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I was born in Michigan to Linda Bush; my parents weren't married at that time. some of the things I remember from Michigan are, snow, the apartments we lived in, walks in the woods behind the apartments, quicksand in the woods, a fort my mom built( some kids also started a forest fire in it, but I don't really remember that), walks along a dirt road and picking up fall leaves to press in wax paper, my Aunt Lydia who lived 2 doors down in the same apartments (she was the only one I would let take splinters out of my fingers because she was gentle when she did it), Tonka toys, my Big Wheal, my mom and aunt driving there cars on the frozen lakes and getting stuck once in a snow drift, my baby sitter I cant remember her name but I know I hated her, my mom going jogging, getting left at the gymnasium at my brothers school, my Grandma Carling's house, my parents wedding, my mom cleaning a house with a really neat electrical system you could turn things on and off from different places in the house, popping a black balloon my mom gave me with a large rock because it wasn't the one I wanted and then feeling bad about it afterwards, watching Super Woman on TV at Rick Ybarra's (Dakota's Dad) house, walking on the frozen lakes and looking at the fish and other frozen things in the ice, falling backwards and hitting my head on the ice, and a strange reoccurring dream that caused me to wake up and my head to hurt. A few years later my parents did marry and we moved to Galesburg Illinois, I was 4 at the time of the move. There was a lot of snow there during the winter too; we even tunneled into a snowdrift in our front yard once to make a snow fort. There were storms with winds strong enough to lean up against, I remember my mom even bringing me in a few times for fear of a tornado. We lived pretty much as far as I remember in the middle of nowhere. Our house was surrounded on three sides by a cow pasture; on the other side was the road and then endless cornfields. We knew to stay out of the corn fields because if you wondered into them and got lost you may not ever find your way out. My mom had a garden that she raised vegetables in, we were vegetarian mostly and my dad was not at all. My dad raised rabbits to eat and my brother and I took care of them. We also had chickens and we would go out and collect there eggs everyday. We had a problem with a chicken hawk stealing our chickens a couple of times, I think my dad shot it but I'm not sure. We had a dog named Poncho which me and my brother loved and my dad hated, and two cats, Sky Eyes and Black Velvet. Our house was a country style house, two stories with a basement and added on car garage. There was a kitchen, living room and two other smaller rooms on the bottom flour (one was always closed and we couldn't go in there, I don't remember why or know if I ever knew). The second flour had only two rooms, my parent’s bedroom to the right, and mine and my brother shared the one to the left. The basement was storage mostly and my mom did the laundry down there. It was always dark down there so I stayed out of the basement as much as I could. Our well was out in the pasture and there was a fence around it to keep the cows away. The fence did little for the snakes, rats and mice, my dad was always going out there to clean the well out and dump some more bleach in it. We also had a cistern on our back porch but we never used it for anything. My dad hung aluminum siding and I guess he did a good job at it we never seemed to be in want of anything at least not from my perspective. We had a wood stove that we heated the house with; my mom would set large pots of water on the top of stove so that we would have warm water to take a bath during the winter. Having that wood stove required wood to burn and so there were trips out into wooded land to look for standing deadwood. My mom and dad would work all day finding the right tree, cutting it down and then cutting it up, and stacking it in the back of the truck. On the way back me and my brother would ride on top of the woodpile right behind the cab so that we could see over the top of the truck. To date there is still no better way to ride in a truck. There were several lessons taught me in Illinois by my dad, but the one that I remember the best is the one he taught by example. I don't really remember what my brother and me were doing but we were out in the yard, possibly throwing stones at something. Anyways our dad came out and was telling us not to throw rocks at the house. I doubt that we had been doing that we would have known that dad would have straggled us if we did. So as he is telling us not to throw rocks at the house because it will damage the outside of the house or we might hit a window and break it, he leans down and picks up a large rock. At this point me and my brother are just watching and listening to him. my dad then arches back, aims nicely for the roof of the house, hurls the stone forward and puts his rock right through his bedroom window. Well sons that's why you don't throw rocks at the house. Yes Dad yes it is. Near the end of our time in Illinois me, my mom, and brother took a trip to Georgia to see our Grandparents. we had collected coupons off of cheerios boxes for months because cheerios had some discount for Trailways and I think we got a couple of our tickets for free using the coupons. The bus trip was long, unexciting and I think I asked my mom a thousand times how much longer it was. Sometimes the bus drivers were nice and would tell me, I'm sure they knew my mom was tired of hearing it. Shortly after we returned from that trip we packed everything up in two trucks, I don't remember if we had trailers or not, but I think that we had one, and moved to Georgia. I was 6 at the time. My first memories of Georgia are of course from
that first trip. My grandparents had a large house (average really,
smaller than a lot of the new ones they make today) on Sycamore street
in Buford. it was more or less in a rural setting, no one was too close
but we could see the neighbors house, and he had this evil turkey that
would attack little kids, I was a little kid so that was bad, but Dakota
was littler so that was even worse for him. There was a small spring in
their back yard and that was where they got there water from. When we
first got there my grandparents put us up in a camping trailer they had.
