MY MONKEY:
My Monkey has been with me all my life. He currently lives up in my mind. Not physically inside my brain, of course. But still very much in my head. In the Operations Department of my Self, which for me, is my mind.

My Monkey has a really awesome time up there. For some reason he gets insane satisfaction from meddling with my personal decisions. He lives in fear and wants to share this anxiety with me, through his endless chattering in my mind. The chattering often becomes a full-fledged conversation, making me sometimes forget who’s actually talking up there.

This blog is my attempt to quiet the Monkey, so I can achieve a more conscious level of awareness in my own life experience.

ME:

My name is Paul W. Davison. I started this blog in September 2007.

Manifesting Phase

I am currently living the most significant phase of my life experience. Perhaps someday I will call this phase the “Manifesting Phase.” The phase of allowing actual physical people, places, and things to come into being. This phase began back in December of 2005, when I learned that I was going to be a father for the first time. Becoming, and then being, a father is truly the best thing in the world, and I tell this to every other father that I meet. I have never experienced such profound love for another creature in my entire life. My marriage is also evolving in a positive direction and I am grateful for that. Our relationship has really grown with the experience of sharing our love with another person. It is wild to think that you share this experience of raising a child with only one other human on the face of the earth. And it is comforting for me to know that we are lucky enough to share totally compatible philosophies about the “how” of raising our child.

Prior to this current phase, I was deeply enmeshed in my television career, which began when I moved to New York City in 2001, after spending the previous six years in the military as an infantry-paratrooper officer. What follows is my story of how I got to where I am today…

Becoming a Soldier: West Point and My Training

I entered the United States Military Academy during the summer of 1991. It was an inevitable development, considering I was born on Academy grounds in 1973, when my father was a Tactics Department instructor at the Academy. By the time I entered the Academy I had already lived over half of my life overseas, due to my father’s military career. He graduated from West Point in 1964, served two tours in Vietnam, and later commanded tank units in Germany during the height of the Cold War. His father, my grandfather, graduated in 1939 and attained the rank of four-star General. My dad was no slouch himself and ultimately retired in 2000 as a three-star Lieutenant General with 36 years time served. This lineage goes back five generations to the year 1885, when Lorenzo Paul Davison, my great-great uncle, graduated from the Academy. Needless to say, by the time I reached high school, there was a little family pressure to follow suit. I was in my third high school, an all-boys prep school in Northern Virginia, after attending two different high schools in Germany. Military service wasn’t exactly in the forefront of the minds of my Southern gentlemen classmates, so my choice to attend West Point made me unique. Perhaps this was my first sighting of the Monkey, who knows. I felt I was making the best decision at the time. I truly had a strong desire to serve my country and felt proud to be following in my father’s footsteps.

West Point was challenging and envigorating. I thrived in an environment that valued discipline, hard work, and sacrifice. I was also motivated by the fact that one could only attain success through the path of high-performance. West Point is an engineering school, but I ended up majoring in literature and philosophy (one of only about dozen like-minded artsy-fartsy types at the Academy) and minoring in computer science engineering. During our senior year, we were to choose our branch of military service. I choose infantry. The Queen of Battle. The grunts. The ground-pounders. Figured if you’re gonna be in the Army, might as well go all the way. Hu-ah! Fortunately, I graduated near the top of my class and had my choice of assignments available to me. I chose Italy.

Over Seas

I began my military career as a paratrooper officer in the elite 1st Battalion, 508th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, stationed in Vicenza, Italy. This was the only forward-deployed quick response element in the European Command’s arsenal. Our area of operations covered Europe and a portion of Africa.

Living in Italy was a dream assignment. It was an interesting time, what with Bill Clinton in office. The world really loved America, and there was never the feeling we’d be involved in full-scale conflict. Certainly Bosnia and other non-combat operations in Africa were going on, but the situation that today’s military is dealing with would have been considered a far-fetched fantasy back then. I was one of about two-dozen other top-notch young lieutenants. We were all Airborne and Ranger qualified, but more importantly, we all had an incredible passion for this unique experience with which we were presented. We traveled every chance we got, skiing in Italy, Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, running the marathon in Venice and Running with the Bulls in Spain, downing enormous liters of beer at the Oktoberfest in Munich, and partying in London, Berlin, Slovenia, Croatia, and Prague, and up and down the boot of Italy, ad infinitum.

I served as a rifle platoon leader, an 81mm Mortar Platoon leader, and a battalion Air Operations officer. While stationed overseas I participated in about 30 Airborne Operations in Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, serving as Jumpmaster on several occassions. I trained with a variety of international units, including while stationed in a designated “hazardous duty” zone in Turkey in the summer of 1997. I earned Belgian and Italian jump wings, the US Senior Parachutist badge, the Expert Infantryman’s Badge, the Army Commendation medal, and the Kosovo Campaign Medal. Notice I didn’t discuss actual operations in Kosovo? Not because they’re top secret, but because we all earned the ribbon for being in the area of operations and conducting limited support operations for helicopters based nearby during the Air Campaign portion of that conflict. My government salary was also tax-free during that conflict, so I wasn’t complaining. Eventually my unit eventually did conduct an airborne operation into Kosovo, but I had already returned to the United States by then.

I was promoted to Captain when I hit stateside in 1999. I finished out my service obligation stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, where I commanded a company of trainers at the US Army Airborne School.

As luck would have it, at Fort Benning I would also get my first taste of a major Hollywood film production.

To be continued…

RELATED POST: My Monkey and Me (Part Two).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under My Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.