Personal Narrative: Herrieden, Germany

Herrieden, Germany, was a quiet town. Houses in the neighborhood were never the same color. It was as if someone dumped all the shades of color onto this town. The Germans that were living in this town never had a frown on their face when outside. They always greeted their neighbors and gave each other gifts. The German community around my family and other families knew that we were Americans, but they never treated us with disrespect.When my family moved into the town, our neighbors came over to visit us that same week and brought us German candy. My parents offered them dark beer and not too much later they were all smiles and laughs. Our neighbors became good friends with our family and it was like that for other people throughout the rest
Four years living on a military base and my parents divorce. My mother met our step dad that same year and he helped us move off base to Herrieden. Luckily my mother got a job as a government employee and that allowed me and my siblings to keep going to school on base. I went to Ansbach Middle-High School. The school was shaped like a rectangle, also all the housing around us were just really tall rectangles, and the military base itself was just a rectangle. Looking back, the environment around me was very depressing and boring. There was a max of 300 hundred students at my school and that was spread through grades 7th-12th. There was no majority ethnicity in the school, instead there was a multitude of races that attended every year. I attended the school through 7th-11th grade. Even though I went to school for 5 years I didn't have an impact until my last year there. 11th grade was the turning point for me. I got involved with a program at my school called the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). I joined this program at 9th grade and treated it as another class till my junior
Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage are the seven basic values of the army. JROTC helped me grow as a person and let me interact with people that I would have never interacted with before. I developed social skills and a good work ethic during my time in the JROTC. Over 50% of students in high school were in the program. I helped over a 100 students with basic army movements and discipline skills. A lot of students didn’t care much if they were good at what I was teaching them. That didn’t stop me from forcing them to repeat basic army movements for an hour each day. I taught them repetition and discipline. The more and more people I helped, the more people saw me as dependable. My instructor gave me more responsibilities and tasks to do as he saw me improving. JROTC helped me meet the friends that I still have to this day. If I did not join the program I wouldn’t have become who I am today. I used to be an introvert and kept to myself at all times. I rarely finished assignments or even started working on them. I never participated in any extracurricular activities. I was just a super lazy