In high school at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1971, there was a lot of bottled up, typical teenage rebellion, and once in a while some steam had to be let off.

You could count on one hand the number of so called trouble-makers in the school, and one year, while classes were changing, a group of us saw huge fight suddenly erupt in the hallway. We were expecting it to be a couple of boys, but as I moved forward and got a better look, it was two girls fighting—all out—over some boy, no less.

A teacher was brave enough to get between the two girls, and his glasses were slapped down to the ground in the next few seconds. Somehow he got the girls apart and just as quickly as the mayhem had started it was over.

Discipline is a way of life

For minor infractions at school, there was the dreaded after-school detention, which wasn't that bad, but it could prove difficult to explain to an inquisitive mother how you developed a sudden interest in a club or after school activity, in the middle of the school year. It was difficult if not impossible for parents not to know what was happening at school.

The military has a great advantage over typical public schools as the parent's permanent record and commanding officer could easily become involved and a child could become a tremendous liability if they persisted in creating disturbances at school.

I remember one student, who talked back to his teachers and was particularly uncooperative. I don't recall his name, but he disappeared from school a few days, and we assumed he had gotten a suspension.

Suspension was very serious, as at Ft. Knox, like all military base schools, your father had to bring you back to school which meant he had to get time off from work and have a face to face conversation about the student's behavior with the principal.

This was something that was fairly rare as these types of confrontations usually meant and even more serious confrontation back at home.

A missing student

Days turned into weeks and we began to speculate about the boy's disappearance. "Maybe he ran away from home?", or "maybe he was killed by his dad and buried somewhere out in the millions of acres that made up Fort Knox.

Our speculation ended after a few months when the missing student turned up in school one day, sporting a "buzz" haircut and a Marine uniform. He spent part of the day visiting all of his former teachers and stood almost at attention, in polite conversation with the same teachers he had not so friendly conversations with just a few weeks earlier.

We were fairly sure he was given a couple of choices by his Dad, one of them being an opportunity to get "three hots and a cot" and an opportunity to learn that life at home probably wasn't that bad, compared to the alternatives.

My father was a drill instructor for several years of his 24 year career, and while we never had an in-depth conversation about what the alternatives were to finishing high school and staying out of trouble, it went without saying that my dad wouldn't hesitate to give me permission to join the Army or even the Marines at age 17 if I turned into a trouble-maker. Or he would have shown me the door.

Looking back, I realize now that while we did have to walk the straight and narrow more so than the average civilian student, most of us developed a healthy respect for authority, good study habits and a willingness to try and get along with others, which certainly served me well in my life after high school and in the world outside the main gate.

Making choices

A few years after high school, I was working at a small printing company, in Columbus, Georgia. The owner of the company, who was a compassionate man with a soft spot for young people who needed some direction, and some part-time work to help them along the way, had hired a particularly "type A" personality, a young man who didn't seem to know what he wanted to do with his life, but he could talk a mile a minute.

One day this young man came in and announced he had decided he was going to join the Marines. Even though Fort Benning, an Army training base, was adjacent to Columbus, he was hell-bent on joining the Marines and he talked openly about how the discipline of the Marines would be good for him and would give him some direction in his life.

Having grown up in a military family, I knew what the military life was like and while I knew that this lifestyle was not for everyone, for some people who didn't have a strong internal compass to keep them going in the right direction, a few years in the Marines or any branch of the service could probably be beneficial, provided you survived basic training, of course.

I wished him well, but I was not able to learn how he fared in his new life and what it brought him.

About one in five Military Brats joins a branch of the service, and many make a career in the military. For those of us growing up in military families, we know what the military life is like first-hand, and for those that choose to make a career out of the military, it can be good choice.