The week before spring break, CHS alumnus 1st Lieutenant Luke King visited Ann Arbor and Community High during his pre-deployment leave. King will be deployed to Afghanistan in a few weeks.
King graduated from CHS in 2007, and the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2011. On Tuesday, March 26, he came to Community High to visit with old teachers as well as share his experience with The Communicator.
When asked about his time at CHS, King described himself as “a pretty driven kid in high school.” He went on to explain why he chose the military. “I was thinking about where I wanted to apply to school. I thought my college should be based off of what I want to study and what I want to study should be based off of what I want to do. So I started thinking way too far into the future probably for somebody who is 16 and doesn’t really know what they want to do. I didn’t really know anybody who was over there serving but the fact that there were people over there who were willing to lay down their lives for me made me decide that nobody else was going to lay down their life for me without me there doing it with them,” said King.
West Point provided a particularly rigorous environment for King to learn the skills he will take with him Afghanistan. Daily physical training, intensive academics and summers spent in various departments of the Army helped King to become an effective leader and soldier. However, this deployment will be his first time in combat.
King adopts a selfless attitude towards dying. “It’s more nervous for your family and how they would cope with it than you because if something does happen over there, you aren’t really going to know that it’s coming. It’ll just happen and then you won’t be there any more. It’s not really an issue for you but for your family; it really stresses them out.” said King.
Students in The Communicator wondered whether or not the political environment of CHS made being in the military difficult. On politics, King opened by saying, “all the views expressed in this interview are mine and not the Department of Defense’s.” He continued to say that, “Whether or not it’s right you guys can decide that…whatever Obama and Karzai are deciding in terms of what we are trying to accomplish, it’s so far above my level…I just know that I have the opportunity to go there and help on a very small scale. This one group of people over there, I am going to make life better for this one town and this one area. That’s how I choose to look at it.”
King will be in charge of security for the Colonel at his Forward Operating Base, or FOB. “What the colonel wants, the colonel gets. So, the colonel put me in charge of his security. So that’s basically what we will be doing over there—driving around our entire area of operation with the colonel making sure he doesn’t do anything crazy and get blown up.”
King is in one of the final rounds of deployment to Afghanistan and efforts are largely focused on stabilizing the country from the removal of U.S. troops. King will be deployed for 12 months. Our hearts and prayers go out to him as he fights to defend our nation.
