Many veterans and others have strongly suggested that my history would be helpful to those joining the military as well as those returning to civilian life.
When I was 10 years old, I had I had two careers that I believed I wanted to do when I grew up. One was working in a research laboratory and the other was a minister. My family doctor, just returning from World War II, suggested that I needed to select a field in the laboratory that was open at the time. He suggested two areas: one virus and the other parasitology (the identification of worms and bugs infecting human. But then he added that studying virus a very slow field that took days for results, whereas parasitology has instant results which was better for me.
When I was in my senior class in high school I started looking for the college to teach me parasitology, but my mother told me there was no money for college. The family doctor told me to join the Air Force and have them train me. So I quit school and joined the Air Force.
At the end of basic training I found a base in Puerto Rico that was changing command so I volunteered to go there, hoping to be assigned to the medics. I was sent there and assigned to work on the wards, feeding and handling the bed pans. I did the best job I could for three months and then, each day before going to work, I asked the commander for a transfer to the lab. After two months of my daily requests for a transfer I was transferred to the emergency room. I loved the job, but it was not the career I was looking for, so after three months I again started my daily request for a transfer to the lab. About a month later the commander told me that if I did not stop asking for a transfer he would court marital me. I applied for a transfer the next day and when he called for my arrest I gave him the rule that allowed me to do so. Two hours later I was on a plane headed for lab school. I returned after graduating lab school and the other technicians were happy to let me do parasitology. I also volunteered for Air Sea Rescue as I loved to swim.
While in the Air Force I read a medical journal about a doctor that I decided I wanted to work for although his hospital was in Nassau Co. and I lived in Brooklyn. I applied for position in his laboratory three day after my discharge and was accepted, but in the histology lab. But, again I did the best I could in the lab and produced twice the slides of what the other technicians were producing. After three months every time I saw the pathologist and was able to speak to him I asked to do parasitology.
Then one day about two months later he came in the lab and grabbed me by the shoulder and took me upstairs to the bacterial lab to show me that they found an egg of a parasite on the slide. It was the egg of a little whip worm, but I pointed out two other parasites on the same slide, one the large intestinal worm and a dangerous protozoa. At that point I became the chief of parasitology for the next 20 years. I ended up teaching parasitology to the interns and resident doctors at the hospital as part of my job.
When I retired I became a minister, went to seminary and still working in that field, with veterans suffering from moral injury and PTS.
The important part of my story is that I never gave up on my dream of the careers I wanted to do, and you should never give up on yours either. Today I tell people that I never had to work, because I loved what I did and due.