I am a military police officer and I have served on two deployments my first was to Iraq in a medical unit and my second deployment was to Kuwait as a military police platoon leader.

I think as a rifle platoon and company commander your view is about 1 000 meters in front of you and you hope you can cover that ground and not have to back up and give it up again.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

We had times in '66 and '67 when we would pick up a platoon of privates out of the receiving barracks the week before we even graduated the platoon that we were on!