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    Lessons Learned: An Army Reporter Turned Jag Lawyer Reflects on the Lessons He’S Learned Thus Far
    Lessons Learned: An Army Reporter Turned Jag Lawyer Reflects on the Lessons He’S Learned Thus Far
    Lessons Learned: An Army Reporter Turned Jag Lawyer Reflects on the Lessons He’S Learned Thus Far
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Lessons Learned: An Army Reporter Turned Jag Lawyer Reflects on the Lessons He’S Learned Thus Far

    By Paul Bouchard

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    About this ebook

    Paul Bouchard's books includeEnlistment, A Package at Gitmo, The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Man, and the nonfiction workA Catholic Marries a Hindu. Note: The views expressed in Paul Bouchard's books are solely his own and are not affiliated with the United States Army.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 29, 2012
    ISBN9781475937367
    Lessons Learned: An Army Reporter Turned Jag Lawyer Reflects on the Lessons He’S Learned Thus Far
    Author

    Paul Bouchard

    Paul Bouchard is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction including Priya’s Choice and A Catholic Marries a Hindu. A retired Army JAG officer, he practices law in the Washington, D.C. area.

    Read more from Paul Bouchard

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      Book preview

      Lessons Learned - Paul Bouchard

      Copyright © 2012 by Paul Bouchard.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      The views expressed in Paul Bouchard’s books are solely his own and are not affiliated with the United States army.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-3735-0 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-3736-7 (ebk)

      iUniverse rev. date: 09/27/2012

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter One    Growing Up

      Chapter Two    College

      Chapter Three    Back in the U.S.S.R.

      Chapter Four    Grad School in the Nation’s Capital

      Chapter Five    Why I Believe in Ghosts and Psychics

      Chapter Six    Joining the Army

      Chapter Seven    A Failed Marriage

      Chapter Eight    Panama and Hispanic Culture

      Chapter Nine    Law School

      Chapter Ten    Zealous Advocate

      Chapter Eleven    Going to the ‘Stan

      Chapter Twelve    If I Were President

      Chapter Thirteen    Some Tough Lessons

      Chapter Fourteen    Too Young to Appreciate President Reagan

      Chapter Fifteen    9-11 and Kudos to the Military

      Chapter Sixteen    Parting Thoughts

      About the Author

      Dedication

      For Michael Crichton

      Introduction

      The inspiration for writing this book is Michael Crichton’s Travels, a book I always have near my bedside lamp; a book I’ve read many times; a book I still read passages from, from time to time.

      Crichton’s Travels touches upon his many travels and the lessons he learned from some of his life experiences. As of this writing, I’m nearing my forty-third year, and based on the law of averages and the fact that the average American male has a life expectancy of some seventy-seven years, I’m no doubt in mid-life—it’s halftime. I’m halfway there; I’m in the middle innings of this game called life.

      With forty-three years under my belt, I figure I’ve learned a few things along the way, and that’s what this book is about: observations I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned over time.

      I’m still learning of course, because, when it comes right down to it, learning is an ongoing process and not a destination.

      PB

      El Paso, Texas, May 2010

      Note: For privacy reasons, I’ve changed the names of some people mentioned in this book.

      Chapter One

      Growing Up

      I    grew up in Frenchville, Maine, a small town located some four hundred miles north of Portland, Maine. Back when I was growing up, Frenchville’s population was about two thousand; now, it hovers around fifteen hundred.

      Stretching about twelve miles in length, Frenchville is comprised of roughly four hundred homes that hug U.S. Route 1, a road that, in some parts, runs parallel to the contours of the St. John River. Importantly, parts of that river—including the Frenchville portion of it—serve as the international border between Maine and Canada.

