran. Uh, he was army. So you know they a little concerned. But you know, uh, vietnam was, you know, probably 20 years. You know it was. At least it was about over 20, 20 years behind us.
Speaker 2:No one had heard of Kuwait or Iraq really in America, or paid much attention to it, and so it seemed like a pretty safe bet. I would join the Army, get the GI Bill, get out, go to college. That was the plan. And so the recruiter even found me a great job as a 19 kilo which is an armored crew member on an M1A1 Abrams tank. It only had a two year enlistment. It gave me the GI Bill, everything I wanted. So I signed up for that went to the Dallas MEPs. So I got everything I wanted.
Speaker 2:And back in school it's my senior year. I was going to ship out I don't know when that summer. Obviously the recruiter comes into the school to do, I guess, a school visit or visit with somebody, and asks me he says, hey, you're in the band, right? I'm like, yeah, I'm in the band. He says, here, give these flyers about the Army band to your band director. And I'm like the Army has a band, why didn't you tell me the Army has a band?
Speaker 2:This never came up. It's like is there any chance I could maybe join the band instead? And he's like, well, let me see what I can find out. Just so happens, could find out. Uh, just so happens. Um, uh, the, the active army recruiters are missioned based off of particular mos's or whatever. It is like they. They run it very specifically, right? Uh, that month his mission was one army band musician. So I was like, for some reason, uh, so he drove me down to Fort Hood to the 2nd Armored Division band. I took an audition with the bandmaster and passed Barely passed, but I passed. And so, believe it or not, they took me back to MEPS, renegotiated my contract for a three-year enlistment which included the GI Bill and the GI Bill kicker. Oh, so I actually ended up with a better deal. Yeah, and I was in the band Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, so yeah, so you go through all of that. You finish out your senior year, you head off to basic training. Tell me about your experience, that first experience of hitting basic training.
Speaker 2:It was tough. This dates me of course, I'm probably not the oldest person you've interviewed, but I went to Fort McClellan, alabama, which is where basic training was for me and it was also OSUT training for the MPs and the chemical, so before they had moved everything up to Fort Leonardwood. So 1988 in July I report July 1st. Get to the reception station, july. I report July 1st. Get to the reception station, they issue me like a brown towel and a dog tag chain and something else and there I sat because it was a July 4th holiday, right. So why do they ship people? And to this day they still do it.
Speaker 2:Right, they'll ship people to reception and then you'll sit there for like an extra five or six days not doing anything.
Speaker 1:I think it just ensures that you leave.
Speaker 2:Maybe Maybe but, there I sat, yeah, I learned what. What is it called Police, police patrol, police call, police call. Yes, police call, I learned what police call, was Very excited about it the first time I heard about it and we did that so many times.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, so for anyone listening who's not military, tell us what police call is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so police call, as it was explained to me, is you line up in this big long line and you're going to walk across a grassy area or whatever it is, with the person next to you. You stay in line and the instructions are if God didn't put it there, pick it up. So cigarette butts, trash wrappers, anything, okay, so that's how exciting.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That was my introduction to the military. Yeah, uh, basic training was. You know, the first couple of weeks was very hard, very intense. Had no idea what was going on. We would get daily updates from the drill sergeants telling us that we're going to war because Cuba shot down one of our F-16s or who knows what was going on, and maybe there was some truth somewhere that there was some issues with Cuba and maybe there was some truth somewhere that there was some issues with Cuba.
Speaker 2:But it was a good experience. I grew as a person, for sure. I learned that I was part of something bigger than myself and how important teamwork was. One of our first team things and I don't know how in the world we did it was to lift a full-size set of bleachers and move them oh I don't know how many feet into a different company's area so probably a football field length and just learning how to stop being an individual to do this task and the drill sergeants let us figure it out on our own. That was a very important lesson to me on how to work together as a team and help each other and not be an individual. And eventually we, we, we got it done. Yeah, it was a good lesson for us as a team and to learn how to work together.
Speaker 1:Kind of taught you the power in a team too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, because you're not going to move it by yourself.
Speaker 2:Not doing it by yourself, no you're not Absolutely, and it was a heavy task, right yeah. Task, right yeah. And two things that impressed me with Fort McClellan. Alabama is on every Army post, even in August. You will go. We do what's called an FTX, a field training exercise. They used to call them bib wax or whatever.
Speaker 2:But you would road march into the woods and whatever and you'd road march 15, 20 miles, set up camp, put up like a little pup tent, and you're in the middle of nowhere and the enemy's going to attack you and this and that, and you don't hardly get any sleep. And you wake up the next morning and it's August, in Alabama, alabama, and you can see your breath and it is cold. I swear I might have even saw some snow. Probably not true, but it was cold as heck. And the first time I'd ever had coffee in the back of a deuce and a half with the, with the mermite cans and everything, and then they had the coffee and I just needed the coffee to warm my hands up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was terrible, but you know I still drink coffee today. And then we're in there and mop for so we're practicing our nuclear, biological, chemicals, what they call it at the time, training. So I've got the protective mask on and all of this stuff on and our steel pots At the time we didn't have kevlar steel pots to sit on top of these masks and we're cleaning our weapons and and in the middle of the woods and they've got. They've got like the, the, I don't know like a, not a porta potty, but an outhouse like.
Speaker 2:Like a six or eight-man outhouse. You walk in and it's like a public outhouse I don't know how to explain it. And so we're cleaning our weapons and then I hear a drill sergeant out of nowhere and thankfully it wasn't our platoon. I was like Private Doty, where's your steel pot? Oh no, I guess you're supposed to have your cover on. It's in the latrine, drill Sergeant. It's like Private Doty, go get it. It's like it fell in, drill Sergeant, oh no. And I'm just listening to this and, oh my God, the drill sergeant lost it. He sent the biggest guy in his platoon to go in and hold Private Doty by his ankles, while Private Doty went into this eight-hole outhouse and fished out his steel bot.
Speaker 1:Oh, I hope he learned a lesson from that.
Speaker 2:I tell that story as often as I can. It's a funny story to me.
Speaker 1:Because it didn't happen to you, right, it didn't happen to me and I didn't get punished for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah. So those are my impressionable moments in basic training that would stand out.
Speaker 1:How was graduation from basic? How was that for you?
Speaker 2:It was pretty cool. My parents came, you know, got the obligatory pictures with my drill sergeant. I came in in the Army band. It was a civilian acquired skills program. So instead of going in as an E1 pay grade private, I actually came in as an E3 private, first class. So that's where I got to wear my rank. You could wear it during basic training but you kind of didn't want to.
Speaker 1:Right, you don't want to stand out. Didn't really want to stand out.
Speaker 2:One of the pinnacle points of my training was when I was going through final inspection for basic training and one of the drill sergeants looked at me and he says you on my platoon. I basic training was when I was going through final inspection for basic training and one of the drill sergeants looked at me and he says you on my platoon.
Speaker 1:I'm like, yes, drill sergeant.
Speaker 2:I was like yes, Mission accomplished. I completely managed to fly under the radar. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that was fun. You know, we did an outdoor parade, you know, and like a little indoor ceremony. But yeah quick. Not much to it, but that was nice.
Speaker 1:And then where'd you go from there?
