Me in front of a mountain
It was 1996, and I was at ROTC‘s Advanced Camp at Fort Lewis, close to Seattle, Washington.
Back then, you had over 40 days of a camp to assess you as a person who would become a future US Army officer. There were two of the advanced camps, attended between your junior and senior years in college. Your summer was devoted to doing all sorts of physical and mental challenges.
It is of note, then, that since all the people who were involved in this operation were members or employees of the US Army. And if you are unaware about how people who work government jobs…you do NOT work on federal holidays. I was in a war zone and we got the day off for July the 4th–during the war.
That’s necessary backstory for my picture in the header.1
We were, unsurprisingly, also given the day off for the 4th of July in 1996. If you think to yourself that we should just keep on training, let me remind you, nobody else was working on July the 4th. So we were given the choice of two adventure-filled…uh…adventures either watching the movie Independence Day^[With Will Smith and the best depiction of a US President, ever.] or going on a bus trip up to that gigantic hill that you could see from literally the entire western side of the state of Washington.^[And talk to the locals and they will tell you it ain‘t like a backdrop. You can literally tell which direction you are going by where Mt. Reiner is in your view.] So, naturally…mountain.
We got up to the top of that thing…well, the middle of that thing-that rock is stupid huge. We got to the middle of the mountain and we stopped at a lodge to eat and see the friggin‘ snow in July and got that ridiculous view. It was worth the trip.
Footnotes
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The hat was awesome, I wish I still had it. That is probably something I’ll try to explain it someday. ↩