Sgt. Stryker reminisces about the military and Saddam:

I won't bore you with all stuff that happened during the 90's, since most of you have at least a passing knowledge of the "Peace Dividend", the drawdown, the restructurings, the RIFs, doing more with less, the humanitarian missions, the relief missions and the peacekeeping operations. While all this was going on, 90-day rotations to Saudi became the norm. The light of liberty to the world debased itself before a King. Every so often, we'd play whack-a-mole with Saddam when he'd decided the world had forgotten about him. We'd lob a few Tomahawks his way and we'd forget about him until he poked his head up again or the President faced a political crisis at home. I often wondered what went through Saddam's mind when he watched CNN and saw that President was in trouble. "Oh *@#!, here it comes. Batten the hatches, boys, we've got incoming!"

I distinctly remember one occasion a few months after I joined the Air Force when a few buddies and I were eating at the chow hall and talking about the Gulf War. I'd said something to the effect that we'd stopped to soon, we left the guy in power and now we're going to pay for it until he dies, just like Castro in Cuba. Some TSgt at another table turned around and gave us the party line about why we couldn't take out Saddam. Our allies wouldn't go for it, the American people wouldn't want to see a bunch of people dying in Baghdad, it would be too hard and we had no idea if the guy who took over after Saddam would be worse. Like I said, that was the Party Line and you never found a shortage of people in the military to tow it, but that's just the way things are in the military. "We're at war with Oceania. We've always been at war with Oceania." That sort of thing. Well, I'm still here, that Tsgt's gone and I guess I ended up being right after all. I guess if you wait long enough, that eventually happens.

He want to bootcamp at the same time I did. We should've finished it in '91.