Gate Duty at Three in the Morning and the Car That Should Not Have Been There

They do not tell you in basic training how much of soldiering is just standing somewhere being cold and bored. I found that out my first winter at my first real duty station, where the newest privates got handed the worst shifts, and the worst shift of all was gate guard on the far side of the installation, the sleepy gate that almost nobody used after midnight.

I was nineteen, barely graduated, still with that fresh-off-the-bus look. Pulling security at a back gate from ten at night to six in the morning, alone in a little booth with a space heater that lost every argument it had with the wind. My whole job was to check the occasional vehicle and stay awake. It sounds like nothing. In basic they had drilled into us that no post is nothing, that the boring jobs are exactly where discipline either holds or falls apart, but standing there at three in the morning it was very hard to believe that anything I did mattered at all.

Then a car came up the access road and died about fifty meters short of the gate.

Just stopped. Headlights on, engine dead, sitting in the cold in the middle of a road that saw maybe five cars a night. My stomach dropped. Everything they teach you starts running in your head at once. Keep your distance. Do not assume. Do not leave your post. Report it. And under all of that, the simple animal fact that I was one skinny new private alone in the dark and something unexpected was happening.

I did it by the book. I called it in. I kept my distance and my light on the vehicle and I gave clear loud instructions for the driver to stay in the car and show me their hands. My voice cracked in the cold and I hated that, but I held the line.

It turned out to be an older woman, a civilian who worked in one of the offices on base and had taken the back route home because it was shorter. Her car had simply given up in the cold, the way old cars do. She was terrified -- not of me, but of being stranded and alone at three in the morning in the freezing dark, and here was this kid soldier lighting her up and shouting commands.