It was one my
Grandfather had built himself
and so it was named the KenMade. My
Grandmother had also made us pillows
for gifts, they had little cartoon charters on them, one was Snoopy and
that was Jediah's, Mine I cant for the life of me remember what it was,
but its still packed somewhere, I'm sure
Winder is where I spent most of my time growing
up I suppose. And it’s still what I think of as home today, mostly
because my parents, Aunts, one of my uncles and grandmother still live
there. My parents had decided to move because it was time to own a house
instead of renting and my mom had become pregnant with Sierra and the
house we were in was just too small. They had a house built in a small
neighborhood. The plot of land that they picked was the only one left on
the street and it was the only one with trees one it, the rest had
pretty much been clear cut when the houses were built. My mom and dad
decided that they wanted as many trees left in the back yard as
possible, but most were cut out of the front and side yards. It was
quite exciting when we moved into our own brand new house. There aren't
as many interesting things in suburbia as there are in rural America,
and we had become suburbanites, though as a family we still cling to our
untamed ways. The neighborhood was pretty good I suppose as far as a
neighborhoods goes, there were a few other kids to play with, mostly our
neighbors across the street. When we got a little older my dad bought us
BB guns and we shot at everything in our yard and some things that
weren't. As untamed suburbanites we began to make trips out to the
northern Georgia mountains and spend weekends there when we could. Often
the whole gang would go including grandparents, aunts, and uncles. When
we couldn't spend a weekend we would spend most of the day. We would all
go swimming or wading in the creeks and; you had to wade in up to your
knees first then let them get completely numb from the cold. the water
was so cold though that it would cause your whole body to ache until you
had gotten accustomed to it, then you could play for the rest of the day
and be fine; stub your toe if you want, you cant really feel it anyway.
Dad had done a lot of trimming and thinning of the smaller trees in our
backyard one weekend and so we had a lot of fairly straight small wooden
poles. Having also some spare tin roofing around he decided to build us
a log fort. He used the larger logs to make a frame for the fort and
then used the lighter ones and nailed them to the sides to makes walls.
He even put in windows and door. we used that fort for everything I
don't remember how long the fort lasted, several years, but it is one
the things I remember best about playing around and growing up in that
neighborhood. There were other things that I remember too, for instance
gaining a new
sister
when I was 7, and then gaining
another sister when I was 10. getting a
brand new bike for Christmas, using my bow and arrow in a neighborhood
way to small for it. Then there is Henny Penny that turned out to be
Roody Rooster
(story here). There was
also the Christmas vacation when it actually snowed a little bit, maybe
a inch or two. Dad made a toboggan; Jediah and me got on it and dad drug
it around the roads behind the truck. Dad also got us a go-cart and we
were the bane of the neighborhood I'm sure. Shortly after we got it I
had the privilege of giving rides to some of the other kids, Dakota
being the first one of them. The go-cart had a two seater bench, nothing
really for the passenger to hang onto. so I wized up the street like I
had been doing all morning by myself and make a quick left hand U turn
like I have been doing all morning, and suddenly Dakota was airborne,
and then groundborne and then rolling. Well I got in trouble and it
ruined my day. I started school in first grade at 7 and skipped
kindergarten altogether. My mom put all of us kids in private school and
worked hard to to it. Once school started as far as I can recall life
more or less stopped, I hated every day and every minute of it, it was a
huge waste of time, and taught me mostly useless crap. Of course I was
dyslexic and no one had any clue for several years, I even wrote
everything perfectly backwards in first and second grade but no one So I was out of school and needed work. My first job after high school (I had worked a summer at K-Mart, and even worked for the Winder high school while I was attending for while) was at a local used car lot and repair garage. I was the gofer guy (go fer this, go fer that), the janitor guy (sweep here, sweep there), and the car washer and cleaner guy (wash this car, wax that car, there vacuum, now shampoo the seats, etc. etc.). After working for them for 4 or 5 months they let me go, said they could no longer afford me because sales had been low (they had been) and they had been sued and lost (they had been). So I moved on, I got a job at a deli, worked there for a couple of months, it was a rather long trip to the deli I worked at and so I ended up getting another job at a deli just a few miles from home. I worked at that deli for a few more months, but just couldn't get very many hours so I started looking around. I ended up with a job even closer to home working as a machine operator for a onion and potato packager and distributor. Work was dodgy even there though, sometimes at the end of the day they would tell us not to come back the next day because they had no work. it was on one of these days sitting