"Life's Trajectory" by Bill Donohue
– maybe
Life offers the right way, the wrong way, and the military way for doing things; not all outcomes are predictable.
Bill Donohue lives happily in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Retired as Executive Director of The Special Children’s School, his writing is fueled with a passion to engage the NC General Assembly with stories of children and adults with special needs, most having waited far too long for entitled services.
Autor’s Talk
Bill Donohue
To this day, I look back on my military experience as remarkably good fortune. When I was drafted into the army in 1966 after college graduation, however, I was terrified. College grads were being swept up nationally to lead young men into far away jungles of misguided death and destruction.
I had been a big man on my campus: fraternity guy, jock, popular campus leader. When I read the newspaper, it often went no further than the sports section. But, I had an offer to attend graduate school and pursue a career that would largely create more of my kind, and the conscription as it was called, derailed me completely.
The reality is that I was still a small town, naieve, white kid, four years after attending an otherwise progressive university. I was no more prepared for the military or a real career than the man in the moon. I had not traveled, shared any cultural awareness, or grown at the intended pace of my peers.
Three days after arriving at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for Basic Training, I had still failed to reach my family to tell them where I would be for the next 10 weeks. My father had been diagnosed with ALS and I already missed my small town Iowa securities. When finally reaching my mom on a Fort pay phone, minutes before curfew with 15 soldiers waiting in line behind me, I broke into uncontrollable tears, a sobbing embarrassment vividly seared in my heart forever.
As Paul Harvey might have said, “Now, for the rest of the story….”
