Those decisions can and sometimes do change our lives forever.
I was finishing my senior year of high school and working in a service station. My job was fixing flat tires, oil changes and pumping gas. One afternoon a recruiter, a navy chief, came into the station and he asked me if I liked what I was doing? I said it was okay. He then said if I enlisted in the navy, I could have a job where my hands would be clean and I could work in electronics. That rang my bell because I wanted to work on radios more than anything else. I went to his office to talk some more and he gave me some brochures to look at. I noted that I could work 20 years in the navy and retire with a pension for life. This was sounding better all the time.
I talked to my mother, expounding the virtues of being in the navy. I was ready to sign up. Being 17 years old one of my parents would have to sign a paper stating it was okay for me to enlist on a minority contract. That meant that I would be eligible for discharge the day before I was 21. That seemed like a good deal in case I didn’t like being in the navy. I could have my radio training and use it in civilian life. Neither mom or dad would sign for me to enlist. I was not happy about that! Their decision changed my life forever. What I did not know at that time was the fact that the navy would not have invested two years training me for less than one year of work in aviation electronics. I would not have been happy about that at all. I would have left the navy with no viable skills to support myself for the rest of my life. It would have been a wasted three years in my life.
I had just met Joyce two weeks before I would have signed up to enlist in the navy. We were having a rocky start. She was not even sure that she would go out on another date with me. My enlisting at that time would have ended our lives together. This leads me to part two of decisions…
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