The hardest part wasn’t the marching,
wasn’t the godawful food, although almost so,
wasn’t the heat and humidity of San Antonio.
It wasn’t the thought that I had nearly
flunked out of college under the sway,
or was it swaying away with, recreational drugs,
until I cut a deal with the Dean, my future
for producing a DD-214, an honorable discharge.
It wasn’t the skinhead “haircut”, repeated
every fourteen days lest it appear we had hair,
nor even the idea that we were prisoners
in this strange penitentiary for two years.
The hardest part was casting aside
the minds we had so carefully developed,
setting aside the tendency to think
and only then to act, or to think at all,
to become mindless drones obeying orders
issued by those we knew would never be
our intellectual equals, for warriors do best
when they maintain unit cohesion
and always reply, “Sir, yes sir” while saluting.

First published in Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 13
A publication of the Laurel Review