Greg Waite:  

Ok. Well, it's been a long ten years. For those of you that didn't know, I joined the Army before graduation and shipped to basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri July of '98. After graduation I started advanced training in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I left for Germany in Feb '99 and spent two years stationed in Darmstadt with the 66th Military Intelligence Group. It was interesting and fun, but looking back on it now I think I was still a little too young to really enjoy living overseas. I traveled a lot and have some really great memories, but there was a lot of drinking involved and it probably compares to the first couple of years of college for most. It did get me prepared for my next assignment though. One of my favorite memories of living in Germany was on an early Saturday morning run. It was really early, somewhere around 5:30am, and it was snowing. Not a blizzard, but these huge, fat, flakes and their coming straight down, thick but slow. I'm halfway through a ten mile run and I'm behind this housing complex north of the barracks. The trail runs behind them through these woods, but the light from the parking lot is still making its way through and casting all these crazy shadows all over the place. I hear this noise off to the right and all of a sudden this big buck jumps the trail right in front of me. I'm talking within fifteen feet here. Then he's followed by four does. Scared the crap out of me at the time, but what a scene. You really have to get away from things in the states to see something like that, but there I was, in the middle of a fairly large city in Germany almost getting trounced by five deer on a Saturday run. I left Germany in Feb '01 and moved to Fort Carson, Colorado. I had volunteered for an assignment with the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). I pretty much spent the first six months with the unit training; advanced weapons, close-quarters-combat, winter warfare (downhill and cross-country skiing, avalanche training, snowshoeing, snowmobiles, how to build a snow shelter and survive in sub-zero temperatures), mountain and high-altitude (too many trips up and down Pike's Peak), etc... They also sent me to Airborne school in Fort Benning, Georgia. Airborne school was a trip. Three weeks of running, push-ups, pull-ups, and throwing your body around to do something that I'm convinced a monkey can do, step out of a perfectly good airplane. I loved it though. I racked up 21 static line jumps in what adds up to less than three years time on jump status (subtracting all the time spent overseas where we couldn't jump). I've jumped from C-17's, C-130's, CH-47's, UH-6's, UH-60's, and a really crappy Cessna. I've had some bad one's, but I was never hurt bad enough where I couldn't go for a run the next day. All in all, most of that first year was pretty laid back, until September 11th, 2001. I'll never forget that day. It's like asking your parents what they were doing when Kennedy was shot. I was getting ready for an exercise while the towers were getting hit and didn't even know what was going on. Then the Pentagon got hit and all hell broke lose. I spent the next week either holed up in the basement of the headquarters building getting ready for anything, or sitting behind a 240bravo resting on the hood of a HUMVEE at the entrance to our compound. The next four or so years went by fast. The end of '01 and beginning part of '02 were spent traveling a...Expand for more