Letter 04 — April 2026
Re: January 20, 2012
Dear Soldier,
January 20, 2012. You remember the date. You will always remember the date, the way people remember the dates on which their lives divided into before and after.
Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The name itself sounds like something from another century, which in a sense it is — the Army was built in another century, and it carries that century with it into each new one, sometimes gracefully and sometimes not. Missouri in January is cold in a way that Virginia cold does not prepare you for. The cold is one of the first things.
What I want to tell you about that first day is not the obvious things — not the processing, not the shouting, not the bureaucratic machinery of turning civilians into soldiers. What I want to tell you about is the particular quality of the decision you had made. You had signed something. The country now had a contract with you. This was, for a young man who had spent the previous summer as an administrative ghost, a significant thing.
You existed now. In the most official, documented, filed-and-recorded sense, you existed. The Army had a file for you. The file contained your name and your measurements and your medical history and the results of your ASVAB. You were a soldier, which meant you were a number, which meant you were counted.
I am not sure you understood, standing there in the Missouri cold on January 20, 2012, that being counted is not the same as being seen. That knowledge took longer.
From the other side of the counting,
Gabriel
mydearsoldier.com