This week we’re hearing from Adam Foutch, who lives in Anchorage.
FOUTCH: My family moved up here when I was like 6 months old, and right now I am the only member of my family up here. I am a student. I went and just got out of active duty army a couple years ago, came back to Alaska and been a full-time student for two years — finished my bachelor’s and working on my master’s now. I got my bachelor’s in history. I want to teach history at a high school level.
I’m probably a little more towards military history or at least conflicts, just because in some ways you can view peace punctuated by war, but it’s pretty easy to go the opposite way of war punctuated by peace because there’s always people fighting over something. People don’t necessarily always think about cause and effect or how we got to a certain point. But if you go through enough history and learn it you can kind of see how we got here, where we might be going, or at least understand the reasoning of how things happened, and I think that’s a really good skill to impart to kids.
My first deployment to Iraq was definitely interesting. That was ’06 and ’07 — fifteen months. And for a lot of that time my platoon of like 40 guys, we had a three story house in the middle of a run-down city. Actually, by the time we left it was pretty good. And then the Marines took over afterwards and bad things happened. The Marines weren’t very flexible.
I mostly grew up here and I think it just helped me learn that you have to go and be prepared for things. The world isn’t always going to be how you want it; you have to go and adapt to the world.
Alaska is home. I prefer to stay up here. People I’ve noted either tend to want to stay or want to leave. There’s not a whole lot of middle ground. People understand that they’re still part of the food chain, and they have to go and deal with more than just their little needs. You have to think about survival slightly all the time. Especially growing up here, you learn what precautions to take. Most people who want to stay up here learn the basic precautions, at least for the area they are going to be in. Alaska, while beautiful, can be very harsh.
