Timothy Ahern

At the tail end of the Vietnam War I volunteered for the US Army Chaplain's Corps, wherein they asked me to serve with paratroopers. Suicide was off the charts back then as it is today. My goal was to seek out the most stressful place, find that paratrooper who had been pushed to his limit, and defuse the whole situation. It was intense, very, very intense. I saw a lot of confusion and hate in the world and I vowed to help fix it. Accordingly, when I was released from active duty I set out to go to college to learn German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and New Testament Greek. I managed to fit in one course in Swahili. Those were Vietnam War days, so when I visited the Federal building in my city the clerk actually threw the application for the State Department at me. It was discouraging. Not far from that were both the Chinese embassy and the Japanese embassy. I visited the Chinese embassy, back in the day when they were not hiring, and then the Japanese embassy. The Japanese official actually asked me, "When can you leave for Japan?" It is a very long story, but I worked on problems in the Japanese school systems. Eventually, my resume was put on the desk of a high ranking fellow in the United Nations. He had a serious problem and he wanted me to help him fix it. The task was in Africa. Well, after we fixed it, I began looking for serious problem in my own country, and I looked for something that would shift me from a global task to a micro, personal task. So I asked myself, "Where is the region in the USA with the highest rate of unemployment?" It turned out at that time it was in Alaska. "Hum," I asked myself, "Could one chap help do something about that?" Hey, come on, if a "white dude" can get himself a job in Africa, why can't the same fellow land a job in an Alaska Native Corp in the middle of nowhere? All of it, from the day I asked to serve the paratroopers to the last day that I served my Alaskan Native community, it was all one big adventure. Today, these days, I am an old graduate student just about ready to finish an MA in Ancient History.