That Time the Army Mistook Me for a Mass Shooter

I was young when I joined the army. 17 to be exact. So young that my mother had to go with me to the recruiters office and give her permission for me to enter into the service of Uncle Sam. Interestingly, my recruiters name was Clark Kent. Go figure. I was enlisting more out of a sense of grief over losing my father to a heart attack earlier in the year. There was so much left unsaid between us that I thought that I could posthumously make him proud of me because, even though he was a navy man, he had wanted to join the army but couldn’t get in because of his prior navy service. As a kid, I thought that I could fulfill his ‘dream’ for him. My mother, didn’t stand in the way. But that is another story.

After my basic and individualized training I won an overseas posting in Germany. I was thrilled to be going out of the country and into a foreign land. There was so much of the world to experience and it was a far cry from the small little farming town where I was raised. I had all kinds of visions of my new life abroad, of my goals and career in the military. Though I was an accounting specialist, my goal was to enter the counter intelligence service and become a ‘cold war’ spy. Yes, this is a story that was that long ago. I was young, naive and full of impossible dreams and I was ripe for the picking for what I stumbled into in Germany.

During the flight to Germany, we made a pit stop at the military base in England for refueling. We ended up being there for awhile sitting on the tarmac because of the weather and because it was the military. I was fast asleep by then when the order came to stand at rest and ‘smoke em if you got em’. Everybody lit up a cigarette at once. I woke because I was choking in my sleep but being a soldier I pulled out my pack and lit one too. That is another indication of just how long ago we are talking about. It was the early 80’s when it was still cool to smoke and you could smoke inflight. You can’t do that now. Nowadays you will actually get arrested for smoking on a plane. Times, ‘they have a changed’.

When we finally got to my permanent station in Germany we were put into temporary quarters until we could be processed into our assigned squad. It was a couple of days before I was assigned to a permanent room and it was there that I met Anthony my new roommate. He was older than me, at that point everyone was older than me, and we became friends. I looked up to him and sometimes he seemed to talk in confusing circles that was hard for me to understand and relate too. He talked about god and jesus and sins and stuff. I had never really gone to church as a kid so the concept was kind of lost on me. He invited me to his church on base and since I kinda had a secret crush on him, I went. It was really strange. Church lasted for hours and they did a lot of singing, the preacher did a lot of shouting and parishioners cried and spoke unintelligibly when he got into the fire and brimstone segment of his oral presentation. I eyed Anthony a lot taking my cues from him on what to do and how to act and after some time, maybe a few weeks, I found myself hooked and converted. They were extreme in their beliefs but it all made sense once they explained it and it made me feel grownup and gave me purpose and the secret knowledge made me exceptional over all my peers back at the barracks because I was privy to ‘the truth’ and real ‘salvation’. They were sinners but I had gotten saved by Anthony and his lot. I was a child of a king. I hadn’t known it but I had fallen into a cult and was becoming brainwashed. Courtesy of the US Army. They allowed the ‘church’ on the base and to have services twice a week so I naturally assumed it was something that they sanctioned.

What made this church so strange was their strict code of behavior. You couldn’t drink or smoke, read the news, watch TV or movies, you had to wear long sleeve shirts and pants at all times, you couldn’t socialize with women and vice versa until you were married. No foul language, no masturbating, no looking at anyone in a lustful way. Always look at people from the neck up so as not to be tempted by their body parts. Pray loud, long and hard. Learn to speak in tongues and believe in the magic of wishful thinking. Plus, the threat of a wrathful god was hung over your head at all times and if you broke just one of these rules at anytime you were considered a ‘backslider’ and in need of intensive redemption.

Being young and inexperienced as I was, there came a point when Anthony and myself got into an argument and I said something like ‘fuck god’ or ‘to hell with god’ and he stared at me all aghast and told me that I had just committed the ultimate sin. Now through our many bible studies and thought experiments I came to understand that the ultimate sin was unforgivable and those so guilty could never get into heaven. EVER. No matter how good you were or what you said or did, you can never make up for the ‘ultimate sin’. So I was pretty sure I was doomed. I had failed and damned myself to eternal flames and fire! So of course I was distraught and having paid attention in church and bible studies I was sure that god was going to magically strike me dead at any moment. So I panicked and for the next couple of days or so I walked around with a certain dread and extreme paranoia. I couldn’t sleep or eat and in anticipation of what was to come, I started writing my goodbye letters to my family back in the states. Trying to explain the terrible wretch that I had become and how much I’d miss them.

Then, came the news that I had been chosen to leave base and travel to another military base in Germany for a couple of days to train on the gun range. I can’t quite remember what we called them back then but they were akin to heavy artillery machine guns. We transported in a cargo truck and a military van. So I wrote a goodbye letter to my best and only friend in the whole world, Anthony, with instructions on how to distribute my letters after I was gone. I handed him his just before we left the base. I got the first shift in the back of the truck with the backpacks and equipment. I spent my whole time cowering in the back corner, with the roar of the engine covering the sounds of my doomed sobbing, absolutely certain that ‘god’ was going to end me in a mangled metal wreckage at any moment.

At some point along the way when we stopped for one thing or the other, I was rotated from the back of the truck to the warmth of the van. But by then I was just a mess of paranoia and became the worst backseat driver ever. I was hyper vigilant on the skills of the driver and kept giving him instructions on how to drive safely and let him know when he was deviating from driving a straight line. Any slight turn of the wheels on the roadway was the beginning of the end, I was sure, so I warned him whenever he strayed. Needless to say, all the others in the van couldn’t stand me and I probably drove them mad. When we reached our destination, I am sure they were ecstatically relieved but of course I would have taken no notice of it. My head and mind were filled with other more pressing things. The next day came and everyone else went to the range but me. I was so relieved because you can imagine the places where my head went about all the different ways that I could possibly die out there on the range. But it was just me and the driver running around all day doing errands. Well, he did. I was just the tagalong who sat in the van most of the time.

At some point towards the end of the day I began to wonder why I was a tagalong since I wasn’t doing anything but sitting in the van wherever we went? So I coaxed it out of him and he told me that they had found a suicide note back at the barracks and they didn’t want me out on the range because they thought I might end up shooting everybody and then turning the guns on myself.

I was absolutely speechless! I had no words! HOW, could they think me capable of something so diabolical and selfish and…. SUICIDE?!? I was terrified of dying! For days now! Where in the world did they ever get the idea that I would write a suicide no….. OMYGOD! I felt misunderstood and betrayed and totally at a loss. How could I possibly explain the real reasoning to anyone, but a fellow church member, that could or would be understood?? After all, the world could not comprehend the things of god and they were all godless.

The Army considered me a potential mass shooter.

Years after the fact, I can now understand why they would be concerned and I can totally relate. I would have made the same decisions as my commanders did and anybody else that had received such a letter from such a person. I had become mentally unstable and I could have probably justified any action I took, in my mind. I can appreciate that sometimes you cannot see things clearly because of lack of experience, education and absence of practical thought. I have learned that it is always best to have a level mind, emotions and sane people to bounce things off of before you act and to always be sure that you can explain yourself to others before solidifying any idea in your mind.

The short end of this story is that I did have to find a new career outside of the Army.