Chapter 2: Those Devils in Baggy Pants

How had I come to this point? How had I fallen in love with a wanton woman who turned out to have the same degree of loyalty as a hungry shark? Just how had my sweet Jenny turned into a cold-blooded assassin that killed my love with the same compunction she would have swatted a fly.

Well, it was easy and natural, actually. After graduating from Cherry Creek High School in the southeast suburbs of Denver, I enrolled at Denver University. It was a good school and close to home. I was doing great in all my classes—I was probably carrying around a 3.8 GPA—when I got a terminal case of the stupids.

My girlfriend from high school—Mary Lou Fossett—had decided on Fort Lewis College in Durango. We were calling each other regularly with maybe an exchange of letters once a month or so. I tried to call her to see what her plans for Thanksgiving were. I called her a number of times over three days with no luck. I did leave a couple of messages but there was for sure no call back from her.

I had a term paper for English that I'd been putting off. I had to write a paper about a well-known author. I'd picked Rudyard Kipling thinking it would be easy. Well, he turned out to be an incredibly complex person and writer. All of a sudden I had tons of work to do and damn little time to do it in. So I had to decide: finish the paper or go find out why my one true love wasn't answering the phone.

It turned out I made the wrong decision on so many levels it wasn't funny. I drove down to Durango and over to the college. I went to her dorm room—I knew where it was since I'd driven her to the school and helped her move in—but she wasn't there. Her roommate told me to try the Student Union building. Sure enough, she was sitting on the front steps kissing a guy like there was no tomorrow. I watched unobserved for a few minutes and even a dummy like me could see it was a serious kiss.

Finally she came up for air and saw me standing there looking like all kinds of lost. She had the grace to blush and the balls to introduce me to the guy.

"Jack, this is Joey Green. He's my fiancé ... we're getting married in June."

Well, hell! What do you say to that? I mumbled something that even I had no clue what it was and slipped away. I wasn't sure what my feelings were. It was a battle between being numb, feeling godawful stupid, and wondering how I had wound up in Alice's wonderland.

It turned out that my prune of an English teacher was the original hard case and she flunked me without even letting me explain or giving me a second chance. Later I realized that I should have just taken the hit with one failing grade and worked on the rest of my classes. But I wasn't thinking too clearly and I dropped completely out of school and joined the Army.

When I went to my dad and asked to borrow some money to get me through basic training I found out that this nice pleasant man I had always admired for his gentle nature could get highly pissed off. And he did: at me! I guess he figured if I was going in the Army he'd best enhance my vocabulary. Damn—and I thought I knew everything.

I'd always had this dream of being a Civil Engineer. I saw myself building bridges in Perú, airports in Brazil and highways in Spain. When I enlisted I signed up for Army Engineering training at Fort Leonard Wood. I should have been forewarned on the bus ride to the base when one of the guys in the know told me they called it, "Little Korea." That was because it was always either blistering hot or impossibly cold and windy.

I did okay during basic training. I ignored the crap they threw at you "to make you a soldier." I thought it was silly but the sergeants seemed terribly serious about it. There were a few key things that if you adhered to them would make life easy. Simple things like looking sharp, paying attention (listening and being where you were supposed to be and at the right time), and being respectful. It seemed that most of the guys got in trouble when they got together as a group but as I was more or less a loner I didn't have any problems staying out of their mindless meanderings.

One area that turned out positive was the rifle range. I was raised going antelope hunting on the plains of eastern Colorado and was coached by my dad at an early age to be careful around weapons and to shoot accurately. I qualified expert on the M16 with ease and caught the eye of the NCOIC (non-commissioned officer in charge) of the range. He was a vet of 4^th Battalion 39^th Infantry's sniper program and had been on several of the Army's competition shooting programs.

SFC (Sergeant First Class) Timmons got me out of several days of KP and gave me some one-on-one training on advanced shooting techniques. He also gave me a chance to shoot at six hundred and one thousand yard targets.

In spite of my dad's misgivings I thought I'd had a pretty good plan. I decided I would stay in for the three year commitment then go to school at Colorado School of Mines in Golden (which had the added plus of being several blocks from Coors). It didn't work out that way.

It was January and February of '89 when I went to basic and it was cold with several snowstorms during our training. One day while we were scouring the company area for cigarette butts—yeah, scrape aside the snow with your boot and lean down to pick up butts and any other trash—the first sergeant called us together and asked if anyone was interested in seeing a movie about the airborne in the post theater. I didn't really know anything about the airborne but getting out of the cold sounded pretty well.