I have proudly served in the Michigan Army National Guard for about eighteen years now – it has filled my life with challenges, travel, interesting people and countless other rewards (and it pays a little, too). I highly recommend it!

Probably the most rewarding and memorable opportunity I’ve had in this time was at the end of 2006, when I was called to duty (canceling all my New Year’s party plans) to serve on the State Funeral of President Gerald R. Ford.

We had all volunteered far in advance for this duty – numbering in the thousands. State funerals are a HUGE undertaking with the President’s wishes, and then his family’s coming first. Prior to President Ford’s Funeral, all of the recent state funerals had, by chance, occurred in states with large active duty military bases. Since Michigan doesn’t have one, it fell to the National Guard to run the show.

With so many duties to be performed, I found myself

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I had maintained a cease fire with the spiders for a couple of decades.  It was an uneasy truce, of course – it’s difficult for them to maintain the terms of the accord, which were simply: if you don’t let my wife see you, I won’t fire.

Oh, yeah: I should probably note that I prefer to combat bugs with my BB gun.  The advantage in stand-off range easily makes up for the bad PR at home.  Of course, I make every attempt to make these operations as covert as possible.

And so the truce continued.  If I’d spy an advanced scout, I might fire a warning shot with a rolled up newspaper – just as a reminder.  Oddly enough, it wasn’t the domestic spider clan that launched the epic offensive.  Even more oddly, they didn’t attack my wife – they made a full frontal assault on my main body.  And now that I think of it, that term applies literally!

I had spent a day camping

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Ok, so there I was…

There WE were…

No, I’m not Tom Cruise, but I am an Army helicopter pilot.

I was the pilot of the fifth ship of a flight of six.  The other pilot was the aircraft commander.  (There are always 2 pilots in a Huey).  My friend Tom was one of the pilots in the trail ship, which makes this as (or more) memorable for him as it is to me!

The pilots’ duties are split up in the following way: the pilot at the controls flies the aircraft, the other pilot talks on the radios and navigates.  Since each pilot has a nearly identical set of controls, it is easy and routine for the pilots to alternate these duties.

On this particular training mission, we were conducting a practice Air Assault, which means

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I love it when soldiers take the initiative to get something done without being asked… except when it results in uncoordinated, inefficient or wasted effort…

I had a couple young men in my company that I liked to refer to as Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dee.  They are both the type of soldiers you want in your command – hard working, enthusiastic and get the job done even without being told.  (Notice I didn’t include “smart” on the list… but I’d rather have a dull go-getter than a smart lump of laziness any day.)  I openly referred to them by these names – they seemed to accept it as a badge of honor (and clearly all in fun).  I never titled them as one or the other, though – I’d just wait until they were both present and ask their boss to, “find something dirty for the Tweedles to clean!”

One of them finally asked me once – while both were present – which was which.  I replied that 1) I wasn’t sure yet, 2) they probably wouldn’t want to know the answer anyway, and 3) I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know!  (I suspected they were both vying for the coveted title of Tweedle-Dumb.)

The following month I fought my way to drill in a pretty intense blizzard – about six inches of snow had fallen sometime between

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Just between you and me (I don’t want this to go public) – If you had a web-cam set up in my house, you would know that when I’m not eating or sleeping, and I’m not at my computer, I’m probably in front of my Playstation – and between 3 and 8 PM, I’m probably there with my seven-year-old son.

As it happens, we were playing a racing game called Gran Turismo and I had just won a race using my son’s favorite car, called a "Tickford."  Now, I sometimes keep a car for sentimental reasons, such as, I always wanted to have that car in real life, but for the most part – in game – I select my favorites based on how well they will compete in races.  He, on the other hand, selects his favorites based on how cool they are, i.e., "that green one has a cool orange stripe!"

The prize for this particular victory was a car we absolutely needed to compete in a model-specific race; and a promising one, if tuned correctly.  But – you guessed it: he didn’t like the car’s appearance.  After some convincing, he decided to try the car out on a test track…

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