by Joey Jordan

Created on: June 07, 2008

Life is a struggle. When you hit hard times you have to bite your tongue, raise your chin high and dig deep to get through the tough times. This is what my father used to tell me when i was younger, yet im struggling to see how it helps right now.

I am a soldier, not serving for the military anymore but i am still a soldier. It is in my heart and soul and it is pumping through my veins every minute of every day.

I started training to be a soldier when i was 12 years old when I joined the army cadets. The legal age to join was 13 back then but i was so eager I lied about my age. They taught me how to shoot, military tactics and self dicipline, and over the years i went on many summer camps which in the reality of it all were more like training exercises.

At 16 years old I joined the British Military, where immediately I went into a tour of Northern Ireland. During my time in the Military I fought in combat in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq. It was all none stop, very fast paced, my military career passed by in a blink of an eye because we was constantly on operations all over the world. My social life consisted of when having the oppertunity to go out and get extremely intoxicated with the lads, and then return back to base ready for operations the next morning.

I excelled over the years, and rapidly flew through the rank system, the army being my life.

Eventually i got bored, i needed a bigger challenge but i never knew what that challenge was. I left the military and went back to the uk. I had no where to live and very minimal family or friends to help me out. The little bit of cash I had left from my last pay check paid for a bed and breakfast for a few weeks but once that had i gone I was literally on my own.

I ended up sleeping on a park bench for the next 4 months. The nights were long and cold and when it was raining I would curl up in a ball underneath the closest underpass to me until it passed. During the days I would beg for enough money to go to the local pub in order to get some warmth and some beer. I would wait until the local working mans club had closed and I watched the old timers go into the next pub before I went in. I would by a pint of the cheapest beer and make it last as long as possible, until I ended up getting into conversations with the old war veterans. As the day went on and the stories got longer, more people would end up buying me drinks, and I would end up leaving the pub at closing hours, crawling back to the same park bench

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