I Was Proud to Do Whatever to Protect the Interests of the United States

For Veteran’s Day, Lynn C., Gospel for Asia staff and 20-year U.S. military veteran, shares her thoughts about serving in the Navy and now her Lord with GFA.

Let’s face it — I cry whenever I hear the song “Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood, and I get choked up when I sing the National Anthem.

As a retired Chief Petty Officer of the United States Navy (September 1977–September 1997), I’ve served with some of the finest men and women our country had at the time.

Having served then, I understand the tremendous sacrifice that our military men and women and their families currently make to protect the interests of the United States, both foreign and domestic. Families make do with only one parent taking care of all the responsibilities, while the other is off on deployment in the middle of the desert or the mountains, serving as an Embassy guard or sitting watch at 3 in the morning.

Loyal, dedicated men and women who spend months at a time off on deployment, missing their families and important milestone events, working hard to ensure the interest of the United States and the safety of her people.


I’ve been in this boat having served in the Navy alongside my husband. While he was serving on board ship while Desert Shield and Desert Storm was taking place, I was serving in a shore capacity in the San Diego area.

It wasn’t always glamorous; in fact, sometimes it was downright dirty. I remember back, as a young seaman during my first tour of duty, when I was assigned to do some document destruction for a deployed unit. Little did I know that these documents consisted of literally reams upon reams of stacked perforated paper, the kind that ran through the old dot-matrix printers. I had many black trash bags filled with these documents to destroy. And I couldn’t use our host force’s document shredder and pulper unit. Oh no—I had to make do with the furnace.

I had to burn all that material…to ash. I don’t even think I got a lunch break. I had to stay with the material for the entire length of my shift and make sure it was completely destroyed. For those of you in the know, it’s like a chain of custody type thing. I couldn’t leave the material unsupervised. If I remember correctly, someone brought me several sodas to drink while I chucked chunk after chunk of page print into that behemoth furnace, while constantly stirring the burning paper with a long metal pole.

Consider this: What does someone look like after eight hours in front of a fire with ash floating all around? (I laugh just thinking about this.) When I finished my shift, I chanced to look in the mirror and gasped. My face was totally ash covered except the little point where my garrison cap covered my forehead and where my glasses protected my eyes. There was a black ring around my mouth from drinking the soda that I was given. I smelled like I’d been sitting around the campfire for days, and my uniform was covered in ash! I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of that day, since it was almost 39 years ago and cameras were not allowed in my work area, but I remember this event very well.

It was probably one of the most unglamorous jobs that I’ve had while serving. Don’t get me wrong, I was proud to do it because I knew that whatever I did contributed to protecting the interests of the United States.


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