About

Starting in August of 1988 and going until about November of 1991, the United States Army was conducting a kind of experiment with us as the test subjects. The Army has a thing then called a Cohort Unit. The idea was that everyone would join at the same time, go through basic training at the same time, report to the same unit at the same time, and then serve together all for the first three years of enlistment. The Army has long since decided that is was a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons, and they have abandoned the program. It does mean, however, that for the group of us that went through the experience, we acted as a kind of human laboratory of what happens when you take a bunch of civilian American peacetime volunteer kids, turn them all into killers, and then set them loose on the so-called enemies of the nation. But the experiment was not just about how the Cohort idea was or was not an efficient way to train soldiers. It wasn’t.

Unlike the regular United States infantry in the late 1980s who were prepared to support tanks in a potential Soviet invasion of Europe, the 7th Infantry Division (Light) had much less heavy weapons and vehicles to transport to a potential world hot spot. As part of a new Rapid Deployment Force designed to fight in low to mid-intensity combat. It was said that the entire division of just over 10,000 folks could be moved anywhere in the world by air in less than six days and required 500 airlifts instead of the usual 1,200 for a standard infantry division. The Army, in its wisdom, eventually decided that a Light Infantry Division was not the great trade-off between deployability and lethality it had once hoped. Big Army later moved on to other unit types as new wars and needs presented themselves.

As a result in this strange military experiment, and the fact that some of us might have mental health challenges as a result of our time in service was not only not discussed, but was simply never even considered. We all kind of had to find our own way through the mess of being a killer one day and a civilian the next. Over the years, not all of us survived that process for one reason or another. It is the hope of this project that apart from just telling our stories to ourselves, and chronicling as best we can a very strange time in US military history, that we can offer some guidance and support for other veterans and their caregivers about what does and does not help when dealing with post-military life. We have a team of combat veterans, lawyers, mental heath professionals and others who just might be able to shine some light on some otherwise dark subjects in a way that does more good than harm. As always, time will tell.

As the song says, “We’re on a mission from God, but we don’t know whose, and we don’t know why.” Politics and culture wars have no place here. These were real wars with real casualties that continue down to this day. In an age where everyone is terrified to speak, we got the terror trained out of us over 30 years ago. Now it’s time to get to work.