at home that an Army recruiter called. And so started the next stage of my life. When the recruiter called it was just about a year after I had gotten out of school I had gone nowhere and done nothing and still lived largely off my parents. When I got out of school I had told myself that I would take a break for about a year and go back take some college and do something. Truth was I had no idea about how to even start going back to school, didn't have hardly a penny to do it with, and wasn't sure if I wanted to anyway. so the recruiter called as I'm sitting at home because there was no work for me to do at work, and asked me if I would like to come into the station and see what jobs I could do in the Army. I had already taken the test that they require; the Georgia public schools administered them to all students so the Army already had my test scores. Well I got nothing better to do, heck I can barely get work. Sure Ill come in, but I'm not signing anything I say to myself, and if I do it wont be for anything longer than two years, I can put up with anything for two years. a week or so later I walk out of the recruiting station with a six year obligation, now how in the world did that happen I ask myself. But I know the answer, I've got nothing else better going on, and its past time for me to moving out of my parent’s house. I joined the Army under the delayed entry program which allowed me a few more months at home before I headed off for basic. it also allowed me to sign up for a specific type of job training, which was satellite communications, (it sounded good at the time, it still "sounds good") it sounded like a non grunt type of job, something a bit more likely to keep me off the front lines if there was a war. Ha Ha little did I know that communications are the first guys the enemy tries to kill, in school the told us that in a combat situation our life expectancy was zero minutes zero seconds, but on the up side we would never know what hit us. My enlistment started in September of 1997 and that was when I was off to basic training. Basic training was at Fort Jackson South Carolina, I was scared near to death when I got there, all the movies I had seen and stories I had herd, I thought that I was going to go through a living hell for two months. As it turned out basic training wasn't all that bad. lots of running, lots of pushups, lots of setups, and lots of other exercise, and then a ton of classes, lots of yelling, lots of guard duties, and no time for yourself. But you know that it only lasts 2 months so it’s not that bad. After basic training came my job training which was a nine month very intensive course. If I had joined the Army to stay out of stressful school classes it certainly hadn't worked. I don't think I had ever worked so hard for a class I did so bad in. of the people that graduated from my class I graduated dead last with an average of about 72%. I can’t tell you just how happy I was that I even passed, there were several others that didn't, most of them had failed out early in the class and I was near the end when I began having serious problems. I got to go home for a month during Christmas break at the end of 1997 and completed my training by September 1998. I was then given orders to Okinawa Japan. I couldn't have asked for a better assignment if I tried, for one I wouldn't have known what to ask for. And for two it was what the Army called a fixed station or strategic. that meant that I would work in a building that would be heated or cooled as needed and that being as I was working in a building I didn't have to worry about being deployed to any wars so long as I was working there. Okinawa was a great experience and a great
place to be, the people I worked with and that trained me were probably
the best there were. As a single solider I lived in the barracks and
shared a room with another person. I was allowed to own a car and leave
base whenever I wasn't on duty, life was pretty good. We worked rotating
shirts and would swap every three months. Our work shifts were eight
hours and other than that we did PT in the morning or at night depending
on which shift we worked. our operations had to run 24 hours a day 7
days a week so we didn't get all our holidays or
Fort Huachuca was a mixture of things for me,
sometimes I loved what I was doing, and other times I hated it. I
remember the first night I arrived there. I had landed at the
Phoenix airport, and from there caught a crop-duster to the local Sierra
Vista airport. I had a window seat on the plain as everyone did, and so
I spent my time looking out the window. I had never before in my life
seen a sunset so bright red; it looked as though the entire sky was a
blaze of fire. As we got closer to Sierra Vista the plain started to
descend and dropped through the clouds. Much to my surprise it was
raining under those clouds, my first thoughts were, this is Arizona;
it’s a desert it’s not supposed to rain here. But the dark rain clouds
were nicely contrasted against the red sky, and the falling rain made
streaks of light and dark that ran from the clouds to the ground like
giant leaning pillars. I decided then that if this place could be this
beautiful from time to time, then it just might not be as bad as I
thought it was going to be. Fort Huachuca and my assignment there was a
far cry from what it had been in Okinawa. Sierra Vista and Fort Huachuca
really are a desert despite the occasional rain and consistently
beautiful sunsets.
