From the Cop and Soldier side: Looking back over 30 plus
years of police work and army work, I realized that most of that time things
that were abnormal became normal. Or,
we could say that “normal becomes transient, depending on the time, events and
what humans can tolerate.”
I think my first exposure to abnormal was when I joined the
US Army. I mean it shouldn’t be normal
for 40 adult men to sleep in the same room.
Nor should it be normal much of the other stuff we did. I made it through basic training and A.I.T.
(Advanced Individual Training) and was shipped to West Berlin, Germany. Now nothing about that was normal. We were in the middle of communist East
Germany with 20 Soviet army divisions around us. Nothing normal there.
And police work is really nothing like you see on TV and the
movies…but it got to where I thought it was normal for people to get drunk and
beat the hell out of each other or crash their cars into light poles. Other normal events in law were ---often
arresting the same people over and over again.
I mean I could remember the dates of births for the bad guys better than
my own kids. I just got used to filling
all that info on the arrest forms.
Nothing normal there.
Then the California Army National Guard. On easy weekends we’d go “camping in the woods
and get up and eat MREs.” On rough days
we’d go to floods, fires, earthquakes and riots. It was funny how quickly I learned to adopt
to any abnormal situation.
Then the deployments to Bosnia and Iraq. I remember one time in Bosnia when I asked a
local citizen of something was “normal.”
She responded with: “What’s normal anymore?”
I mean in Bosnia they managed to kill hundreds of thousands
of their neighbors and former friends.
Blow up homes and businesses, set out over 100,000 land mines and pretty
much destroy one of the most beautiful places in the world! Nothing normal there.
Then going to Iraq. Absolutely
nothing we did at any time there was what most folks in the US would consider
normal. First of all, everywhere we
went, we had to be armed. We couldn’t
even drive anywhere with less than 3 armored vehicles , lots of troops with
guns and crew served guns on top. It was
a place where gun fire became normal…hearing of 2-6 soldiers getting killed
each day became normal. Yep, nothing
normal there.
3 comments:
Yep there is 'normal' and then there is the military version of 'normal' and never the twain shall meet...
You mean our cop world isn't normal? Damn it.
MF, it's "normal" for us, it just ain't "normal" for normal folks...but we run into so many who aren't,...wait, I just confused myself...
screw it...
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