I was born December 6th 1984 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Fayetteville sits just outside of Fort Bragg Army Post and is the home of over 25,000 soldiers and their families. As I explain in later chapters about my own birthing experience in a military hospital, Mom and Dad opted to deliver me in a civilian medical center. Dad said, “They wore their rank first and treated people with low rank like crap.”

My mama was twenty years old, not even old enough to drink, and I was her second...