Speaker 2:I went to the Armed Forces School of Music which is in Little Creek Naval Base in Virginia just outside of Norfolk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yep, it's where the SEALs train. Yes, it's where the SEALs train.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, right between Norfolk Air Station and Virginia Beach.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:So that was a six-month-long AIT. Okay, so I get there you know used to basic training report to my drill sergeant. I get to my barrack and report to the drill sergeant. At the drill sergeant's office I snap to break rest. You know, private teeter reports is ordered and she looks up at me and she says what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Relax, I was like oh, she's like this is the band, yeah she's like I'll show you to your room, here's your bunk.
Speaker 2:You know it was a four. I was in an open bay in basic training. It was a four bunk room. You know we still had common latrines and showers but I had. You know the room was like just four people. Wow, she says here's your stuff. It's Friday, you got civvies. I'm like, yes, real sergeant. She says put your civvies on, see you Monday.
Speaker 1:I'm like wow, what do I do?
Speaker 2:I hadn't had that much freedom in like 10 weeks.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yep Sounds like a great AIT, because most AIT is just an extension of boot camp. Yeah, not so for the band.
Speaker 2:So because it's 26 weeks long or whatever it is, they just couldn't right. Yeah, makes sense. So we were able to wear civvies after duty hours. We still did PT in the morning, but we didn't have to march to class. We didn't do any of that stuff. Have to march to class, we didn't, you know, do any of that stuff. It was almost kind of like, well, what some people would maybe call almost college, but not really because it's still the military College with uniforms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we still had daily inspections, we still had PT, we still had standards Right and it was a tough course. It was a tough curriculum. If you had a college degree in music you were going to do fine, but if you're fresh out of high school from a small town in East Texas, academically that was a struggle. Yeah, so it really was. You think that struggle was?
Speaker 1:good for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it was. I think I grew. I went home on Christmas exodus to visit my parents and went and saw my old band director and I just hung out in the band room and started practicing. There was their Christmas concert that night. He says I don't know, because I asked him. I said can I sit in the Christmas concert? That'd be cool. I mean, you haven't rehearsed with us, you don't know the music. And so I just kind of hung out and chatted to old friends and stuff like that, the underclassmen.
Speaker 2:After I'd graduated they were now upperclassmen and I'd just work on my scales and work on whatever I was supposed to, and a couple of hours later he came out and he says hey, I don't mind if you come out to the concert. I sight-read the concert. So I had improved a lot in that short amount of time. Oh yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the beauty of the military right. You can take something that would normally take you a year or two years and condense it down and really get it within a very short period of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's very high focused. Yeah, right, you're immersed in it, right, so you don't have a choice because you live it. Yeah, so I was in class from 7 to probably 3, 3, 4 o'clock, then there's PT, then there's chow, and then I went back to the School of Music for mandatory practice. So I was literally probably a good 14, 15 hours a day immersed in my practice and my study. You're either going to learn something or you're going to go find a new job. Oh, yeah, and you will find a new job. There was a high, there was a high fail rate. Yeah, the school of music is no joke, so I have a lot of people that didn't didn't make it through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I had a lot of people that didn't make it through. Yeah, did you find in the military with things like that, a lot of it had to do with your determination, not necessarily your knowledge. I mean, like you said, if you had a college degree you could probably make it through here fairly easily, but without one you had to work hard at it. But to me the military always felt like if you had the determination you would make it through.
Speaker 1:I mean you have to have some sort of aptitude right Absolutely, but it's mostly mental and not necessarily the mechanics of it.
Speaker 2:Most of what we learned, I think, in basic training, was mental, the mind game, knowing that the drill sergeants aren't doing anything personally. It, it's a mind game. It's putting you in a stressful situation so you can learn how to deal with stressful situations, right, um, it really is. And the determination and the self-discipline. And you're not going to learn self-discipline without being able to stretch, you know, your comfort zone. So, yeah, I would say yes, there's some valuable lessons learned in that and that follows you, you know, throughout your life, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you make it through. I'm assuming the music school. Yes, I did yeah. Where do you go from Right? Yeah, so you, you make it through. I'm assuming the music school. Yes, I did yeah. Where do you? Where do you go from?
Speaker 2:there, yeah, um, I went to Germany, I got a station of choice, uh, so I went to Ansbach, germany, and I was stationed with the first armored division, and so, uh, that was March of 1989.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Um, and so I actually got to. I was in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell.
Speaker 1:That had to be pretty cool, that was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I didn't have any money to go check it out.
Speaker 2:And also it was a risk because at the time Berlin was in the middle of East Germany right, which was a separate country at the time and it was a communist country, and the only way you could travel to Berlin was to be on some special duty orders and you were on an overnight duty train and it was very like restrictive for military personnel, because you're basically going behind enemy lines. At the time the enemy was the Soviets. Yeah, so we're going through the Soviet Union to get to West Berlin, which is this little bitty island in the middle of the Soviet Union. So I didn't have the money or the inclination to go, but some of my barracks friends did it. They risked it. Um, I'm glad they did, Cause they brought me back a piece of the wall.
Speaker 1:Oh, that was cool.
Speaker 2:You know, thanks guys. Um yeah, so how long?
Speaker 1:were you in Germany?
Speaker 2:Um, I was in Germany, well, the first time until 91.
Speaker 2:Okay, I learned really how to ski very well there because living in Ansbach, it was in Bavaria, it was specifically in Franconia, which is probably about a couple of hours north of Munich, so near the Alps glacier skiing, just some of the world's best skiing there. So we actually had a bunch of us barracks. Rats would get together and we would either find somebody's car or we would rent like a station wagon or something and we would just go out for a weekend, especially a long weekend.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just go ski. We call ourselves the Kobayashi Maru, which is you know, now you, now you're a band geek, so it's a. It's a. It's a nod to Star Trek or the Star Trek movies, and it was the when you're in the Academy. It was supposed to be the scenario that was impossible to to succeed at right. I guess Captain Kirk was the first one to ever do it or something like that. So that was us and it was get your stuff and go. You'd hear a knock on the door and you'd open the door and the person would say Kobayashi Maru, and that's all you needed.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's pretty cool and we would meet down in the parking lot and we would just go. It was an impromptu thing.
Speaker 1:So and I don't mean this in a derogatory manner at all but band geeks are band geeks, no matter where they're in the band.
Speaker 2:Yeah, come to find out.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, it just kind of that's what it is.
Speaker 2:Yep and.
Speaker 1:And there's nothing wrong with that? No, not at all.
Speaker 2:No, no, I mean it can be a source of pride, absolutely. If it is, there's no shame in it. There really isn't.
Speaker 1:Well, if you look at the colleges and a lot of the big high schools, you have band geeks. But they love their band Like they would defend their band as they would one of their own teammates.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, band, as they would, one of their own teammates. So yeah, and as far as, as far as units go, I mean the duty was different but we were one of the hardest working units uh, especially on that, um, a concern is what you call the, the different bases in germany, um, and we, we actually shared a barracks of field artillery and we would end up pissing each other off because we would get back home from let me start it this way they would get up to do pt, like at five in the morning or 5, 30 or whatever it was right, and start hooping and hollering and, you know, banging on our you know what are our doors, and go past and you know know, do their PT. Well, we would, we would get up later, but we would get home at about two in the morning from a gig Right and just give it right back to them, you know. So yep.
Speaker 1:So it's a healthy rivalry, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Kind of like yeah, so you, you were there for that period of time and and then did you come back stateside. Then I did.
Speaker 2:Sounds like somebody re-enlisted too, I did. I re-enlisted in the desert so I actually deployed. That was my first deployment.
