 My family loved watching, well, my dad loved watching war movies. Him and I would always just sit on the couch, watch Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, the whole way through and just obsess over it and like, oh, wow, when I was a young kid I was just getting so excited about World War II and the whole allure of being a paratrooper. The day came when I actually did join the Army and I set a set of goals for myself. I wanted to become a paratrooper and I wanted to go to the 101st. I went to airborne school right after basic, got sent to Italy. In Italy, I was exposed to the culture of the old world and World War I. So that further heightened my interest in World War I, putting World War II aside. Started with a helmet and then set a webgear and a uniform just so I could piece it all together and kind of get an idea of what it would have been like to be in World War I as an American doughboy. Italy came to an end so I got sent back to the States and I landed myself in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. So I am now a paratrooper in the 101st, which is, I think, pretty awesome. Then while exploring the Tennessee area, I discovered Sergeant Alvin St. York State Historic Park and I had seen videos of reenacting but I'd never done it before so I was like, yeah, that sounds like fun. I'll just put my kids together and I'll come out and join. So I came out, met a bunch of great people and they were all wearing their doughboy kit and so was I and I thought that was just the coolest thing ever. So I started coming to a bunch of the events and just living life as a doughboy in 1918 France. It definitely showed me that I take a lot of the modern stuff for granted, like transportation, logistics, uniforms for that matter, we're definitely not wearing any wool or hobnail boots anymore. Seeing where the Army came from and what it is today makes you really grateful that we've achieved so much. Military discipline definitely plays a part in being a good reenactor. You're not going to portray a soldier in World War I with an unshaven face or just no military bearing at all. So being an active duty soldier definitely helps to achieve a proper World War I or just reenacting a general impression. And it also works in both ways too because you do this, you look at the old school Jolene ceremony and then you see how it correlates and forms modern Jolene ceremony and especially like A station medical practices and stuff like that. I think each of them play a part in making the other one better. If you do this now when you're around people that are dressed like it and you know what it's like to wear the uniform and then you look at a picture from World War I and he's wearing the same thing, you automatically put it in your mind how he must be feeling. If it's a hot day, he's obviously going to be sweating because it's wool. So you can almost kind of connect when I was a little kid seeing little images of doughboys and I was just thinking, oh look at that, it's World War II. I'm like, no it's World War I. So I just became obsessed with it because everyone talks about World War II and it overshadows greatly World War I. It's just a little niche in the history books that people nowadays seem to forget about. It's important to me because every soldier needs to remember where the army came from. It's not just the modern army, it's the foundation that the army was built on through World Wars and different conflicts that formed the modern army for what it is today.