How would you want to leave your mark on your time in service? Would it be a universal mark? Or a personal mark?

I would invent a hat that the entire US Army would love... probably edible.

As an enlisted man, I knew that I would never be able to rewrite policy. I did know that I could do my best for my guys though. I gauged the mark that I left on the military by the ways that I taught my Soldiers to be better than they were when I first met them. If they can say that I taught them something that they didn't know before, that I helped them through something that was difficult, if I gave them an opportunity that no one else would have given them, it is stuff like this that I measured just how much I impacted the military. My guys, and their subsequent success was, and still is, how I measure how well I did. The highest rank that I ever held was Sergeant E-5; many of my Soldiers have been Staff Sergeants for quite some time now. I like that. I can't wait to see them put on E7.

You'll know if you made a difference while in military, if your old buddies try to make contact with you years later, after you've left.