This story is about when I was a battalion commander at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

As a parent I watched Sandra and Karen play youth soccer, and I got disturbed about the poor job the volunteer coaches did in keeping the players occupied during practice and in playing the players fairly during games. I gently complained, and got myself volunteered into being a soccer coach.

Okay, I could do that. But then I learned that the only time I was allotted a field for practice was 4:30 in the afternoon. Ooops, that's in the middle of the day for a combat engineer battalion.

So there I was, coaching in my BDUs and occasionally signing papers that the adjutant deemed so urgent that he'd run over to the practice field to get signed.