Blue Feather. Christopher A. Dennis

Me being me, I had a smart remark for everything and often smiled at the insults passed along to us. This had a significant role in the increase of my upper body strength and the development of my washboard abs. there was a guy in my platoon who lost over 40 pounds in a 14 week period, which is how long our training took to make regular young men from every walk of life into the next generation of highly aggressive warriors itching to go to war and kill everything. The drill sergeants would shout commands, and we would respond as one with a loud and thunderous “kill”! I understood that war is not a pretty business, and that this desensitization process was to ensure that not if, but when the time came to face our enemies that we would be especially ruthless and confident in our ability and willingness to take his life without remorse. One of the side effects of this type of training was the development of a rather sadistic sense of humor that is commonly seen among the most effective warriors. For example, if someone were to get shot in the head, instead of shock or some sort of fight or flight response, an infantryman would simply say “that’s not a way to get ahead in life”, or something along those lines. This lighthearted mentality segregated the differences between a warrior and a civilian and especially the P.O.Gs. P.O.G stands for people other than grunts. (Pronounced pouge) Grunts being the infantrymen and P.O.Gs being every other job in the army. Essentially the infantryman is the expendable fighting force which is supported by every other army job to include tanks, mortars and artillery. We were brainwashed into a pride of being expendable and therefore more important than anyone else in the entire organization. The bottom line is, without the infantry, you don’t win the war. You could even go as far as to say take away the Marines and we still have an army, but take away the army all you have is overcrowded boats. That sense of humor helped compartmentalize any emotion that would later affect a warrior’s ability to be the most ruthless and unforgiving fighter on the battlefield. This type of humor was like a shield for our minds that prevented some of the stress of combat and the uncertainty of life or death from effecting the overall mission success. I bought into this mentality as if a Spartan on a distant battlefield in the past. It was ingrained into us that the greatest honor of war was to sacrifice your own life to save another. John 15:13 says greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. this may have been the only bible verse I ever heard spoken during my time in the Army. I am excluding of course, outside influences and experiences.What I eventually learned was that the sooner I accepted my own tragic and glorious death, the more effective and fearless I would be in battle. What this ultimately turned me into was a fearless time bomb itching for a fight with the enemy, bloodthirsty and ready to kill and even more willing to have an opportunity to achieve glory by boldly and recklessly seeking danger to prove my worth to both my country and my comrades. This mentality was a service to myself in a common quest to lift my own name. What I did not understand back then was who God said I was, who God says we are today! Guess what? The first thing you need to know about Jesus is illustrated in Hebrews 13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and forever! Has anyone ever told you that Jesus loves you? Did you believe it? You should! Why? Because this is what it says in Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! Why would he do that for me? Ephesians 2:8-9 explains: for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast. What I knew from childhood sunday school but did not understand was that I was loved and given a gift that I could not earn and did not deserve. The choice was mine whether to accept that kind of awesome gift. That is real love man. Why then would such a ridiculous and crazy gift be given to me, for me? Here are some reasons.

      Ephesians 2:10 says for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

      Galatians 3:26 says for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

      1st Corinthians 6:20 says for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

      2nd Timothy 1:7 says for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

      Psalm 139:14 says I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

      Jeremiah 1:5 says “before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

      It is interesting to me that most people, including myself, search their whole lives to find their purpose. Most of us rely on other people to tell us who we are and what we are not. In my case I was looking for someone or something to tell me who I was, tell me that I was important and tell me that I was needed. In the absence of my known purpose, I found that the military was completely capable of providing me with a purpose. One decorated with glory and honor. The only downside to this is that they have to transform you. They have to reprogram you. They have to make to you new in order to be able to serve that purpose effectively. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a soldier, sailor or marine and serving your country, but it would have been nice to know what I know now and how that journey would’ve affected who I became. My service was filled with honorable things and honorable actions, but the price I paid in character became an obstacle course instead of a hurdle in my road to God. Let me tell you something. It has been a very long road.

      After airborne training and a longer but shorter than expected stay with the 3rd Ranger Battalion, I soon found myself assigned to a unit of about 300 infantrymen situated on the 38th parallel demilitarized zone (DMZ) Camp Greaves, Republic of South Korea. In other words, the very front line with the unstable, hell bent communist state of North Korea, mine fields and all. I remember my first formation as a brand new paratrooper in an airborne, air assault unit. Half of the 300 men were swaying back and forth at the position of attention. Honestly, it smelled like a liquor store. It was clear to me on day one that this lifestyle was going to be about drinking, fighting and sex. We sang songs about this kind of stuff in training after all. It was ingrained into us that to be a real infantryman, or man for that matter, you had to be rough and mean, tough, able and willing to fistfight at the drop of a hat, drink heavy and try to have sex with every pretty thing that moves. This is now my world. Some of the first rumors I heard about on the flight into South Korea were about the hookers and prostitutes that were so readily available to soldiers. The prostitutes would try and make a young private to marry them so that they could get a green card into the United States and have citizenship. At which point they left the soldier and usually stayed in the prostitution line of work. I confirmed the rumors to be true when I landed and received a briefing along with a handful of condoms and told “don’t marry them because they don’t love you”. They told us not to contaminate government property and practice safe sex. they also told us it was illegal to mess with the prostitutes so they were sending a mixed message from the start. Remember now, this is the first time in my life that I am free to make my own decisions and live life the way I want to live. So the motto became train hard and party harder. It did not take very many months for me to realize that I was a weekend alcoholic. A proud one at that. Every weekend had its own new story. I would wake up in turtle ditches not knowing where I was. I would find my buddies passed out buck naked on some laundry machines in the middle of nowhere and often experimented with giant black sharpie markers and the shaving of eyebrows to those who passed out early. The whole goal was to drink more than anyone else and not pass out first. I visited the clubs where you paid the prostitutes or “drinky girls” $20 to give you a lap dance when you drink and at the same time they keep feeding you drinks so that you keep buying lap dances. I wasted a ridiculous sum of money on things that never satisfied me, not even in the moment. Now, I never did get crazy with a prostitute, just lap dances but that’s because I was too young to understand STDs and honestly I thought every prostitute had them. Frankly, I did not want HIV so I stuck to alcohol. Eventually, for one reason or another I was roomed with the chaplain’s assistant. Most of the barracks had about four to five guys in one room meant for two, so I managed to work a deal where I could room with the guy no one wanted to room with and only have one roommate and therefore more space. I was cool with that. If you didn’t know, the chaplain’s assistant is basically like an army pastor’s secretary. The funny thing about the army chaplain is that he is every denomination. He is Christian, Baptist, Catholic, Muslim and Jedi knight if you need them to be. So there I am roomed with a very goofy and uncoordinated socially awkward