Speaker 1:Okay, did you deploy out of Germany then, mm-hmm Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, so my first deployment was the Gulf War, so Desert Shield was what it was called at the time. I remember knowing that my unit was deploying by watching the Armed Forces news, so our command didn't even know about it. It's just AFN. Just here's's the units and then scroll through the screen. First, ad ban what?
Speaker 1:Somebody screwed up.
Speaker 2:What we're all like, what the hell. So, um, that was a surprise. And uh, we were. We were slated to deploy um Christmas Eve, uh, uh, uh. So December 24th 1990, at the last last minute, we got a reprieve. Is we actually deployed, with a division commander and the division staff?
Speaker 2:And it might have been, he might have had some pull, but we actually ended up changing our date to December 26th, the date after Christmas, so we got to spend Christmas with family. If you had family over there, I didn't, I was a barracks rat, but we got to spend Christmas together before we actually deployed over.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice yeah. So what does the band do during that sort of deployment? Because that was the initial push right. I mean, that was really early on in the war.
Speaker 2:It was so they started ramping up in august they started sending chemical companies and stuff like that and and we would go play departure ceremonies, right for them, right, not thinking that this is going to be anything to deal with us. Um, until it, uh, and the band's mission has changed. Wartime mission has changed over years and it's different from today than what it was back then. Back then it was um enemy prisoner of war, processing EPW, uh and um and guard duty, and so that was my particular uh band's job, the first armored division band. So we ended up doing um guard duty around the, the division life support area, so the division main area, in the middle of nowhere, right In a desert, 360 degrees of natural horizon, Um, the dismount area which, which is where vehicles and people would enter into our compound, and the compound was literally bulldozers had built up a berm perimeter and so we guarded that. And then we guarded the entrance to the division's tactical operations centers of the TOC.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So that was our job and we were good at it. Actually, the MP company that was in charge of it, that commander, got relieved. I don't know what they were doing, but the band took over that mission from the. Mps.
Speaker 1:So the band commander was in charge. You've got to do something pretty bad to be relieved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know what it was.
Speaker 1:I think this is something too, but like you know, this is something, too, that people may not know about the army. Is that, um, just because you're in the band doesn't mean you're not going to go do army stuff, like like that? I remember when we were deployed, um, there was a group from um long what they call them laundry and something.
Speaker 2:But they did laundry Bath and laundry, bath and laundry. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they were doing convoy security, oh wow, and so yeah, I mean, when someone says, oh, this is what I did in the Army, ask them what they really did because you don't always do whatever your job is. And that's why I asked, because I was trying to figure out, well, what's the band going to do over there. So, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:And how long was your deployment? We did secondary convoy security, so we actually were in the convoy providing security. We weren't doing the overwatch, the MPs handled the overwatch and all that. I was there. Let me see, we got there December 26, 1990, and we left sometime in May in 91. And we left sometime in May in 91. And I want to say I don't know if it was after the ground war or right before the ground war. We actually had no, it had to have been after the ground war Because they actually we left our instruments and a connex back, way back as we would jump, probably about every three or four days. Yeah, we would end up in a completely different spot somewhere in the desert.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Our commander would pull up a map at some point and say here's where we are, here's the neutral zone, which is some weird diamond looking thing between iraq, saudi arabia and kuwait, like no one really knows who owns that diamond part of the desert. But we would do that probably every three or four days. The platoon sergeant would come in and like okay, we're jumping and we were picked up. We were so good at it. We could set up a GP medium tent and have it dug in, with the flaps dug in and everything inside 20 minutes. That's pretty fast. Yeah, that's efficient. It's very efficient. All of us just had a part to play and we just did it like ants, right.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we were good at it.
Speaker 2:We were good soldiers, you know. Good at it. We were very we were good soldiers, you know, uh. But we did get our instruments at one point and there is if you, you can go find it on youtube and it's all over the place um, so we had an embedded reporter come in and discovered the band was there, so so they got to play a song.
Speaker 2:So and we had our instruments. Just happened to be the week that they let us have our instruments and there was some downtime or whatever it was, and we would play little concerts. We'd stand up and just play little stand-up concerts for people during lunch or whatever, and some people really enjoyed it. Some people really pissed them off because they were on a different schedule and we woke up their sleep.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You're not going to make everybody happy, right, not going to make everybody happy, but that was our mission to do that at that time. And there is and I don't know how famous it is, but one of the platoon sergeants was a sousaphone player, and a sousaphone is this very large silver tuba with a huge bell and it wraps around you. And there's a picture of this guy and it's still rotating around today of this big, large silver sousaphone and he is holding an M60 by the handle in a chow line. Sergeant First Class Brinkowskisky. He's retired now, uh, and then they interviewed all of us. They actually did some special there's a special report somewhere, like that. The different evening news channels picked it up. I've got like a little soundbite yeah it's the second time I'm famous.
Speaker 2:I actually made it to the cover of band director's guide.
Speaker 1:Well so is that the pinnacle?
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Just, I don't know if you're a band director I guess it's a magazine that I don't even know if they publish it anymore but and I hate it because I in the army I had to learn not just bassoon but clarinet, saxophone, percussion. I hate the clarinet, but that was my mission at the time. I hate the clarinet but that was my mission at the time. So I'm on the cover of Band Director's Magazine playing the clarinet.
Speaker 1:Oh I know, Insult to injury.
Speaker 2:But hey, I'm on the cover of a magazine, Right?
Speaker 1:So that was cool, right.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. Yep, that was neat.
Speaker 1:You did your tour over there.
Speaker 2:I did my tour over there middle of nowhere, completely different from anybody's tour now in.
Speaker 1:Iraq or.
Speaker 2:Afghanistan, like they're in the middle of. You know, our youngest son, jason, he was in Syria and he's like in buildings and barracks, but you know, it's dangerous a different kind of danger, right, but dangerous in different kind of danger, right. Um, we were, we were jumping once earlier on and they couldn't pick all of us up at once, so we kind of got left with some other equipment. There was probably about 10 or 15 of us uh, not just the band, but other elements too and these guys showed up in this truck and they had their, you know, their, whatever you call these but the red and white things I can't remember what they're called.
Speaker 1:Turbine yeah, turbine.
Speaker 2:They have their turbines, they're in this truck. They're like, oh man, we're in for it Because, if I recall, we did not have ammo. We had our M16. We had our weapons but we didn't have ammo. So we kind of like pretended that we did and we're down on the ground and we're like you know it was zeroing in on them. They drive around us and they're holding up this effigy of some female had blonde hair, had no idea what it was. How weird Months later, because we had no information. Apparently there was a female.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it was a pilot or something that was actually captured, and so I guess that was their point, uh, to kind of scare us or show us that they've got an american or something, but they're in charge, yeah. Yeah, we actually did have to shoot at a better one. That got a little too close to us and a little too curious, but other than that, not too exciting. Well, we did almost get blown up by a T-72 tank.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So during the ground war, the day of the ground war was very windy, very dark, very cloudy and rain. It was actually cold in the desert. There was actually grass growing in the desert A little odd from what you would think of and this was in January, I think. I think the ground war was in January or February, maybe February, february, maybe february, and you had to stay because, um, the iraqis, or saddam hussein, had planted minefields, right, uh, and so we had tanks that were going through with these mine busters and they had these big things behind them that they would drag and that was supposed to pull up the mines. And then, you know, whatever, uh, so we had, so we had trails, so we had to stay in trails.
Speaker 2:So we're in blackout conditions, which means the only thing that you can see in front of you is the little couple of little red dots.
