Out Front

In Vietnam I served with the 1st Cavalry Division. I started on the ground with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, and then I moved into aviation and continued in the Cavalry as an Aero Scout. The Cavalry has always been the part of an army that goes out front, the eyes that move ahead of everyone else. That was the work. You went ahead to find what was waiting.

Later I was placed on a hunter-killer team. I will not dress that up. The job was to find the enemy and to engage. It is the plainest sentence I know how to write about that year, and it is the truest. I do not tell it for medals or for headlines. I tell it because it happened, and because a man should be able to say plainly what he did.

What I did not understand at the time is that the year was teaching me how to live. A scout learns to look ahead. He learns not to flinch at what is actually out there, and not to pretend the ground is something it is not. He learns that the people behind him are counting on him to see clearly. I have needed every bit of that since.

I came home and became a builder and a businessman, and in time a man who writes songs and puts his story on a page. Different work, the same instinct. Look ahead. Tell the truth about what you see. Keep the people behind you in mind. A scout's job is to look ahead, and so is a dreamer's.

That is why the Cavalry never really leaves you. It gave me a way of facing the world that I have used every day since, and a gratitude I cannot put down. Somebody has to go out front for the rest of us. For one year of my life, that somebody was me, and I have been grateful for the country behind me ever since.