      I wrote about Frenchville in the novella The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Man, a story where a young boy of eleven has to kill a deer in order to enter manhood. Yes, the descriptions are accurate and as I remember them from the late 1970s: snow banks that can reach the height of telephone wires; numerous potato fields; wooded hills populated by fir, pine, and poplar trees; a frozen-solid river from December to March; a town of ones—one traffic light, one church (Catholic—the St. John Valley is overwhelmingly Catholic), one watering hole (the American Legion Hall), one Jewish family (they lived in the neighboring town of Fort Kent); a town of twos—two restaurants (no franchises as both were family owned), two languages (English and French, with the latter dying a slow death), two post offices with two zip codes; and finally, a paper mill—Fraser Paper in nearby Madawaska, Maine—a paper mill that still serves as the economic lifeblood of The Valley.

      A useful technique to describe small towns is to mention what they’re not or what they’re lacking, and such a List of Nots is lengthy because Frenchville has no libraries, bookstores, condos, shopping malls, or sidewalks. No traffic jams, either, of course, and no crime or homeless people, too.

      When I was growing up in Frenchville, only two families had English surnames; the other family surnames were all of French Canadian descent with names like: Lavoie, Labrie, and Levesque; Michaud and Gagnon; Dione, Dugal and Dumais; Corriveau and Chamberland; Gervais and Guerette; Pelletier and Plourde; Morin and Martin; Roy and Daigle; and Bouchard and Boucher.

      As a young boy growing up in Frenchville, my days were filled with playing cowboys and Indians, building tree houses, and hunting and fishing. When Little League baseball finally came to Frenchville, our nation’s pastime became my passion. At fifteen, I bought a used dirt bike motorcycle from a friend, so motorcycling became a hobby. Basketball and soccer were popular, too, but baseball remained the true passion.

      Grade school for us took place at Dr. Levesque School in Frenchville. That was until the sixth grade, whereupon youngsters like myself attended Wisdom Junior and Senior High School (seventh to twelfth grades). Both schools—Dr. Levesque and Wisdom—took students from the towns of Frenchville and St. Agatha and the township of Sinclair. We were bused to school, and yes, as in one of the scenes from The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Man, if you missed the school bus, one could always hitchhike to school.

      All schools closed from mid-September to mid-October in many parts of Aroostook County, Maine, including the St. John Valley. (Incidentally, Aroostook County, Maine, with a population of about seventy-five thousand, is the second largest county—land-size-wise—east of the Mississippi River). The reason for the month-long school closures was economics: school-age children were needed to pick potatoes for the harvest. I, like many of my friends, started picking potatoes at the age of eight. We were paid thirty-five cents a barrel, with a barrel weighing around one hundred fifty pounds.

      At around the age of twelve or thirteen, I started working on a harvester on my father’s potato farm. Five people work on a harvester machine, doing the work of roughly eighty potato pickers. Harvesters have now completely replaced picking potatoes by hand, and the need for school closures is well on its way to obscurity.

      My parents still live in Frenchville in our ranch-style, white-brick house, but being snowbirds, they only live there half the year, with the other half spent in sunny and warm South Florida. They of course keep me informed about Frenchville and the St. John Valley, and the news is overwhelmingly demographic—who died, the school population decreasing (my high-school graduating class of 1985 numbered sixty-five; a typical graduating class now graduates twelve students), the Catholic parishes closing and consolidating, the lack of young people. As my mother says in her native French, "Ont va a l’eclise et c’est toute des tetes blanches, meaning, We go to church and everybody has white hair." Simply put: Frenchville’s population is both decreasing and aging. There are fewer and fewer children and young people, and there’s no longer a Little League baseball team in Frenchville.

      *    *    *

      What are the lessons learned from my childhood? Here’s the list I come up with:

      1.   The Differences Between Rural People and City People. I tend to place people into two categories—rural or city people. With most Americans now inhabiting suburbs, I place suburbanites into the city category. One last qualification: when I mention rural people, I mean people who grew up in a small town far away from a big town. Frenchville, Maine, is not only a small town; it’s a small town surrounded by small towns.

      For example, my first duty station in the Army was at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and during my time there, I lived in nearby Platte City, Missouri. This was in the mid-nineties, and back then, Platte City had a population of three thousand. Such a population would qualify Platte City as

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