Speaker 2:And you had to stay in the in, in, in the ruts, and someone would run out of gas or someone, and while you're running out of gas, someone would fall asleep, ran out of gas, someone would fall asleep, like way up the line. Eventually we we kind of got lost, yeah, like didn't really know what was going on, trying to figure out where we were, where we needed to go. Um, and there was a tank up on the horizon and I didn't see it, but some of us other people were saying they were, they were moving the turrets, they could see the turrets coming, uh, but what I did see was a couple of Cobra helicopters fly up over and because of the wind, you couldn't hear anything. But I saw a flash, flash, flash, and over on the horizon I saw boom, boom, boom, and I think those Cobra pilots saved us. Yeah, somebody was on the ball that day. Somebody was on the ball, and thank God for the Cobra pilots. Right, might not be here talking to you, so yep.
Speaker 1:So there was some excitement over there.
Speaker 2:There was some excitement Yep, Yep, Yep but you know mail wasn't following you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no phones. Just none of that right, Right and you were probably on soft side home Vs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well we were. I had a Cuck V because that was the platoon driver, the platoon sergeant's driver, so just think of it just like a Blazer, right.
Speaker 1:Like a Scottsdale yeah.
Speaker 2:It was a Scottsdale truck. We had filled sandbags and put them on the floors Floorboards Just in case we did hit something. That was our protection. It was a sandbag. It's a lot different and then the bulk of the platoon. They were in deuce and halves.
Speaker 1:Even worse than being in a home. V honestly.
Speaker 2:Really yeah.
Speaker 1:I would think, yeah, yeah. So you guys redeployed out of there in May.
Speaker 2:Yep in May. Yeah, we actually we waited quite a while. King Khalid Military City, I think, is where we flew out of KKMC and we were encamped I don't know how many miles outside of that, still in the middle of the desert and in the middle of nowhere, just during a ceasefire. So we're making our own camp and stuff like that and we called it Camp Kazarin Pass, which is what the division commander called it, and there's some First Armored Division history dating back to World War II about that, which I won't go into but you can look it up or I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2:And then they would pour, they would grate the sand and they would pour diesel over the sand to make kind of a loam. So you kind of had a road that wasn't so bumpy and more reliable. And then we had set up a helicopter landing pads in the in a big area and then pitched up a bunch of camo netting and that kind of became like a relaxation area for everybody and we did a concert there every night and an A-Fees came by and they set up a shop at and they had a little place where you can get burgers and hot dogs called Wolf Burger. It was all free. The USO was there, red Cross was there. It was free pop, free burgers, free burgers, free hot dogs, pizza, and then the band.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's kind of nice in the middle of the desert to be able to do something.
Speaker 2:To be able to do something like that, yeah yeah, until the bus ride home and you realize your entire unit has dysentery oh, this is a bad.
Speaker 1:This is a bad thing.
Speaker 2:This is a bad thing and like, by the time we get back, like all of us are like sitting like this not saying a word to each other Right, because we don't want to tell each other what's going on. And then there was a beeline to all of the outhouses, which there was already a line Because the whole camp God isn't here. We're pretty sure we nailed it. We figured out that it was the breakfast that morning that they'd served and I remember seeing a fly in my potatoes. I didn't really think it turned into that I thought it was gross and just didn't eat the potatoes but yep so don't recommend dysentery.
Speaker 2:That's not fun well, that'll ruin deployment for you yeah, yeah, thankfully that only lasted like a day, yeah, but it was rough. And then the crap burning detail. Of course, when you're on a ceasefire and you've really got not much to do, they find things for you to do, right. So we got the crap burning detail and the mail mission, because after all these months, all the mail caught back up to us. Yeah, probably been following you around, maybe kind of it, but we're talking Chinook full of mail trucks full of mail, uh-huh yeah.
Speaker 2:And then all of the people that were trying to donate us stuff. We got pallets of Perrier water. Oh, how nice Pallets. That was great, until you realize it's 120 degrees outside and you have no refrigeration, right so? But you made it work. We would take a sock, wet a sock and you could put your water bottle down into the sock and just the evaporation would. It would cool the water down probably 20 degrees from whatever the outdoor temperature is. So, I mean, we got pretty inventive, figured things out.
Speaker 1:Figured it out.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep. Let me see, there was one time when the MREs at the time had started putting little bitty I don't know, quarter ounce bottles of Tabasco sauce, oh yeah. And so one of the guys wrote to the Tabasco sauce company just basically saying, hey, thank you for doing this, it's not quite enough Tabasco sauce. So next time would you please considering, maybe you know, using a larger bottle or something, or if you have some Tabasco sauce we're going to be here a while, let me know how much it costs. I'd like to order some. This is early, early 90s. Before there was no internet. You weren't ordering anything online.
Speaker 1:There was no Amazon.
Speaker 2:No Amazon. And then, a couple of weeks later, tabasco Sauce had responded and gave us, like a couple of cases of Tabasco Sauce, an MRE cookbook for each of us and a Tabasco Sauce holder that would fit on our pistol belt. Oh, they hooked you right up, so I still have that Tabasco sauce holder Someday that'll be a collector's item. It might be. It might be.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's camouflage and everything.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's very cool. One bottle of Tabasco sauce.
Speaker 2:So they're very responsive, yeah, so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I find a lot of companies like that really don't just say they support the military, they actually do things like that to support us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was so cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, Anything else cool happen while you were there?
Speaker 2:I think that just about wraps it up for Desert Shield, desert Storm and the ceasefire campaign. Okay, so goal four.
Speaker 1:So did you head back to? Where did you go? Back to Germany, Back to Germany.
Speaker 2:Okay, we flew back to Germany and it's amazing when you have been deployed to the desert. You know, I was only there for like five months, five and a half months, missed my combat hash mark by literally days. But we land in nurnberg and they, they open up the door to the airplane and you could literally smell green. Yeah, I had never thought to even know that that was a thing. Yeah, until you don't have it. But yeah, it came off the plane and it smelled green. You could see trees and there's grass. And we get back to our. You know just the little things that you just take for granted, like being able to flush a toilet or open a window or a door. Right, you know just all those things that you had taken for granted.
Speaker 1:Or using a port-a-john. That's not 900 degrees.
Speaker 2:Yes, have a completely new appreciation for a lot of the basics in your life.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, so yeah, do you find that you still like? I still will wake up in the morning sometimes and just be grateful? Yeah, because I'm in my bed, I'm in my house, no one's shooting at me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:There's this whole like thing that that the people don't understand because they haven't been through it.
Speaker 2:Haven't been through it every now and then I'll open a window and I'm like, ah, thank god for a window.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know oh yeah, or air conditioning, that works, air conditioning yeah, all the little things, yep. So how much longer did you stay in Germany from there?
Speaker 2:The division moved, which means they deactivated us, okay, and they deactivated 7th Corps, and so we were part of the closing, I guess, of the unit. 1st Armored Division had moved from Ansbach to Kaiserslautern. So they basically just moved the flag because there was already military units in Kaiserslautern. So the 8th ID Band became the 1st Armored Division Band. They were in Kaiserslautern and we were just responsible with closing down the community. So I left at the end of.
Speaker 2:They weren't guys who were slaughtered and we were just responsible with closing down the community. Okay, so I left at the end of 91, so December of 91. Was stationed at Fort Lee. I did reenlist in the desert and all my barracks buddies had a moment of silence for me after I did that.