Since that time I have been working and living
on the Island of
Diego Garcia, a small horseshoe shaped island in the middle
of the Indian Ocean. It’s a pretty laid back place, the pace of
everything is always slow, sometimes it’s a thing good, sometimes not.
The Island itself is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, but is
run mostly by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. I still work in satellite
communications and it still "sounds good",only this time instead of
being in the Army I am working for t |
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Ill
come across it the next time I ruffle through all my boxes. I remember
that when we first got to Georgia it was still winter in Illinois so
Jediah and me were quite surprised when we could wear T-shirts and
shorts. My grandparents had a tree swing in their yard which we took
great advantage of. As I mentioned just before; we returned to Illinois
after that trip, and then shortly moved to Georgia permanently. With
some help from my Uncle Allen my Dad got a job as an electrician working
at the same company as my uncle. We lived near my grandparents, though
on a different road. The house was an older house when we moved in.
smallish with two bedrooms a kitchen dining room and a livening room. It
also had a large garage a short distance from the house which was great
for my dad. The house was heated with gas by a heater that was under the
flour in the central hallway though I think we also used the woodstove
we brought with us sometimes. There were plenty of woods outback to play
in. Dad helped us build a teepee from pine branches and a large black
plastic tarp. There was also this big purpley tree by one end of the
house, and during the spring these big black beetles would just love
this tree. So what me and Jediah would do is get long sticks and beat
this tree and watch these huge clouds of flying beetles rise out of it
with this loud humming sound. Jediah started going back to school,
since he had started in Illinois. Mom went to school too (I think) and
then got a job working nights at a nearby nursing home, and as an
electrician dad worked days. I ended up with what seemed like a lot of
time to myself because my brother and dad were gone all day, and my mom
slept when she was home, I don't really remember how long that lasted
though, but I remember it could be boring. Dad had bought an old green
truck, I haven't any idea the make or model, but it was old. We used to
take that truck all kinds of places that it probably shouldn't have
gone, and got stuck for it quite a few times too, but we always got out.
We also had an old station-wagon that could probably fit a dozen kids or
more, it had the front seat, the back seat, and then the rear area could
be turned into seats on both sides of the car by moving some panels
around. We stayed at this house for 2 years before we moved to Winder.
caught on, least of all me. looking back now at all those years of
school I still find them to be mostly a huge waist of time. I could have
learned the things I learned in half the time and then more on top of it
if they had simply permitted me to study the things that interested me.
After all I didn't learn any of the crap I wasn't interested in anyways.
I attended the private schools from first grade till tenth grade and was
finally so angry and fed up with the private schools for various reasons
that I refused to go back to them. So for my eleventh and twelfth years
I attended the public school in winder. those two years of school were
by far the best two years of school that I had, I wont claim that they
were wonderful, they were after all still school but there were people,
classis and other things that I did enjoy. One of the first things the
public school did was test me for learning disabilities. Well that was
something it turns out needed to be done, all I will say for now is, wow
what a difference it makes when your teachers understand where you’re
coming from. I did eventually graduate high school though, and even did
so on time. My high school councilor had told me that because I was
enrolled in Georgia's special education program I was eligible for the
state to pay my college tuition to any of the state colleges so long as
I enrolled for the semester following the summer break. I couldn't take
it though, I had just finished school and was in no hurry to get myself
right back in it, and I just couldn't see self inflicted torture as a
good thing..jpg)
weekends
but they made up for it by giving us other days off, and they made sure
we always had two consecutive days off a week. I first learned to scuba
dive while I was there. One of my sergeants asked me if I would like to
go to the class with him, he needed one more person for the instructor
to give it. I had never thought of scuba diving before, but I jumped on
the chance, and well fell in love with it. Okinawa was sort of like one
large adventure when I wasn't at work. Any day I was off; I was off the
base and finding something, or someplace new, mostly by myself, I
usually couldn't get anyone to go with me. While I was there I even had
the opportunity to take a vacation to the mainland of
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The
Huachuca Mountains rise just behind the Fort giving the skyline a
dramatic look, and also giving the opportunity to easily get away from
the fort from time to time. The longer I was there the more I came to
appreciate Arizona, and its makeup of long flat valleys and tall
mountain ranges. I can’t say I ever really came to appreciate Fort
Huachuca though. I took every opportunity I could to get away from it. I
would have rather been out in "the field" (quite literally in a field in
the middle of nowhere) doing "practice exercises" (pretending we were at
war) than back in garrison (the Fort), or for that matter nearly
anywhere else. I don't know how to best describe it, but there was just
too much stupidity, and BS, particularly from above when we were in
garrison. Between field problems (another way of saying we were in the
field pretending we were at war) and other things I ended up spending
much less time at the fort than I could have. In my first nine months
there I was in several practice exercises, some lasted one to two weeks,
and others would last a month or more. I also participated in an NTC
exercise that lasted about a month in the High Mohave Desert, which is
much more of true desert than is Arizona. Adding all the time together I
spent in the field in those first nine moths, I probably only spent
about 4 of them actually at the fort and in garrison. I worked in the
Honor Guard for three months starting in June of 2001 which was a truly
a privilege for me, and gave me the opportunity to give something back
to many of the families that had given so much before us. I participated
mostly in funeral details, but also had the privilege to participate in
a few other ceremonies including a Forth of July celebration in which we
used cannons in conjunction with a marching band for several of their
songs. I was released back to my normal unit at the beginning of
September 2001, and soon after 9-11 happened. Fort Huachuca became a
beehive of work that very morning, and by the time the sun had set that
evening we could have deployed to anywhere in the world and been fully
capable. It was November of that year though when we finally did deploy,
and
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my
company was sent to Camp Stronghold Freedom, Karshi-Kanabad Uzbekistan.
