You’re (Your) Home

When I left for basic training at 19 in the summer of 1993, I essentially never lived in my parents house again.

After basic training and Infantry training, I went straight back to college. The summer of 1994, I went to ROTC Advanced Camp at Ft. Lewis, Washington, then back to college. In the summer of 1995, I worked an internship at the Clarendon Hills Police Department to complete my degree. I did live at my parents, but my room had already been converted into something else and I lived out of the basement. Honestly, I was working 60 hour weeks, so I wasn’t home very much anyway.

Once I was commissioned about now, late July, of 1995 I went to work at the ROTC Department at Western Illinois University and then, in December, it was off to Ft. Benning. Then Ft. Riley. Then back to Benning. Then Bragg. Then Leavenworth, Korea, Bragg again. Fort Bliss, Fort Irwin, the Carlisle Barracks. Sprinkle in Afghanistan and Iraq a few times each. I moved around a lot, as most of us do.

I joked often over the years that I didn’t mind all the moving around and that it must have been my gypsy Bohemian blood that kept me from sitting still, or even needing to stay in one place. In reality, I was always home.

Home for me was never a physical place once I left mom and dad’s house. That house, which had always been my home, had been replaced by the Army as a home. It wasn’t a place, necessarily, but it was my home. No matter where I was living geographically, I always felt at home in the Army. In the back of my mind, I always knew this to be true but I never could articulate it until this past weekend.

If you are unfamiliar with the picture on this blog, it is from the movie Almost Famous. After moving around with a rock band for a number of weeks, William (a high school student) says to Penny Lane, “I have to go home!” She looks him dead in the eye and says “You ARE home.”

After three years of retirement, for the first time I was completely surrounded by Veterans of all shapes, sizes, and ages. And all of them were Paratroopers. I said it in a Facebook post…I felt very “at home”. It was all very familiar and very comfortable. I had never met 99% of these men before, but it was like I knew them all as soon as we started talking. Shared experiences, locations, and stories. Like long-lost brothers.

I said to myself, “You’re home. This is your home.”