Speaker 1:Right, you were pretty adamant about that. Two or three years yeah, I was the only one. I was the only one that did that. Right, you were pretty adamant about that. Yeah, I was the only one.
Speaker 2:It's the only one that did it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you'd think so. Obviously I did 25 years in service. So something changed between the high school kid that signed up for the GI bill money Obviously it was not about the college money anymore at that point, right, even though I'm thankful that I do have my degree, you know, largely because of the GI Bill and the kicker. But you know that moved me to Fort Lee. I spent about a year there, met my first wife. Deployed back to not deployed. I got restationed to Frankfurt. They shut down. I was fifth core band. They shut down Frankfurt when they moved us to Wiesbaden. Got a divorce during that time. That didn't last very long. No kids from that marriage. No kids from that marriage, no.
Speaker 2:And then when I was stationed in Germany the second time, it was a great timing because it was right around the anniversary of all of the major battles of World War II it's a good time to be there. So, being in the band, the 5th Corps band, we went TDY, started off at Normandy Beach. They put us up in timeshare bungalows and you could see all the concrete barricades and the machine gun nests and that's still there. Up the hill was the American Cemetery. It was just amazing. And then we followed that through Pointe du Hoc and Bastogne and all the way across, all the way to the Czech Republic, where the Soviets met the Americans. So the East and the West met up.
Speaker 1:The one time we were on the same side.
Speaker 2:Yes, the one time we were on the same side, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yep, wow, that's quite an experience, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:That was a cool time. Busy again, oh yeah, busy but cool. I learned a lot about World War II history and now I'm infatuated with World War II history because of that.
Speaker 1:So that was cool. Yeah, so you were in Germany. For how long this time, did you say Probably about another two and a half years.
Speaker 2:So altogether I served and lived in Germany about three years.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:No, sorry, six years.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right so.
Speaker 2:I do speak German, not as much as I did, but I could carry on a conversation.
Speaker 1:You know some basic stuff still, so that was cool now, did you deploy out of Germany at all again, or did you just?
Speaker 2:come back to the state. I did so after. The fun time with going through all the World War II battles was when Slobodan Milosevic decided to do a little genocide and so there was a UN situation happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina, yes, and so we got pulled to that deployment. So I learned how to probe mines, you know, in the training leading up to that, yeah, how to inertly probe for mines without setting them off, hopefully um, yeah, some important skills.
Speaker 2:Uh, they ended up, uh, deploying us to a small town called Tazar, hungary, which is on the on the border of Bosnia, so we weren't actually in Bosnia. Um, that was the supply in COIC at the time. So it was kind of like my job to kind of me and operations to try to make sure everything got set up and coordinated and everything. And we ended up in kind of a tent city. We turned, we didn't, but it was already there. Tent city we turned, uh, we didn't, but it was already there.
Speaker 2:Uh, they had turned a farmer's field into basically a tent city encampment a little bit different this time. Uh, we get there. The uh, the gp mediums still were on concrete slabs and there was plywood. We had plywood walls so that they were kind of hardened, and we had Hungarian nationals that would come in and fill up our kerosene heaters for us and there was a huge, very huge tent for entertainment and a workout area and 24-hour dining facility. So that was a lot nicer, still in the middle of a farmer's field, but it was nicer. Let me see, we had at one point and our mission there was music.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So that was our mission. So we would either go down into Bosnia and entertain soldiers or they would come there because it was kind of like a transition point, you know, before going. You know beyond the wire or whatever they call it, you know, and all that Right. So we, we did concerts, you know, quite a bit. Usually it was rock band or jazz band, or we would go into the local town or some of the some of the nearby towns and give concerts there. Uh, basically kind of like a partnership, friendship. Sorry for screwing up your roads, sorry for, you know, congesting the traffic, kind of sorry for making your life miserable here's, you know, that's kind of what our job was was to smooth over those ruffled feathers.
Speaker 2:And I remember, actually because I was driving I can't remember why or where, where, but driving into a town, going down a hill, and I actually got pulled over by the police. I was exceeding the speed limit. I don't think I really knew, like, what speed limit was.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it was posted or not and the status of forces agreement. The police didn't have that authority, but I went ahead and pulled over anyway. And these kids come out of the police van and they come up to me and they're like thank you, thank you. And they hand me a piece of paper and they had up to to me and they're like thank you, thank you. And they hand me a piece of paper and they had drawn a nice little drawing of like kids and flowers and stuff and then just write please, you know, respect the speed limit in this area, or something like that.
Speaker 1:It was like got the point across.
Speaker 2:You can't feel bad like they weren't good he wasn't going to write me a ticket. He couldn't, you know they couldn't arrest me, but it was very effective.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, and it was like this.
Speaker 2:thank you for what you do and hey, please don't, you know, obey our laws. Well, clearly it was effective.
Speaker 1:You're still talking about it today. Yeah, it was a great story. It really worked. It worked, it worked, yep.
Speaker 2:So that was cool. One time we had a little tent where we could do our rehearsals inside that encampment and we had a French horn player. That was, she was practicing by herself and this stray dog walked in, sat down next to her and when she would start playing he would start howling. So he would start singing or howling along. Whatever she did, he would try to do it. So that was kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:And then we did have like a little extra time on our hands then, because, you know, it wasn't like a Gulf War deployment, it was kind of like we're kind of beyond where all the danger is and our mission is music. So there was a lot of downtime. So it snowed once, you know. So we're out in our like underwear, yeah, doing snow angels in our brown sock and brown underwear and our brown t-shirts and, you know, just carrying on. There was a we'd heard a rumor that, uh, apple juice could give you the runs, uh-huh. So, uh, me and another buddy tested that theory. So we went into the 24-hour dining facility and grabbed all the cans of apple juice we could. It is true, is it?
Speaker 2:It is a fact, you will spend some time in a Port-au-Prince and liquid will come out of your butt.
Speaker 1:You know what else is true that idle hands are the devil's tools. Yes, yes. We did have a lot of downtime for that. I think those two things went together there, yep.
Speaker 2:So that was kind of cool. And we actually got to go to Budapest for a day.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of cool.
Speaker 2:We got to see I don't know. There was some sort of a symphony performance there. Well, we were only there for a day and we had to be in uniform, but it was still kind of cool to see you know, a different deployment, but still yeah important, you know right, that was cool.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I think this is this. Is you make a good point? I don't even know if you mean to make it here, but you know, I talked to a lot of veterans who may not have been on a deployment or may not have seen combat or whatever. I mean you've kind of seen both sides of it. But everyone in the military provides a service, and even the folks who don't are there so that the people that do deploy can do it successfully and have what they need. And so I don't think there needs to be this. I'm not a veteran because I didn't deploy. You know, everyone provides a function, everyone does something to help that effort. Your first deployment you were there, guard duty, convoy, security, doing all of those things. Your second deployment, you're providing music, but that provided something for people, and so I think it's an important distinction. I always ask people, not necessarily, are you a veteran? But I ask did you serve? Because some people have that stigma about veteran, whereas if you served, you served.
Speaker 2:True, I mean you need to have combat. You need to have combat service and support. Yeah, you know your combat service and support. To this day, I probably remember just about everything from basic training so I can deploy weapon systems that I was trained on. From basic training so I can deploy weapon systems that I was trained on. You know, I can pretty much disassemble and reassemble an M16. To this day, probably blindfold.
Speaker 1:Yes, as well as an M9 and probably a .45 as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and I shot expert, yeah, most of my career. But, yeah, everybody has their mission to do.
