If you have ever served in the military, or know someone who has, you have more than likely heard horror stories about bureaucracy snafus. Some of these are legendary...and some are a real pain in the backside!

One day in February of 1991, my mother is watching footage of the ground assault into Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. Mom answers, hoping it's a neighbor or a friend.

Instead, she sees a casualty notification officer, who gently tells her that her son was killed in action.

Mom takes the news as well as can be expected...she just has this feeling that the Army is wrong. Mother's instinct, faith, who knows...

Meanwhile, as my people are in mourning, I'm in Iraq, watching from a hilltop as the First Armored Division's Third Brigade kicks some Republican Guard ass. We had had one causalty...CPT Paul Mason in S-2/S-3 had gotten some shrapnel in his eye from a land mine explosion, but the medics removed the sliver, patched him up, and later he got the Purple Heart. I have no idea of my alleged death.

Somewhere around this time, the Army realizes that it made a BIG mistake. A soldier in the First Brigade of the Third Armored Division, a soldier with nearly the same Social Security Number as me, had gotten killed...somewhere along the line, a miskeyed number...and as a result, my family got the news that I had made the supreme sacrifice for my country.

I find this out a few days later, when I get the chance to call home. "Mom, if I'm dead, then I sure didn't make it to heaven, cause I've gone to the devil." Or words to that effect.

It didn't end there. My younger brother was convinced I was dead, and that every time I called or wrote home, it was really an impostor. Not until a year later, when the family came to visit me at my Stateside duty station of Fort McClellan, Alabama, was the kid convinced I was alive.

Isn't bureaucracy wonderful?