Will the real derangedvisions please stand up?

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Hello everyone, I am @derangedvisions, and I been here on Steemit for 103 days now. My real name is Wes and I am a US Army veteran. The reason for this post is to introduce myself, and in the future there will be posts from those in the veteran community on Steemit that will be writing for the @shadow3scalpel account making their introductions as well.

The veteran community on Steemit is comprised of military veterans from all over the world. We all share one common thing, that we have given up part of our lives in serving the countries in which we live. It doesn't matter where we are, we are all brothers in arms and we understand the sacrifices that we have made.

Military Life

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I joined the military in 2000 as a combat engineer, but then re-classed to an Apache Helicopter Technician. As much as liked blowing things up with C-4 and all the other explosives we got to play with, I didn't like the idea of disarming mines in the middle of a minefield.

I think my wife, @faitherz33, took this picture about 15 years ago when we had just got to Ft. Hood, TX. This was before camera phones and digital cameras. Good old film days where you had to take your roll of film to a store and get it developed just to find out half of the pictures turned out looking like crap.

During my time in the military, I deployed to Iraq twice and spent a total of 30 months in combat.

During the down time in Iraq, I spent a lot of time boxing. That could be one reason I am so weird in the head, because I have been punched so many times. I am the one on the left.

After the military

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When I got out of the Army, we stayed in Texas and I became a police officer. In the picture below you can see how messed up my nose got from fighting, lol. Boxing and MMA took its toll on it and I don't even know how many times it has been broken.

This was a pretty rewarding job, but it had its ups and downs. I worked a pretty bad area of the city that was full of drugs and violence, so I was exposed to some pretty bad things that people shouldn't have to see. It is unbelievable what humans can do to one another.

After being a cop in Texas for a while, we decided to move back to Utah to live near family. I worked in the state prison for a while managing the maximum security gang unit and also the mentally ill offenders. Eventually I grew tired of law enforcement all together and decided that it was time for me to go after my dreams.

This was when I decided to go back to school and do photography full time. Over the past few years I have been going to school for web development and design, then switched over to digital cinema and finished the first two years of that program in two semesters and now I have switched to photography full time to fine tune my skills.

I have my own photography business and my own media/design company and it is nice to be my own boss. I think that is one thing that all veterans are striving towards is having their own business so they don't have anyone else to answer to except themselves.

I was lucky enough to travel to Africa last year and document the efforts of a nonprofit organization for a month while we lived among the Maasai in their village.

I met some amazing people while I was there and have been inspired to start my own humanitarian efforts across the globe.

These three farm boys were some of my favorite children that I met while I was there. After I took some pictures of them outside, I spent the next few hours playing with them inside the church during the service and also outside with a hand made ball that they had.

What am I doing on Steemit?

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Here on Steemit I am sharing my photography and the occasional video that I put together. I have seen the power that this platform has for humanitarian work, so I have started my own photography contests called Deranged Photography Contest that I am using to help people from all over the world by rewarding their efforts.

I am also raising funds for other various humanitarian projects worldwide. I am hoping that everything falls into place for the most recent project I am teaming up with others on the platform for and if it does, I will make an announcement post about it, because it will be a huge service to the community we are hoping to help.

How can you help @shadow3scalpel?

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Every upvote you do on each @shadow3scalpel post goes towards supporting the worldwide community of veterans here on the Steemit platform. Shadow3scalpel has a curation trail that can be found on SteemAuto.

Now simply click on Follow and you should be able to set the amount of voting power you'd like to allocate to the Veteran's Curation Trail. Somewhere around 5-10% would make a big difference to our veterans.

If you would rather delegate to Shadow3scalpel, your delegation will go towards supporting all of the veterans posts. You can click any of the links below to delegate:

50 SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP,5000SP.

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Thank you for taking the time to read a little about me and for supporting @shadow3scalpel. If you wish to know where my name came from you can check out my Steemit Name Challenge where I explain the background of Deranged Visions. The post is quite old, so be sure not to waste VP on voting for it.

You can always check out my personal blog for more of my shenanigans.

Be sure to follow @shadow3scalpel to stay up to date with everything that is going on with Steemit's Veteran Community.