Iowa Army National Guard recruiters really earned their pay in December 1998 when I enlisted. My unit, the 834th Engineer Company, in Davenport, Iowa, was packed with PFCs and buck privates. We were young, inexperienced, and overconfident. 

Through the years, Staff Sgt. Eric “Mac” McArthur and I served in the same squad, participating in the same combat or explosives training and stuck on the same crappy work details. McArthur was a soldier’s soldier. He was an accurate marksman with his M16, and he’d mastered our machine guns. He understood the layout and function of our explosives systems, and he was proficient in the tedious but crucially important detonation cord knots upon which those systems depended. He was deployed two more times after he and I served a year in Afghanistan. He earned a bronze star.