A Quote by Tim O'Brien
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
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What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later.
I didn't want to do two years in the regular army, my music career was just getting started. So, I joined the Guard where, after going to weekend meetings, you'd do six months of active duty, with three months of basic training and three months of on-the-job training.
I quit drinking in 2002, mere months before my college graduation.
I think a draft produces a better Army than the one we would have with all volunteers, because I think you get average Americans if you have a draft. And if it's an all-volunteer Army, you get people who join up because of some problem in their own lives. They don't have anything else to do, they don't have a job, or they can't find what they want to do, so they join the Army. And it doesn't produce the best Army.
When I fought in The Ultimate Fighter Finale, I had microfracture surgery, and that's usually eight month's recovery turnaround. I had to fight three months after that, and I fought three months after that. And I had to train through that with that.
I had, before I went to college, I had taken a few years off after high school and really had, I guess in those days, I had no intentions of going to college.
I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It's a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle.
The first time I went to Iraq was October 2002, when Saddam was still in power, and then, subsequently, in January of 2003, about three-and-a-half months before the U.S. invasion. So, I got to see the before and after of Iraq, basically, before and after the war.
I was fortunate to have served in leadership positions throughout my entire service in the Army. I was in my first unit for two or three months before deploying to Desert Storm. I immediate knew I was in the right place.
There were a couple of months when I was approaching graduation where I started to think of graduating from college as the afterlife. Because it's this kind of crazy thing that you always know you're going to finish school inevitably, but nobody ever really tells you what happens afterwards.
I was at Reed [College] for only a few months. My parents intended for me to stay there for all four years but I decided that college wasn't right for me. I had no idea what I wanted to do I didn't see how college was going to help me.
...we're going to be in an economic slowdown for a couple of years. So to take three months, four months, six months to spend this money the right way-we're not going to get a chance to spend a trillion dollars again! Ever. So let's do it the right way.
I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
I had this whole plan when I graduated high school: I was going to go to college, date a few guys, and then meet THE guy at the end of my freshman year, maybe at the beginning of my sophomore year. We'd be engaged by graduation and married the next year. And then, after some traveling, we'd start our family. Four kids, three years apart. I wanted to be done by the time I was 35.
September 2001 turned out to be an unusually bad time to sell stocks: By New Year's Day 2002, little more than three months after the post-9/11 low reached on Sept. 21, the S&P 500 had gained close to 20 percent.
I bought a tape recorder and some stuff and went to Europe for three months when I was 18. The puppeteering was only there as a hobby. I wanted to be a journalist. When I was 19, and after I had spent about a year in college, Jim Henson asked me to come out and try puppeteering for awhile.
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