Defining moments

 

Sometimes we don’t recognize them when they happen.  The images of paper towels casually tossed to people desperate for help brought back bad feelings for me though, and I realize that memory was a defining moment.  It was long ago, in the Army, in basic training.  We’d done a long march; maybe it was the 20 mile march.  At the end of the trek, we were not back at camp, we were at our destination from which we would be trucked back to camp.  Tired and hungry, there was food waiting for us.  Our meal consisted of individual cans of C rations on the back of a truck.  There was no orderly distribution, there were a couple soldiers tossing out cans of food from the back of the truck and watching the hungry trainees scrambling for them.  I don’t think it was a sanctioned event.  That was the first and only time we were ever subjected to that novelty; but the Army training did have a way of getting in your head like that and making a situation feel desperate, even if it was really not so bad as it seemed.  I walked away from that free-for-all for food.  At that moment I resolved that I would never scramble like that.  Not for food.  Not for safety.  Not for anything.