I arrived at Basic Combat Training on a Tuesday – August 25th. I remember the date the way you remember the day something in you quietly ended and something else, harder and less certain, began.
The decision itself had started long before I ever stepped off that bus. It began with a flip, almost casual, decision to do it – the kind you make late at night and half-forget by morning. Then came a second, more serious decision: the one where you actually mean it. And then the long third beginning – weeks of training, shopping, eating less, packing, preparing. I hired a personal trainer. I watched TikTok and YouTube videos of soldiers I’d never met, absorbing their advice like scripture. I joined a WhatsApp group of incoming recruits and current soldiers trading tips and tricks to survive what was coming. None of it prepared me for what was coming.
There was unemployment before all this. There was running a for-profit company and a non-profit at the same time, trying to make both survive. There was the move from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma, then Tulsa – remote work, layoffs, and certification after certification, chasing whatever would keep me employed. There were warehouse shifts and caregiving jobs, taken not out of ambition but out of necessity, to fund conferences I couldn’t really afford, hoping the debt would be worth it. Nobody tells you that the road to a decision is sometimes more exhausting than the decision itself.
When I got my uniform, I was elated. The black shirt and shorts with the Army insignia. The green pants, green underwear, green long-sleeve shirt with my name stitched on it. I wore it with pride. I also wore it as penance – as an offering to God, calling on Him to make my visions and resolutions real. That is the part people rarely say out loud: for some of us, service is also prayer. Psalm 23 marched through my head more nights than I can count. The Lord is my Shepherd. I personalised it. Please, God, have mercy on me.
And then there was the real thing – the doing it. I have scars from listening to a Drill Sergeant yell, even in my sleep. I feared breaking a bone during exercise. I was told, mid-training, that I had a sickle cell trait – and I pleaded, quietly and honestly, that the blood test results would never be my portion. I cried. I breathed intentionally, deliberately, and then forgot to breathe altogether. I fainted once. There was a Caribbean song coming over the speakers in the van as we drove to sick call, standing shoulder to shoulder with soldiers who had entirely different reasons for being there, their blood pressure taken alongside mine.
There was the exhaustion and sleep deprivation, carrying heavy objects, the sound of grenades on the first day of basic, the sting of a vaccine injection. There was blood from my arms while I screamed, the cold and the heat, hostility from the bay like I was watching myself age a decade in a single scene – moving from victim to villain and back again. The monotony and the pain. The thirst and the hunger. The MREs. The ghost that haunted my formations, morning, afternoon, and evening. And finally, at reception, learning I didn’t have 20/20 vision and needed glasses that would take two weeks to arrive.
Truthfully, my journey as a soldier hadn’t even begun the day I made the decision. It began the day I realized what that decision actually cost – my marriage, or at least the life I imagined for it. My spouse laid down her own career and dreams to provide shelter, to hold our life together while I chased mine. I thought about a master’s in cybersecurity, about earning Top Secret clearance with the Department of Defense. I thought about my mother’s burial, which I could not fully participate in because life – training, conferences, distance – kept pulling me elsewhere.
In the ER, in the examining room, struggling to get an IV in, moving my shirt slightly for an EKG, I remember thinking something simple: I am not poor. I would say it to myself, quietly, like a rebuttal to everything that felt like loss. I am rich in love.
I am still in that journey. Along the way, I have met other Africans and Caribbeans, each carrying a different story and a different injury. One man was inspired to enlist by his 19-year-old daughter, already serving in the Air Force – a father following his own child into duty. Another got married and joined just two months later, choosing to build a family and a service career in the same breath. One had just received his green card and was now nursing a fracture, still standing, still counting the cost of a new country and a new commitment. A mother was doing it all for her four-year-old, training with a child’s face in her mind on the hardest days. Different nations, different wounds, the same aspiration underneath.
Nobody knows tomorrow. I certainly didn’t know, that Tuesday in August, everything tomorrow would ask of me – my body, my marriage, my faith, my sense of who I was. But tomorrow came anyway, the way it always does, indifferent to whether we feel ready. My journey isn’t finished. I don’t know how many more Tuesdays stand between me and wherever this road ends. But I look up to God, and I lean on the support of my partner, and I keep walking. The lesson I carry, still, isn’t about weapons or drills. It’s this: uncertainty is not a reason to wait. It is simply the terrain you walk while becoming who you’re meant to be – and you rarely walk it alone.
. Inegbedion is a technology entrepreneur, journalist, and social innovator. He is the Head of Happiness at ConcordeApp, an AI platform transforming how people build meaningful professional relationships, and the Head of Failure and Social Experiments at Semaform Foundation, a nonprofit advancing technology for social impact and health equity. Chaste serves as Global Editor of DA News and is a regular contributor to BellaNaija, BusinessDay, and Premium Times, where he writes on artificial intelligence, innovation, entrepreneurship, and global development. His reporting has covered major international forums, including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, CES, Cannes Lions, Afrotech, the World Bank, and AI for Good.