Speaker 1:Right, and I really don't believe one mission is more important than another. They're just different missions, right, and so I don't know if you meant to make that point, but you kind of made it as we were talking. That's interesting. I just wanted to kind of highlight that Cool. So yeah, so how long was this deployment?
Speaker 2:This deployment. It's kind of an open-ended deployment, so it got a little, a little concerning. Um, I want to say it was like maybe three or four months, okay Wasn't too long. The problem was it was open-ended, so there was the frustration of when are we going home? There was no end date, right, and they kept extending us and kept extending us. But, yeah, that lasted a few months. We came back and I ended up ultimately going back to Fort Hood, texas, okay, with the 1st Cavalry Division, and that was my last active duty unit.
Speaker 1:How long?
Speaker 2:were you with the 1st Cav? I was with the 1st Cav, probably about two years, two or three years. Okay, I actually took a special separation bonus. President Clinton was the president at the time and they were doing a reduction in force, which usually happens in certain cycles. Usually it's a democratic cycle.
Speaker 1:This is the mid-90s, right Mid-90s. I did the same thing. I was in the Navy. Yeah, I did the same thing.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually on recruiting duty in the Navy, oh wow. And yeah, the force reduction happened and I was able to get out like I don't know, six, eight months early. Yeah, that's what it was, and I got to pick.
Speaker 2:Oh, what date do you want to get out? So I just picked my ETS date and they gave me money for getting out. I had the right rank, I had the right MOS, I had the right years of service. Like I was going to get out and go to college anyway because I was an E6 at that point staff sergeant and my career management field the Army Band is educationally. It's very high top-heavy on education. You've got a lot of people that are joining at the beginning of their service with already having a college degree, which makes promotion bottleneck at right around E7. You really need to have a bachelor's degree to progress to a certain first class.
Speaker 1:So this was a perfect storm for you to get to the point it was and yeah, I'm going to get out. Anyway, I'll take your money.
Speaker 2:I'm going to get. I'll take your money, I'll go to college. Yeah, I did have the distinction of being the first cavalry division's drum major. Oh, so, uh, I don't know of any other unit that can get so decked out. Uh, so, the first cavalry division, uh, my uniform as the drum major I had a stetson, I had white leather gauntlets that went halfway up my arm, an enlisted person's sword and spurs and a little sash called a baldric that would go across your chest. So it was pretty impressive looking Well, yeah, yeah. And then just about every week we had some sort of a ceremony on the parade field and you had the 1st Cavalry Division concrete patch right there, the Norman Shield on the parade field, and it was a great show. We would do the pass and review and then line back up and set up on the side, and then Gary Owen was one of the big marches for the 1st Cavalry Division or any cavalry unit.
Speaker 1:I served with the Gary Owen battalion. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a march called Gary Owen.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think that's where they got it from. Yes, yeah, the 2-7. Yep.
Speaker 2:Cav. And so at the end of the passenger view, and so at the end of the passenger view, they had soldiers in period uniforms, like the Western uniforms, with the light blue shirts and the dark blue pants with the yellow stripes on horses, Stetsons, winchester rifles, and then they would fire off follies of artillery. And then they would charge through that smoke and we would be playing Gary Owen and they're rattling their sabers and they're firing their Winchesters. And in the back trailing was a chuck wagon with a dog that was just barking his head off and just yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip. Oh my God, this is like a circus. It was every week and everybody ended up that was on the parade, you know, or in the stands on the parade field. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was fun. That would be so cool to see. Yeah, so you went out with a bang.
Speaker 2:I did yeah, I was a division drum major for 1st Cavalry. It was the operations in COIC for a band that you know we would fly up to Fort Carson, Colorado, quite often because they had a brigade. Fourth Brigade was up there so we'd go up and do support for them. So yeah, it was fun. We'd go around and do parades and concerts all over Central Texas, Wow so.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:Easy drive down to Austin. Yeah, so it was a good location. Yeah, yeah, it was fun.
Speaker 1:So you do this and then you get out.
Speaker 2:Well, I took that special separation bonus Right which had a requirement to serve either in the National Guard or the Reserves. Okay, so as a condition of that bonus, yeah, you enlist. So I enlisted into the Louisiana Army National Guard and I was in the National Guard band there in Bossier City and I went to Louisiana State University, their Shreveport campus, so did that for a little while.
Speaker 2:I went to school full time, picked up a server job at Applebee's, yeah. And then the manager was like, thought I was impressive, got a job as a bartender. So I bartended for a while and they're like hey, have you ever thought about management? I'm like well, I'm actually going to college for hotel and restaurant management, so I guess I could just skip college if you're just going to offer me management now. So I took a job as I managed Applebee's in Shreveport and then I had there was a problem store up in Fort Smith, arkansas, so they transferred me up to Fort Smith, arkansas to fix problems there. And then I realized that the number of hours that I worked based off of the pay I was getting wasn't really a good match for me.
Speaker 2:I had just hired a brand-new fry cook. He was still in high school, it was a summer job and I'm showing him his very, very first paycheck and how to read it and what the taxes are and what social security is and why these things are coming out of your check. And that little sucker on his first paycheck made more per hour than I did. That's an eye opener. Huh Yup Cause I'm working 70, 80 hours a week. Yeah, that was a tough life and I'm like writing's on the wall. This restaurant management is not where it's at, Not for me. So I decided to go to college full-time Along. That way I met my second wife and she was from Michigan.
Speaker 2:Okay so that brought me up to the UP.
Speaker 1:So did you transfer from the Louisiana Guard to the Michigan Guard at that point?
Speaker 2:I did an interstate transfer from Louisiana to Michigan, okay, so I spent some time in the UP. Hold on, yeah.
Speaker 1:For anyone listening that has not been to Michigan or know about Michigan, the UP is the Upper Peninsula, which many people think is just an extension of Wisconsin, but it is part of Michigan, so we have the Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula. I just wanted to make that distinction for anyone who's like what in the hell is a UP?
Speaker 2:And not ever being from Michigan or not even from that part of the country, because being raised in the South, I don't know, didn't know the geography.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just assumed Michigan was just one big city. Boy, that was your mistake. Like Detroit, like just most of Michigan is just Detroit. Yeah, you know. And Cadillac man, they named a car after it that's got to be Metropolis. And Cadillac man, they named a car after it, that's got to be Metropolis, oh right. Just like what. So, yeah, I go up to the Upper Peninsula where I meet my very first snowblower.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Right. So I get to do that for the first time and like taking snow off of a roof, like with this little big rod thing that you shove up there and basically you cut snow and all that Pretty exciting stuff.
Speaker 1:That's exciting stuff if you've never seen it or done it before were you in eskanaba then, or what part of the up were you?
Speaker 2:uh. So I was in a small town called gould city, okay, that was with my uh, my wife at the time. That was her father. So we lived with him for a few months until I could get established in a college, okay. And so that eventually brought me back down to Grand Rapids where the band was. I didn't know geographically how all that worked. I knew it was one week and a month. I'm like I'm just going to go to Northern because it got accepted at Northern Marquette, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'll just drive down to Grand Rapids one week, in a month it's not that big of a deal, right. And then I get down there for my first drill and it's right, before they go on annual training. I'm like, okay, I'll come down for annual training. We went to Alaska that summer so that was fun. And then the unit readiness NCO is like how are gonna, how are you gonna do this? Like it's just once a month. He's like, no, we rehearse every tuesday. I mean what?
