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From: snowman1@mybytes.com
Date: 11 Jul 2000
Time: 22:12:41
Remote Name: 205.188.200.34
I am a 21 year old Army Reservist and ROTC cadet. I have been in the Reserves since 1996 and have been to many courses since. After basic training, I went to Airborne school, then survival/evasion school, then Sapper school (like Ranger school). In ROTC I competed in Ranger Challenge for three years and was a Commando instructor for two. I started feeling pain in my left hip in April 2000 and thought it was a normal muscle strain from running. A month later it became more serious, so I had an MRI done. I was told I had AVN and would not be able to run ever again, or stand or squat for long periods of time. For the past four years, my life in the military is nothing but running, standing, and crouching. Needless to say, chances of getting my commission in the Army is highly unlikely, but not hopeless.
The doctor said I was never supposed to enlist in the Army, and that the past four years of strain I have put on my hip is equal to about twenty years if I had never joined. I have been doomed from what I do best and AVN has surely put a kink in my future.
Oddly, I feel no depression and can only find the best of things. No more waking up at 5:30 in the morning to run my guts out. No more laying in the snow in the middle of the night waiting hours at a time. No more long briefings that bores me to death. I must say though, if I am dismissed from the Reserves and ROTC, I will miss it dearly. For whoever reads this and is feeling depressed, if a 21 year-old punk whose future career has been shot down to a blazing inferno can find some sort of optimism, surely you can.