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Ryan Ouellette

Ashley Humphries

ENC 1101

3 February 2015

As a young child, I was incredibly receptive to all kinds of media. Genres like music,

television, video games, and social media have caught my attention from the very beginning.

Countless hours were spent consuming these types of media. However, there is one type that

stands out from the rest, movies.

There ten year old me was, lying on my couch, channel surfing through endless waves of

boring shows when something sparked my interest. Normal pre-pubescent boys were all

consumed by gore and violence, myself being no different. So when the sounds and sights of

violence surrounded my senses, I was immediately drawn in. And there I sat for the next two

hours, totally captivated by the intense warfare and gore, of what I would later find out to be,

Black Hawk Down.

Weeks turned into months, months into year and my interests continued to expand and

grow, but my interest in movies would remain strong. I continued to relate my interest in military

cinema to other facets of my life, like television and video games. It also lead to my choice of

high school classes and organizations.

Entering high school would be an immense changing point in my life, as it was for many

children. Some of those changes would include dramatic weight loss (something like 40 pounds),

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a heck of a lot of acne, and a change in my favorite movie. Now, while something as trivial like

having a new favorite movie might be, for me it was anything but the sort.

At fifteen years old I thought I had seen a quite a bit of movies in my lifetime. However,

none would have the same effect on me quite like Saving Private Ryan would. Tom hanks

portrays a U.S. Army captain in World War II sent to rescue a fellow comrade bogged down

behind enemy lines. The themes in the movie like honor, loyalty, and duty really resonated in

me. For this movie flickered a spark within me.

I began to take my school work more seriously, actually opening my books to study and

read. Something as silly as JROTC once seemed became important to me, allowing me to

progress through the ranks and positions rather quickly. I made captain a year earlier than most

cadets, the same rank as my idol Tom Hanks in the WWII epic. And perhaps the most important

change of them all, I began to seriously ponder the thought of join the military.

For it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that I would finally understand what those

brave soldiers must have felt when preparing to storm Normandy, in real life and in the movie. It

was brisk, late October night in Fort Benning, Georgia. Alongside myself were two hundred

newly graduated soldiers all drowsy and fatigued from the last nine weeks of rigorous training.

Confusion was spreading throughout the ranks, like the plague, as to why we were all woken up

and hastily rushed to a training site in the middle of nowhere. It wouldn’t be until they lined us

up in a dimly lit trench that I would finally realize what we were about to do, the dreaded live-

fire course.

There I was with my two best buddies on my flanks, Max and Zach, when the drill

sergeant screamed at us to get “our pathetic asses over the damn wall.” I was in a small state of

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shock when I finally made it over the protective walls of the trench. The simulated battle field

was littered with barbed wire, sand pits, and simulated casualties. The strong smell of smoke and

the screeching sound of mortars and machine gun fire immobilized me. A rough slap on my

helmet from Zach was enough to shake me from my daze and immediately I was crawling on my

belly towards the gun fire. The bullets were so close overhead that you could feel the heat

radiated off from them and hear the buzzing as they zoomed by.

However, that wouldn’t be enough to deter my brothers and me from our objective. Most

of us reached the objective but the effects of that night wouldn’t impact me until weeks after. For

I finally realized what those soldiers must have felt when they stormed those deadly beaches. Im

sure the actors in Saving Private Ryan were swept away with all kinds of emotions when they

recreated those harrowing events. The profession that I had chosen was nothing to be taken

lightly; that I would be put into life or death situations on a daily basis. And I had never been

surer of my career choice in my life.

My first stop along my path would be the Air Force recruiter’s office. My ambitions of

being a kick ass fighter pilot were almost immediately dashed when the burly sergeant deemed

me medically unqualified due to my poor eyesight. My next stop would take my aspirations to

the Navy recruiter’s office. However after several weeks of deliberating with a one Chief Petty

Officer Michaels, I found out the navy wasn’t for me. The last leg of this rather dull saga takes

us to the U.S. Army National Guard and a “lovely” Drill Sergeant Techeria.

Walking into that large office I was rather timid and nervous. The man was pretty much

what I imagined an army recruiter and drill sergeant should look like. He was a tall man with

broad shoulders and defined muscles which only furthered my level of uneasiness. Our animated

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discussion that day was all over the place, from my prospective job choices to where I

envisioned myself in the near future. I didn’t know it then, but my future would forever be sealed

with a single handshake as I left feeling immensely more confident. I had finally found my

home.

Fast forward about eight months and we arrive in July of 2014, the month I was slated to

ship off for basic training. July was a month of great anxiety and fear for me as I prepared for

what would be the hardest experience of my young life. Coincidentally, this was also the month

that I first saw Lone Survivor.

This movie chronicles the experience of a four man Navy SEAL team on a mission in the

rural Afghani Mountains. Concepts like brotherhood and loyalty are especially prevalent in this

cinema. And as corny as it might sound, after watching this anti-war/pro-American film, I knew

that what I was doing was the best thing for me. In the four following months I would experience

an unparalleled level of brotherhood, loyalty, duty, and honor.

All of the blood, sweat, and tears I shed at Fort Benning was something that I wouldn’t

give up for anything in the world. The skills and knowledge I learned in my training will help me

succeed throughout the rest of my career and life. There are a few defining moments in a man’s

life. Moments like his first crush, first kiss, first car, so on and so forth. For me, those moments

wouldn’t be necessarily the same, but the ones that are worth mentioning are the certain movies

that left a positive influence on my life. I wouldn’t be the same man today without films like

Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan and I couldn’t be more appreciative of them.