If you were to ask a random person on the street, whether the United States is currently at war, what do you think they'd say? Maybe, not technically, kind of? The U.S. military is in a kind of limbo right now. That's actually been pretty typical over the last several decades. We haven't declared a formal war against anyone, but military activity is happening.

Service members are training all the time, and just a few weekends ago, some of them did drop

bombs on another country, Iran. This quote-unquote peacetime activity has me thinking about a few

things. First of all, peacetime in the U has me thinking about a few things.

First of all, peacetime in the U.S. is actually pretty active.

And I've also been thinking about what it's like to serve in the military during these in-between times.

What are people looking for when they enlist?

What do they hope to achieve?

How do they look back on their combat experiences when they don't have a war to ground it in?

This week, I talked to someone who can shed light on those questions. Dr. Ray Christian served in the Army for 20 years. He's about to turn 65 this month, and he joined the Army right out of high school in 1978.

A few years after the end of the Vietnam War, and he retired in 1998 before 9-11 ushered in a new era of military activity.

Ray was an infantryman, a paratrooper, and even a drill sergeant at one point, he has lots of badges and medals.

And like a lot of his fellow service members, he's also been diagnosed with PTSD.

Ray talked to me about his military service from Boone, North Carolina, the college town of about 20,000 people that's home to Appalachian State University. Ray lives there with his wife,

surrounded by goats, chickens, and a revolving cast of other farm animals. And he told me what his

service was like, how it involves secretive combat missions and dangerous training drills.

And when it was over, how hard it was for him to find his place outside the

military. Ray tried law school and failed out, and then discovered a passion for history and

storytelling, and eventually got multiple graduate degrees. Today, he's both an academic and a

frequent storyteller on big-name podcasts and radio shows like The Moth, Snap Judgment, and Risk, and Ray has his own podcast called What's Ray Saying that I really like listening to?

But before Ray Christian was a public radio storyteller, he was a kid growing up in a segregated black neighborhood in Richmond,

Virginia, trying to figure out how to get his life started. Like a lot of poor teenagers, the most

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