“We were all going to go and do this together,” Weiss, of Fort Dodge, said. “And none of us ever went to the same base. One got out and my other friend, we were on opposite ends of the planet the entire time.”

Weiss enlisted in the Army in October 1992 and completed his basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

“If you like sand and a New Jersey accent, it’s great,” he joked.

Weiss trained as a forward observer for artillery and was stationed in Germany as soon as he graduated boot camp.

“When I was there, everybody was starting to do rotations for the Kosovo-UN mission,” he said. “So all of our training was to prepare for going to Kosovo.”

By the time his unit was called up for a rotation in Kosovo, Weiss received orders to head back stateside to Fort Carson, Colorado.

“I’m laughing like, ‘Have fun in Kosovo,'” he said. But he wasn’t laughing for long.

“I get to my assignment in Colorado and they’re like, ‘Don’t even unpack, we just got orders and we’re going to Kuwait in two months,'” Weiss said.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was building up his forces and the U.S. military was deploying to Kuwait as a show of force.

“We sat basically parked in the desert, 70 miles from the border,” Weiss said. “And we’re basically told if anything comes across that desert, shoot at it.”

During his six years of service, Weiss enjoyed the amount of travel and all the different missions and projects he volunteered to do.

“I just took every opportunity I could,” he said. “I got to do a training where we basically timed how long it would take a battalion to get loaded on a ship and be deployable.”

Weiss and his crew loaded an entire battalion on a train to ship from Colorado to San Francisco, where the battalion vehicles and equipment were loaded onto semi trucks and driven to the harbor to be loaded onto a cargo ship.

“And we did it in like a week,” he said. “They were expecting it to take months.”

The biggest impact his military service had on him, Weiss said, was during his last year of enlistment when he was chosen to be part of the Fort Carson Honor Guard.

“Every day, we were on assignment to do military funerals for veterans or soldiers that had died,” he said.

At first, Weiss was nervous about his new assignment.

“I was so terrified that we were going to mess something up,” he said. “And we went and we did it and everything came up perfect.”

After a year of military funerals, each service was just as hard and emotional as the last.

“From the first day to the last day, you still get that lump,” Weiss said. “When the shots are fired and TAPS plays and you’re folding the flag and presenting it.”

Soon, Weiss plans to visit his old stomping grounds in Germany. He and his wife are planning on visiting their daughter and son-in-law, who are stationed at another military base in Germany, for the holidays. Weiss said he plans to make a trip to see the now-decommissioned military base he spent so much time at in the 1990s.