h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As a member of the United States Army Reserve, I travelled to El Salvador in South America in the summer of 1999 with members of my unit to support a hurricane recovery operation there. While we were there, I turned nineteen. It was a little odd, because for most of the day I got no special treatment--I just did my job like I had been doing every other day since we arrived and like I did every day after until we left. In the evening, however, I first got thrown into my unit's non-potable water supply as a sort of baptism, and then received a sort of field party with pizza from the village. This was a luxury for everyone else in the group as well as myself, because we had all been living on Army food for a while and, quite frankly, we were sick of it. Later that evening, a Reserve officer, who in civilian life happened to be a professional Elvis impersonator, came to my tent and serenaded me on one knee with a depressingly non-Elvis version of the birthday song. As birthdays go, it wasn't all that exciting, if you ignore the fact that I was in a foreign country, and it was a little sad being away from my family, but that day will always be one of my favorite memories.