Day Fifty-two - Lisbon

And, by military career, let's just make it quite clear that it was just for a period of eighteen months. When I enlisted, I was told that initially I'd start in an eighteen month contract, then after that it could be extended for a period of almost nine years, after which my time would be up. And to be honest, eighteen months seemed such an eternity at the time; in truth, I half-regretted it as soon as my basic training began, and though the thought of quitting plagued my mind for a few weeks, I stuck it out. Well, as I've mentioned before, my military career got off to a wrong start, well, before it even it began. You see, when I first volunteered and I went through those psychometry tests, I was initially slated to become a driver for the Air Force, you know, transporting personnel from one place to the other, that sort of thing. But just before I got the all clear, I was told that due to my age - I was still only seventeen at the time, and still half a year away from turning eighteen -  that I wouldn't be able to be incorporated straight away, I'd have to wait until I was close enough to eighteen in order to be eligible for the military driver's license. And truth be told, then - sadly just as now - I was far too impatient... and I made a blunder of a move : in order to get an earlier incorporation, I'd change my specialty, and so I joined the military police. Which, if I'm honest, was no police by any stretch of the imagination, just basically glorified security officers whose job was to sort of keep the peace, but we mostly spent our days doing very little. I didn't really complain about it then, but I immediately knew it was a faux-pas. 

Well, let's see how things went : I had like a month of basic training, which was just running around and marching a lot of the time - daily from the crack of the dawn until very late in the evening. Then I had two more months of specialty training, which, shocker, was pretty much of the same, but with probably even more running.  Cool thing about that was that I was in really good shape back then - at least for my usual standards. Then, by the end of specialty training I had the choice of where I wanted to be assigned, in terms of air force bases. I had in mind to go either far away, or very far away - that was the plan for the longest time. But then, about midway through my specialty training, something very important, and completely unforeseen would happen. I had no way of knowing yet, but sometime in May 1995 I would meet the girl who would one day gift me with a son. But all that will be told soon. Now, let's end this by saying that there's a part of me that wishes I'd stuck to the plan, and went really far away. Why? Because though it meant that likely things would never have happened the way they did for me, I think she would have been happier.