First Army's Lt. Gen. Tucker to retire
By Matthew Martinez
What started out a short-term plan to join the Army became a career that spanned more than four decades. Now, as First Army’s Lieutenant General Michael Tucker prepares for retirement, he is sharing some of the most memorable parts of his career with Local 4’s Emily Scarlett on the Rock Island Arsenal: Inside the Gates.
“There’s truth in the adage that time flies when you’re having fun because I feel like it was just yesterday that I joined the Army,” says First Army’s Lieutenant General Michael Tucker. It was actually 44 years ago that he joined the U.S. Army. “There was a poster, recruiting poster, in my high school, and it said, ‘Join the Army and be all you can be.” He was just 17-years-old in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. It started out as a three-year plan, but he liked the challenge. Tucker says, “In all the military services, they will not allow to be stagnant. You have to move up, or you’ll move out. In order to move up you have to be competitive. To be competitive you have to be good at what you do. You know it’s kind of up to you. The Army – as all the military services – are full of opportunities. It’s just up to the individual if they want to reach their hand out and open the door.” The real challenge came in 1991 while fighting in the Gulf War. Tucker and his team ran into the Medina Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard, their elite troops. “It ended up being the largest tank battle in the history of the United States. 182 tanks, 204 armored personnel carriers destroyed,” says Tucker. Now with less than two weeks before his retirement, today, he says it is time to settle down. “I wasn’t always there for my kids as they group up. I was deployed. I was away, and now I have five grandchildren. And so, I’m still able. I’m still healthy, and I want to spend time with my grandchildren in a way that I wasn’t able to spend time with my own kids.” In 2007, when a scandal broke out of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. surrounding unsatisfactory conditions for wounded warriors, Tucker was once again called to the front lines. That is coming up next week, on Rock Island Arsenal: Inside the Gates.
