Graduation Speech - Original Writing - 1802 Words

Nine years ago, I never could have imagined I’d be writing this essay. I was a senior in high school, and, like the rest of my classmates, I was apprehensive about the future. Unlike my classmates, I felt like I had missed the proverbial â€Å"you need to get your life together† message. I watched my classmates apply to colleges, their majors already decided and their future careers mapped out. While I was an above average student, I felt I lacked the decisiveness my classmates seemed to have. I did not feel passionate about a career or even a field of study. I felt defective. This was compounded by the financial strain I knew attending college would have on my family. It seemed wasteful to try to â€Å"find my passion† at school while squandering†¦show more content†¦Military training in a school environment was unlike anything I had encountered in high school. I was thrown into a curriculum filled with different aspects of military intelligence, from i dentifying ships in foreign navies to learning how to build and present an intelligence brief. I enjoyed learning how historical events shape present day policy and how new information fit into foreign policy and current events. I graduated as one of the top students in my class. In September 2009, I checked into my first command, eager to learn and ready to work. Unfortunately, my command was a shore command, meaning the command did not deploy people. Fortunately, my department arranged for my temporary attachment to a command that did deploy, a maritime security squadron whose mission was to protect US and Coalition warships as they transited in and out of port in Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates. I was deployed from April to November of 2010, living in Dubai and working at Jebel Ali. During that seven months, This deployment was the steepest learning curve I had experienced in my life to that point. I learned about waterborne tactics, Iran’s Naval power, and extremist groups operating in the Arabian Gulf. This was especially relevant when an al-Qaeda aligned group, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, attacked an oil tanker transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Our unit was responsible for making initial reports on the damaged tanker when it limped into port.