What Campaign Setting for your Module?

[manikus]

Uncle Bill was in the Navy. I've heard some pretty messed up stories about guys teasing each other on ship.

[Uatu]

Hmm - buff men all together on a ship, without any women around is never a good recipe...

[manikus]

One of my instructors was a nuclear engineer on the U.S.S. Nimitz. The stories he tells are outrageous, but they smack of the truth, too.

Glad I passed on the Navy.

[Uatu]

I never was meant for rigid, group-based life, anyway...

[manikus]

I had intended to go into the Army in 1990. My dad was a veteran, and I was acquainted with one of the Senators for Oregon. I was planning on West Point. But, I had a knee injury that was going to keep me out of the service. There was an epiphanel moment as I sat in a First Sargeant's office and he told me about the surgery the U.S. government was going to pay for and all this other stuff they were going to do for me...suffice it to say, I went to a nice private school instead. Three days before my first semester of college started, the U.S. Army moved into Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm. Had I accepted the appointment to West Point, I would have just been recovered from the surgery, a member of the Army and not yet in school for deferment - they could have fast-lined me through basic and sent me to the Gulf. I know they did this for several dozen of that years incoming freshmen. I also know that they denied student deferment for R.O.T.C. students at my University who were in their third and fourth years...

Man, I'm glad my life didn't go that way, though sometimes I like to speculate on how it might have gone - I'm sure I wouldn't be the person that I am today (for better or worse).

[Uatu]

Sometimes the slightest turn changes our lives in a big way - just one decision can have a great effect.

I wouldn't have been able to get in the army, anyway (I'm a wimp, etc.), but different strokes for different folks...

Military experience can often be positive - but this of course requires that one survives it...

[manikus]

My brother really wanted to go in to the service, but when he was 18 he was not on a course to graduate high school or get a G.E.D. So, instead he stayed around and got his 16 year-old girlfriend pregnant. Ah, life's little twists and turns.

[Uatu]

Ha ha... Yes, for better or for worse...

[manikus]

Well, he got a horrible wife out of the deal, but a lovely daughter. (And a son to follow a couple of years later.)

[Uatu]

Well... She can't have been THAT bad, considering that the son appeared later...

Ya gotta do with the circumstances that heaven gives ya.