It was definitely an interesting diversification of my education; I had begun programming independently, and not really developed any impressive skills; nor did I get any security clearance required for continuing to write software. However, the middle year of my service consisted mostly of doing QA with one of the contractors that had sold to the ministry of defense the old dream of a connected battlefield, information flowing from the radars through the touchscreen and even out the tubes. The grand vision was implemented in a dozen different ways by various hardware and software that contractors were busy updating as quickly as the government could pay them to create new bugs while keeping diligent track of the familiar ones.