Once I turned 18, I began looking into joining the military. After weighing out many options, I decided to become a Chaplain’s Assistant in the Army. I went to the Army recruiter to go through all the paperwork, got a GED and was ready to fully enlist. To my disappointment, however, I was soon after informed that I lacked the necessary high school typing courses to become a Chaplain’s Assistant.

Later, I made the decision to become a Cavalry Scout in the Army. I knew that this was a stealth oriented combat arms position, and that if I were to ever enter combat it would be highly dangerous, but I was unaware that the ‘Cav Scouts’ had the single hardest, and most in depth non-SOCOM training in the Army. I enlisted and left for training at Fort Knox, Kentucky three months after my 18th birthday.

The first official day of training, I realized how hard it would be. We spent over four hours that night doing “corrective training,” brutal exercises designed to cause muscle failure, and then go even further. Corrective training was regularly given with the impression that it was a punishment for one mistake or another. In reality, it was preordained, and would be given regardless- they just needed to find any little mistake made to pawn it off on in order to initiate it.

Over the next three months in a hell I asked to be put in, I learned countless details about the Army and quite a few actually useful things. I learned combat life saving techniques like how to treat a gunshot wound to the chest and more basic things like CPR, and how to administer an IV. I learned how to use camouflage to conceal an attack or fortify a position. I learned how to operate communication radios, and the many protocols and codes associated with using them.

The most important things I learned however, were intestinal fortitude, and how to shoot a gun. Two and a half months into Cav Scout training, I was able to regularly do exercises to the point of muscle failure, and then get back up and force my muscles to fail again and again for hours on end. Determination was a passing thought, and mental barriers simply didn’t exist.

In just three months I learned to fire, as well as disassemble and assemble many types of weapons, including my M16A4, the vaguely similar M4A2, as well as drastically different weapons such as the M-240B, and M-249SAW. I even learned the ins and outs of the famed M-2 .50 Caliber mounted machine-gun and the infamous Klashnikov, the Russian AK-47. Firing these weapons became second nature after the repeated sessions with each. A dot on the horizon representing a man’s body at 300 yards was only somewhat of a challenge. Even without the aid of a scope targets fell beneath precision fire.