Nineteen seventy-four: I had my license and a car. The car was a nineteen sixty-five Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and an automatic, its two eighty-nine V-8 hustled me around the hills of southern West Virginia.
I graduated high school. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, was a year behind me, and had gone to Europe for a month. I was working odd jobs at the oil and gas distribution center when the Air Force recruiter called me. What the hell, I decided, and enlisted.
It was a shock to my girlfriend. It was a shock to everyone.
It wasn’t the greatest decision, an impulse because I was impatient to get out of there, to be free, to be my own person, impatience that still haunts me.
There’s no doubt what song represents that year best: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I used to sing it to my girlfriend, to entertain her.
Yes, we were in love.
Michael Seidel, writer 
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