George Cagle

Until recently, I spent my life "chasing the money." It all started with the story of the Toms. Nope, not the shoes, at least not at the beginning. Fresh out of high school in Broken Arrow, OK a budding suburb of Tulsa, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. In retrospect, it is just my type of indecision that military recruiters prey on. Tom Cruise and his Top Gun persona did not help my cause and before I knew it, I was "haze grey and underway" on the USS Kittyhawk.

My original intent was naval aviation; just like Tom. I was missing 2 things, perfect eye sight and 120 college credits to qualify for the naval aviation and officer candidate training. Instead I signed up for "landscape and population control" and spent the next 4 years of my life scrubbing the head and painting decks and bulkheads.

A took away a couple of things from my time in the military. First, my loving wife of now more than 16 years without whom I would have never been introduced to my daughter and an all expenses trip around the world including such exotic destinations as Hong Kong, Singapore, Honolulu, Perth, Australia and Hobart, Tazmania. In exchange for those exotic destinations, I spent 4 months doing circles in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Christmas of 1996 in Bahrain was a real treat.

I was in between the Storm and the Shield and long before 911. I wonder just this moment how our actions following the first Gulf War must have spurred the fury in those hell bent on hating America and all it stood for and forcing the issue of a strike against us on our own soil. This issue like many can be subject to the what if game in perpetuity, but I don't see much use in it, so I digress and move on.

I faced a choice in 1998. Either spend 1 year away from my newly-wed wife in Yokosuka, Japan, or bring her along with my for 24 months together, but away from everything else domertic. The third and most obvious option was to remove myself from the situation entirely and let my enlistment expire along with the first installment of the story of the Toms.