Speaker 2:the recruiter never told me that should have read that fine print. What he didn't, man, you didn't tell me that. So, not knowing at the time, I could just switch mos yeah in the guard and just go to the local engineer company. Right, I had the mindset that this is my MOS, this is my unit. So I actually moved to Grand Rapids where the band was and went to college at Davenport, got my bachelor's degree at Davenport.
Speaker 1:So how did wife number two feel about moving to Grand Rapids?
Speaker 2:She was okay with it. Yeah, that's what we had to do, and that's where I do have two kids from her. Okay, rick and Kyan. Rick's my oldest, so they were both born in Grand Rapids, oh okay, yeah, nice, and you have a daughter then too, mm-hmm. Kyan is my daughter, okay.
Speaker 1:You have a daughter.
Speaker 2:Then too, mm-hmm, kyanne is my daughter. Okay, she's my youngest. Currently I'm in a blended family, so I'm married to my last wife, my third and final.
Speaker 1:Third time's a charm. Right, I know it, rick. As a fact it is, as a fact, good, good, that's good to hear.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, michelle, and then she has two boys, brad and Jason, and so between us we have a blended family of four. They are all at some point one year apart from each other. So at one point we were newly married or maybe even still dating.
Speaker 1:We had a freshman sophomore junior and senior in high school. Oh man, that's work. Yeah, yeah don't. Oh man that's work yeah. Yeah, don't let anybody kid you.
Speaker 2:That's work.
Speaker 1:So what year is this? Now that you're in Grand Rapids, 2000.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right so 9-11 hasn't happened yet 9-11 hasn't happened yet, but Y2K actually happened while we were in Grand Rapids. Oh, yeah, and we were looking out the window at midnight seeing if the lights were still going to be on and what was going to happen. So obviously that ended up without being a big deal. Where are you?
Speaker 1:working at this time? Are you working other than the Guard? So?
Speaker 2:full-time college student.
Speaker 2:So, I was blessed between the, the michigan army national guard was paying a federal tuition assistance. I was getting a michigan state tuition grant from them as well, and my gi bill and my kicker I did not have to work. I could be a full-time college student, pay my bills, um, and not have to work, which allowed me 100% time to focus on my studies, which was great because I graduated cumulus and laudi yeah, you know, not having to have to deal with a job. So that was cool. So plug for the Michigan Army National Guard, great college benefits.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you know how the system works, because I can vouch for you on this one. I went to OCS but I didn't have a degree yet, so I'd have my degree when I graduated. So I went to college. I was working full-time, but I went to college, collected the state tuition assistance the federal tuition assistance and got the OCS kicker and some other things. So, yes, you could live pretty well. I mean, you weren't going to be a king, nope, but you could take care of business.
Speaker 2:On, all of that you could do well. Yeah, you could do well.
Speaker 1:So you graduate from college.
Speaker 2:Graduate from college.
Speaker 1:What happens then?
Speaker 2:uh, I start working as a meat manager for dnw food stores. Uh-huh, which is a grocery store chain out west. Um didn't work out. Um, I think they did some. They fired me. But also I think they were looking for an excuse because around the same time it came out that they were having to make cookbacks and lay people off, and right, they're very proud that they didn't have to lay off any management, they just fired they just fired me.
Speaker 1:What a deal.
Speaker 2:But but that actually opened up. That actually became one of the best things that ever happened to me. Because, um, I was talking to you know, some of the buddies in my unit and the the recruiter for the band and she's like, have you thought about going into recruiting? I'm like no. And then I talked to the recruiter supervisor and he's like there is a great town called Montague, it's out over by Muskegon, it's on Lake, basically on Lake Michigan, it's on White Lake that opens up into Lake Michigan. I think you would love it, I think you know, and so I. I I did. I went out there, uh, took, fell in love with Montague. It was amazing. Uh, accepted a recruiting position. I had already made E7 by that time because, hey, I have my bachelor's degree, so now I'm competitive within my career management field, right. So made it to E7. It was an E7 position, moved right into it, joined what they call the Active Guard Reserve Program, which is being in the National Guard but also being on active duty. So that's your full-time job.
Speaker 2:Right job and it comes with it the same benefits that an active duty person normally would get with your pension after 20 years of service and everything else that comes with it. So I did that and ultimately stayed in the recruiting and retention battalion as a recruiter, perhaps guidance counselor, marketing department for the recruiting retention battalion until I retired, and that took me a couple of different places too. I actually ended up in Lansing for a little bit in marketing because I was a successful recruiter at the time. I actually was the rookie of the year and they were struggling. The commander actually pulled me back to the field to go back to recruiting duty. So I did that and then ended up going to Detroit to work for the Detroit MEPS as a guidance counselor, which is where when the recruiter brings you to the MEPS stands for Military Entrance Processing Station, recruiter brings you to the MEP stands for Military Entrance Processing Station. That's where you go to get your physical, take your aptitude test, call it the ASVAB, pick your job, sign your contract. I was the guy that signed your contract, so did that for a while and then they moved me to Garden City.
Speaker 2:I was requested to go to Garden City to be a special recruiter for what was called the Language and Cultural Specialist Program. The MOS was 09 Lima and the 09 Lima. This program took indigenous persons of Middle Eastern descent that spoke the language, knew the culture, understood nonverbal cues, to enlist into the Michigan Army National Guard and deploy alongside units and act as an advisor to the commander, which was an invaluable resource, because now you've got a commander in unfamiliar territory and an unfamiliar culture and society. And I remember one of the stories that was told by an online Lima, like they're hearing gunfire, right, and what do you think you want to do when you hear gunfire? Right, there's a problem, there's a situation.
Speaker 2:And the online Lima was like hold on, let me go check it out. It was a wedding. Yeah, yeah, it's typical for them to just fire off guns into the air Right as as a as a celebration. But understanding nonverbal cues, you know things like that and just the nuances of you know, not just an interpreter, not an interpreter at all, an advisor as a language and cultural specialist. So Dearborn at the time I don't know if it's still true had the largest concentration of Middle Eastern persons in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, and not just Iraqi, but I, you know, iran, afghans, people that spoke Arabic, pashto, dari Farsi, and you know each one of them brought a special skill set to whatever deployment that that unit was going to be Ended up being the number one 09 Lima recruiter in the nation.
Speaker 1:Well, I can personally thank you because we had an 09 Lima with us, did you? Yeah, and I can vouch for the value of having that person.
Speaker 2:There is a small chance, probably greater than a small chance, that I enlisted that 09 Lima, probably she was female and I don't remember.
Speaker 1:She came to us for deployment and then she disappeared after deployment, probably off doing something else. But yeah, it was a—and I remember she was from—her family had been from Morocco. Oh, okay, and that was a problem because of where we were at. She couldn't let people know that her family been from Morocco. Oh, okay, and that was a problem because of where we were at. She couldn't let people know that her family was from Morocco.
Speaker 1:But again, very aware of the situation, I don't mean to derail it, but when you started talking about that, I'm like, oh my gosh, I remember this Because we had people that were part of that program. Yeah, I think I know exactly who it is.
Speaker 2:I won't say her name, yeah. Yeah, I think I know exactly who it is. I won't say her name. Yeah, but yeah, I think I know who it is. I'm still Facebook friends with her.
Speaker 1:Are you Well?
