by Bob Lonsberry

He made his debut the other night. A lone trooper. Camouflage fatigue pants, olive drab t-shirt, combat boots, gear slung on his back.

Eyes glinting and hard, looking resolutely into the distance and the future. Running through a rocky desert. Strong and unstoppable. A kick-ass G.I. Joe. The American fighting man.

An Army of one.

I liked the ad. I loved the ad. It made me proud. It made me want to be that trooper.

And the slogan clicked. It just clicked in my mind, and I understood.

That's what those P.R. slicks in Chicago were thinking.

I enlisted during a different era. Be all you can be. That was our motto. I've still got mugs somewhere that say so. And t-shirts and maybe an old bumper sticker. Army. Be all you can be. I can hear it still being sung in my head. And so I was angry when I heard.
It was in the paper. The Army was mothballing it's old slogan and was going to some glitzy $150 million campaign to pump a new one. An Army of one. It didn't make any sense to me. It sounded selfish.
The Army isn't about being one, it's about being one of many. It's about being part of a team. It's about making the interests and objectives of your unit more important than yourself. An Army of one my backside.

Until I saw that trooper.
That's why I joined the Army, that's why I was proud to be a soldier. That's why all these years later I've got my Honorable Discharge certificate framed and on display.
You're not a soldier once, you're a soldier always - if you were a good one. And I hope that young men and women will see that trooper and hear that slogan and think of possibilities. Possibilities within themselves.
I hope they will consider going into the service of their country.
As commissioned officers or enlisted soldiers, it doesn't matter, the honor is not in the rank, it is in the willingness, and in the "U.S." insignia you wear on your lapel. And someday in the flag they will drape across your casket.

And it's odd that I feel that way, because the Army isn't fun. It's often anything but fun. It is even occasionally miserable.
And that's the peacetime Army. I have no knowledge of war or experience with it. I cannot imagine combat, though I believe there was a time when I was prepared and trained for it.

And I know that my fondness for the Army has grown since I left it. And that when my enlistment was up I didn't re-enlist, and that I was darned glad to be out.

But it helped me in ways that it took years to understand, and it gave me a sense of oneness with and belonging to the Republic that I treasure more and more as I age.

But I have been an Army of one. And that trooper running powerfully across the desert, I have felt that spirit and that sense of invincibility. I have been him.
Not literally, not in battle dress, but in the challenges and exertions of life.

The Army taught me that I had no limits. That physically, emotionally and intellectually I had reserves I had not previously imagined, and that the barriers I had imagined were universally wrong.
I would have lived a fine life without the Army, but it would have been a life without vision and excellence. It would have been a life blindly ignorant of my potential. It would have been half a life.

But it is not.
I am an Army of one.
And I got to be that way by putting on the uniform of the United States, by standing in the long green line of soldiers that stretches back through Da Nang and Normandy and Gettysburg to Valley Forge.
I understand that now, a dozen years out of the Army, in a way I never could have when I walked into the recruiter's office.
The old slogan will always be part of my memory. But I'm not going to reject the new one.
Because I figure in another 20 years there will be some 40-year-old guy sitting there thinking about his days in uniform and it will mean something special to him.
And I suspect he will feel the same, and that he will be proud.

That he was an Army of one.

Bob Lonsberry (c) 2001 Reprinted by permission.

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