I spent nearly a year there and was flown back only a few days short of
365, the Army said you couldn't be deployed for more than 364 days or it
wasn't a deployment it was a assignment and they weren't allowed to
assign anybody there, so I had to be brought back. I actually could have
gone back earlier, as the rest of my unit left about 3 months before I
did. But as they needed three people to stay on to help our replacements
integrate in and also someone to act as a liaison for a bunch of
civilians that would be taking our places I volunteered to stay behind.
did I mention before that I didn't to much care for Fort Huachuca, well
I didn't want to go back, so that was why I volunteered to stay on. I
figured if I was going to be in the army it made more sense for me to be
deployed and doing my job, then back in garrison sweeping the motor-pool
for the 4th time this week. It was in mid November of 2002 that I
returned to the Fort. Shortly after my return I was allowed to take
leave and I took most of the month of December and part of January 03
and went home to Georgia to see my long lost family. I retuned from my
leave disappointed as ever to be back, but President Bush hadn't been
wasting any time, and wasn't going to let his Army sit around twiddling
their thumbs for long. As the Afghanistan war began to cool down he
began planning the war for .JPG)
barrow us. We were then reattached to another unit and from that point
on we were bounced around every couple of weeks to a new unit. We would
get there, get set up, settled in a little bit, and then packed up and
sent off to someone else. We quickly became the bastard children of the
86th. Everyone wanted to use us for a week or two here or there, and
then pass us onto someone else when they moved on. But no one wanted to
support us. It can be quite hard to provide satellite communications for
folks when they don't want to give you gas for your generators, and
aren't very concerned with where your food or water comes from.
Eventually we got so lost bouncing from unit to unit that we could no
longer keep track of where our parent unit was, and our parent unit had
ceased to care where we were. Yah it was interesting. We ended up
finding our way to Bagdad and supporting a tank unit. They were pretty
decent folk, even provided us with gas, food, and water regularly. They
were set up at the Martyr's Monument in Baghdad and that was the first
time in quite a while that I even know the name of the place I was
staying. We had been at the Martyr's Monument for maybe three or four
weeks when we got a call from our commander. Apparently they had managed
to find us. They hadn't really been given a choice though, the
department of the army said that my enlistment was over and they needed
to get me back to the states. That was the beginning of September 2003.
It took them about two weeks to get me back to Huachuca, and another two
weeks to get me out of the Army. During all my time in the army I had
managed to earn 92 days of leave that I hadn't been able to use. The
army had actually planned on keeping me another three months past the
end of my original enlistment, but with that much leave built up they
couldn't deny it to me, and so I just took the last three months off. I
ended up actually getting out of the army in December of 2003 instead of
my original date in September. So ended my career in the army. 
he
Navy as a civilian contractor. Not much ever really happens here on the
island, it’s too small, and there really aren't that many people. Being
located only seven degrees from the equator the seasons are pretty much
all the same and the days are always warm. The main difference in our
seasons is how much rain we get, most days it rains at least once, a dry
spell is going more than three days without rain. During our rainy
season it will rain everyday nearly all day and an umbrella becomes the
casual style for anyone who wishes to be outside for more than five
minutes at a time. While there isn't a terrible lot to do on the island
itself, being over here has provided me with the opportunity so see some
other countries. I've managed to spend a few days in