I recently happened across this article and couldn’t stop reading until I had finished it.
By Colby Buzzell
Imagine that you graduated from college, and a couple years afterward your alma mater contacts you and says, Sorry, you didn’t graduate from college. In fact, you have five weeks to drop everything that you’re doing–quit your job, get out of your lease, put all your stuff in storage, cancel your Netflix, etc.–and report back to campus so that you can redo all the schooling that you’ve already done. And not only that, here’s a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver with only one round in the chamber–spin the chamber, point it at your head, and pull the trigger. If you live, you live. If you don’t, you don’t.
The only shooting that I care to do from now on is with my camera, and I had just got done with the long and arduous process of getting my GI Bill activated and signed up for photography classes down at the city college when I received the large manila envelope in the mail with the words IMPORTANT DOCUMENT printed in all caps in the center of it.
Inside was a letter that said that I had five weeks (just enough time for all the illegal drugs in my system to get flushed out) to report to Fort Benning, Georgia–“Home of the Infantry”–for in-processing, and after that I’d be assigned to a National Guard Infantry unit. Purpose: Operation Iraqi Freedom. I love all-expenses-paid business trips, but I don’t recall enlisting in the National Guard–I enlisted in the regular Army. What I do recall is my recruiter telling me that I wouldn’t be called back up to active duty unless “World War III broke out.”
(Read the rest at http://www.esquire.com/print-this/army-recall-0908)