When he was on the instructor staff at the Air Command and Staff College, the Colonel served with an Army lieutenant colonel who, as a 19 year old enlisted man, had been taken captive after a Viet Cong ambush and held as a POW by the North Vietnamese. Wisely, the Staff College's commandant made it a point to have this officer speak to the assembled class each year about his experiences at the hands of the communists. At the conclusion of his presentation, he would describe his first day of freedom and his return to home and loved ones, and would sum up with the following statement: "...and I haven't had a bad day since."
The Colonel tries, sometimes unsuccessfully, to put everyday troubles, aches, and stresses into the perspective of some of the real hardships he has experienced. Admittedly, some will scoff at what the Colonel considers "hardships."
The Colonel didn't grow up in rural Mississippi during The Great Depression (like many in his family).
The Colonel wasn't in the first wave on the beaches at Iwo.
He hasn't been persecuted to the point of death for his faith.
But, then again, the Colonel does have a few painful benchmarks of his own against which to measure present difficulties. For example:
The best drink of water the Colonel ever had came from a puddle in a jeep track in Tunisia, after he scooped the green scum out of the way.
The warmest the Colonel ever felt was the ray of sunlight, after twenty hours of cold and dark, that split the uprights of two mountain peaks in Norway and touched his face.
The best shade he ever experienced was sitting with his back to a very hot M-60 tank in a scorching July California desert.
The best nap the Colonel ever took was on his feet, leaned up against a tree, twenty miles into a twenty-five mile forced march.
The second most beautiful thing the Colonel has ever seen (Miss Brenda being the first, of course) was a three foot square of muddy high ground after a night in a Panama mangrove swamp.
The Colonel's point, toward which the few of you wasting precious rod and cone time have languished in frantically bored anticipation, is that no matter the pain or unhappiness of one's momentary circumstance, it's probably not near as bad as it could be. That revelation is called perspective.
