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Well, This Is Another Fine Mess I've Gotten Myself Into

I started back to school in the Summer of 1990. Towards the end of the second session, Saddam Hussein got the crazy idea that Kuwait was the nineteenth province of Iraq and transferred part of his army there! My unit was a reserve general hospital that was supposed to take over the hospital at Ft. Bragg, so we figured that the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel would be activated to replace the active duty solders who had been deployed to Saudi Arabia. The activation orders came down in the last week of August 1990. I had been a warehouseman on active duty, but retrained as a pay clerk when I went to the Reserves. I came home from a family reunion and found a message on the answering machine. It was from my supervisor wanting me to come down and help process the medical folks who had been activated. I remember saying, "I can't do that; I've got school." No sooner had I said this when the second message from my supervisor started. I had to come down; I was on the orders as well. Of the non-medical personnel in the unit, only two were activated. Some bright boy in Second Army decided that about a dozen specialties were so essential that everyone who held them as primary, secondary, or even additional would be activated. When I got retrained, my active duty specialty became my secondary, and that's why I got activated four days into my first full semester in five years! Do you think I saw the inside of a warehouse during the nine months I was at Ft. Bragg? NOOOOOOOO!! I was assigned to the hospital's Personnel Division where I typed medical leave forms and made sure everyone was being paid properly. It wasn't that bad. I got paid an obscene amount of money courtesy of the Saudis and Kuwaitis and went home every weekend. I also earned an Army Commendation Medal, a National Defense Service Medal, and an Armed Forces Reserve Medal with "M" device (for mobilization); I rather like my medals.