Speaker 2:after this, you need to connect me, we'll see, okay, but yeah, one of the and I had a great team of I had and they were all Muslim.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh. But I had a guy from Morocco who was my lead guy there. I had a guy from Morocco who was my lead guy. There was a contractor from Lebanon, there was somebody from Egypt, there was somebody from I can't think a country in Africa I can't think of the country now but they were a great team and they would go in and they knew the community. I could never infiltrate that community, Right, I couldn't. But they could. They could go into the mosques. They could never infiltrate that community.
Speaker 2:Right, I couldn't, but they could. They could go into the mosques, they could talk to the sheiks, they could talk to the leaders, they could talk to the parents, because in that culture, I don't care if you're 30 years old, you don't make a move unless mom and dad tell you it's okay.
Speaker 2:So they had to get the buy-in from the parents and they had to get the buy-in from the parents and they had to get the buy-in from their local shake to enlist in the American military and go back over to Iraq or wherever and do that. So it was important. The program doesn't exist anymore, but it was very valuable when it did Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So you did all the rest of your time kind of in that recruiting realm then yeah.
Speaker 2:I retired from the AGR program as the marketing NCIC at the state headquarters in Lansing.
Speaker 1:You worked with Curtis Beeland.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Troy Weirman yeah, troy Weirman, yeah, yeah, so Troy Weirman actually recruited me into the Michigan National Guard, but there was a guy that he worked with and I cannot remember his name, but his sister and my sister were best friends. Oh, wow, there was this whole thing, but anyway, yeah, so we probably know a lot of the same people.
Speaker 2:We probably do, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:But Curtis Beeland was my lifeline back when I was deployed. If I needed something from the Michigan National Guard, he was at our battalion so he was helping us with that. Oh, that's cool. But then I worked for Consumers Energy and when he retired I called him and said dude, you need to come work with me. So he came to Consumers Energy where I got him in all kinds of trouble. That's cool, all fair, but yeah. So what year did you retire then from the Guard 2013.
Speaker 2:Okay, 2013. So you've been retired for a few years, a little bit now. I was just 23.
Speaker 1:So 12 years, A little bit now. What is this?
Speaker 2:23?. Yeah, going on. No 13, 12, 13?.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 12, 13 years, wow. So I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I had divorced, I had a you know seven to nine-year-old child living in Fallerville at the time seven and nine year old child living in Fallerville at the time. And so a friend of mine said hey, you know what you, you want to serve like. Your life has been service. Have you ever thought about becoming an EMT?
Speaker 2:So I went to LCC and went to EMT school, did my, did my training there, used, used almost the rest of my GI Bill. So got that, did some ambulance ride-alongs with Livingston County Ambulance. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to apply with you guys. When I get out and they're like, oh, we don't hire EMTs, I'm like, what are you talking about? It's like we ride medic, medic, we're all paramedics, we don't have EMTs. So I did all the prerequisites to get into paramedic school. So I did my anatomy, physiology and all the other things I needed to do that. Then went through paramedic school, literally graduated paramedic school, have the certificate. Graduated paramedic school, have the certificate. Uh, my, my wife michelle and I we were dating at the time uh decided to go to belize on vacation celebrate this milestone.
Speaker 2:When I come back, I'm going to go apply to do the you know, the whatever you have to do for your license right right, um, I get a facebook messenger call from a guy that was a recruiter that I served with, and you know, on the east side of the state, ypsilanti, and I'm like what's this guy want? So I find a spot with some Wi-Fi, yeah, and I'm like, hey, what's going on? What's going on? He's like, hey, um, I'm, um, I'm in, uh, I'm in marketing. Now I want you to come back as a, as a civilian contractor. And I'm like, wait a minute, like what's the pay? And at the time it was like 50,000. I'm like, okay, more pay than a paramedic. Nights, no, weekends, federal holidays off, no 12 hour or 24 hour shifts. I did all this for nothing. Okay, I'll come back, you're on I'm on.
Speaker 1:I came back, I had the same cubicle. I had the same phone number I had when I left oh my god, and I was only gone for like a year and a half right so I still knew everybody and I knew all of my you know, the you know outside the Guard that I would deal with, like the different state associations and stuff.
Speaker 2:Right, had all your connections Jumped right back into it. Right, Yep.
Speaker 1:Is it a different feeling, though, like as a civilian? 100% yeah, there's a lot less stress.
Speaker 2:It's like you don't have to deal with anything. Right, I can tell you, I never took another PT test. I never went to drill like. Oh, you got drilled this weekend. Okay, see you Monday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know rubbing in a little bit.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, it's, it's awesome and you're getting a pension, I mean. So I was drawing my pension at that point.
Speaker 1:That was just extra money. So, that was nice, and how long did you do that?
Speaker 2:I did that from 2014. Eventually I switched over from a contractor to a Department of the Army civilian but basically stayed doing the same thing until about October of 23.
Speaker 1:What year, is it? We're in 25 now, october 23. So about a year and a half ago, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's about right. And then I was offered this position. So I'm currently the executive director for Delta Retirement Center in Lansing, so still serving. I mean what?
Speaker 1:you do here is service to elderly people? Yeah, absolutely, and it's still all about service.
Speaker 2:It's the passion and compassion. It's just, you know it's not veterans, you know it's a different clientele, but it's still service to country. But it's service to people who have lived a full life and have done some amazing things and back in their day were probably badasses, right. They just need a little help with their activities of daily living, right, and I'm happy to respectfully help with that. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:I want to ask another question. It has nothing to do with that, but how did you meet Michelle?
Speaker 2:Plentyoffishcom. Okay, yeah, there you go folks. Yeah, there's your plug. The internet works out. I can tell you from my perspective of the website not a lot of issues If you're a female on that site there's a lot of sharks, yeah. So, yeah, met it and I was chosen because I had proper grammar, I could spell most things correctly and I guess, and my military service yeah. So she picked those things out. She's like I'll give this guy a try and here you are.
Speaker 1:And here I am, here I am.
Speaker 2:That's incredible Again you know, being fired is a terrible thing, being divorced is a terrible thing, but sometimes it all works out for the better Right. So I am so grateful to have met Michelle, and our lives are together and we are both better people and both much happier, for you know all the things that we've gone through in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everything you do brings you to the point you're at right now. That's true, right, good or bad, good or bad. I think Jocko Willink always says when things go bad, he says good, what can I learn from this? Good, how can I do this differently next time? And so it sounds like that's you know, even in adversity there. And so it sounds like that's you know, even in adversity, there's always something to be gained from it. So is there anything that we haven't covered, that you wanted to talk about.
Speaker 2:Let me go through my notes here. Okay.
Speaker 1:Hmm.
Speaker 2:Rinkford, Wiesbaden, Fort Lee Going backwards. No, I think that covers it Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. So we'll wrap up and I'll edit out that little portion right there, just so you know. Okay, all right.
Speaker 1:So we'll wrap up but before edit out that little portion right there, just so you know. Okay, all right, so we'll wrap up, but before we finish our conversation today, I always ask everyone the same question at the end, and that is when someone's listening to your story years from now, when neither one of us are here, what would you like them to take away from your life? What message would you like to leave people with?
Speaker 2:you like them to take away from your life. What message would you like to leave people with? I want to think back to what somebody a hundred years ago would have said to me. Technology will change, points of view will change. What's popular, what's considered socially acceptable, will change, um, but I think people, core values I don't think that's changed in 100 years. I don't think that's probably changed in 300 years. I would say living your best life and thinking of others. I mean, you can't go wrong with that. Yeah, just don't be selfish.
Speaker 2:All right Be a nice person.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thanks for taking time out of your busy day to sit here and talk with me today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you.
