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Who we are as we travel through time changes with the day, the week, the month and year and decade. We are worn down by the trials of this life, and built up by our own character's response the them.
So, pick a date, mine is 1968, and go decade by decade and share the person you were on those dates.
In '68 I wanted to get in the war that was tearing my simple, beloved country apart. I was only 10 however and Thank you God could not act on my youthful impulse to try to set things right. My family was torn asunder, my American-German mother had been very badly treated by my Swiss-German father, as had we all. This war and the images that came over the tube were the last straw. I wanted to get in and set things right, but I was still a child.
In 1978 I was leaving the army. The insanity I saw there showed me that the interests of the high and mighty and those of the common man did not converge. I was a border guard in West Germany on the East German and Czechoslovak borders which we patrolled in our tanks and tracks. I had been assigned without discussion to mortar training and then to a mortar track. Thing was, it was all about trajectories, ranges, wind speed, and other stuff as well. It was all about math and I drove myself nuts to learn it, as alien to me as something from Mars. Who the hell made these decisions? Then one cold winter night we were all rolled out of our bunks by the alarm. It was 2, 3AM, don't remember. We hit the floor running as our training taught us. We trained endlessly, we were border guards and wore the black berets. So we ran out to the track park like the old films of RAF guys heading for their planes during the blitz. We fired up our tracks which we kept perpetually warm, and headed to pick up ammo. There we waited as one by one tanks and tracks ammoed up. We were sitting targets and I just sat there in the back of a mortar track, in a well lit ammo dump, waiting to die. One missile, one artillery round, and we were done, sitting among all that ammo. Once we finally were done with that cluster**** we headed for the border.
Well they told us the next day that an important Russian scientist had tried to defect but was caught. If he had made it we were responding in order to counter any Russian effort to come across the border to get him back. I didn't care. I'd been hung out to die with the rest of the guys. So the first time it was my chance to reup I said NO. Then I told them why, but nothing ever changed my friends told me.
In 1988 I was moving out of Jersey to Oregon, or had already moved. Anyway it was around '88. I drove my truck through Yellowstone during the fire they refused to put out if that helps with the date, and with my two dogs, Rommel and Daisy. I didn't know what Oregon was like but I knew Jersey wasn't it.
In '98 I was getting ready for an adventure, to go to Asia. I'd started a bookstore and met lots of women but I was on a different page from all of them. I had high hopes for Asia. The next year I was to travel, I met my wife Dolores, and started a new life.
In 2008 I was building. Dolores and I had traveled back and forth from working in Oregon to building in the Philippines. We were finished with the Jagna house and were getting ready to start fixing up one of the lots we had bought in '07. I was tired of roasting in Jagna and was ready to try something different. Iirc we built our first seawall on the property we now live on full time.
So, pick a date, mine is 1968, and go decade by decade and share the person you were on those dates.
In '68 I wanted to get in the war that was tearing my simple, beloved country apart. I was only 10 however and Thank you God could not act on my youthful impulse to try to set things right. My family was torn asunder, my American-German mother had been very badly treated by my Swiss-German father, as had we all. This war and the images that came over the tube were the last straw. I wanted to get in and set things right, but I was still a child.
In 1978 I was leaving the army. The insanity I saw there showed me that the interests of the high and mighty and those of the common man did not converge. I was a border guard in West Germany on the East German and Czechoslovak borders which we patrolled in our tanks and tracks. I had been assigned without discussion to mortar training and then to a mortar track. Thing was, it was all about trajectories, ranges, wind speed, and other stuff as well. It was all about math and I drove myself nuts to learn it, as alien to me as something from Mars. Who the hell made these decisions? Then one cold winter night we were all rolled out of our bunks by the alarm. It was 2, 3AM, don't remember. We hit the floor running as our training taught us. We trained endlessly, we were border guards and wore the black berets. So we ran out to the track park like the old films of RAF guys heading for their planes during the blitz. We fired up our tracks which we kept perpetually warm, and headed to pick up ammo. There we waited as one by one tanks and tracks ammoed up. We were sitting targets and I just sat there in the back of a mortar track, in a well lit ammo dump, waiting to die. One missile, one artillery round, and we were done, sitting among all that ammo. Once we finally were done with that cluster**** we headed for the border.
Well they told us the next day that an important Russian scientist had tried to defect but was caught. If he had made it we were responding in order to counter any Russian effort to come across the border to get him back. I didn't care. I'd been hung out to die with the rest of the guys. So the first time it was my chance to reup I said NO. Then I told them why, but nothing ever changed my friends told me.
In 1988 I was moving out of Jersey to Oregon, or had already moved. Anyway it was around '88. I drove my truck through Yellowstone during the fire they refused to put out if that helps with the date, and with my two dogs, Rommel and Daisy. I didn't know what Oregon was like but I knew Jersey wasn't it.
In '98 I was getting ready for an adventure, to go to Asia. I'd started a bookstore and met lots of women but I was on a different page from all of them. I had high hopes for Asia. The next year I was to travel, I met my wife Dolores, and started a new life.
In 2008 I was building. Dolores and I had traveled back and forth from working in Oregon to building in the Philippines. We were finished with the Jagna house and were getting ready to start fixing up one of the lots we had bought in '07. I was tired of roasting in Jagna and was ready to try something different. Iirc we built our first seawall on the property we now live on full time.
Why not give a decade by decade? If you haven't gotten very many decades Pax, you can fill them in later. 
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