He went to college for several months, and wasn’t really into the “going to school” thing, you know, going back to school. And he quit college, and signed up, and then he came home to me where we live here, and said, um, “Guess what I just did,” and I said “What,” and he said, “I just signed up to go into the Army.”
And I said, “You did what? There’s a war going on, Chris.” He goes, “Well I’m 18 and nobody can stop me,” and he’d signed the papers. And I said, “Well, we’re really proud of you and I commend you for that but that scares me, you know.”
But he just said he felt like it was his duty and it would give him more of, you know, like, consistency and a goal to look forward to and to—just to put him on a track in the right direction, I guess—positive direction, and grow him up, I guess you could say. And he even though about going into the FBI or anything like that when he was done, he thought about that.
He didn’t have any trouble transitioning to the Army life. He was a strong soldier. He talked about when he got back home how he couldn’t wait to get back to the nightlife, and teased his one buddy that was older than him how he liked to ride Harleys, because that’s what old men rode.
So they did a lot of joking, they said, back and forth about that kind of stuff. They nicknamed him the Goose. He smoked cigarettes, and he—even though he always had his own cigarettes—he would always go around and bum one cigarette from everybody that smoked. And somebody said “If you have your own cigarettes why are you bumming them from everybody else?” He said, “I just want to see how many I can get from everybody.”
He liked helping the people in Iraq because he wanted that to give them a chance of living free from murders and violence, and he would give out chocolate and candy to little kids over there that they would run across.