A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY!

2012-01-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

Welcome... to the site, the blog, the book(s)-to-be, entitled "A Sheep In Wolf's Clothing."

It's the story of a guy -- namely, me -- who went into the United States Air Force in 1977 a "98-pound weakling" who just wanted to "play with airplanes" for a living, but who found himself, a year later, jumping out of airplanes instead. How did such a socially inept, unscarred, high school marching band geek, Chess Club nerd, piano-playin', teetotalin' mama's boy wind up with a parachute on his back, a knife in his teeth, and a team of America's finest warriors following him out of the aircraft's jump door into the night? That's what this story is all about.

In its final published form (and this little 'opus' is still under construction), this will be a collection -- or 'anthology' -- of chronologically sequential short stories that cover the entire process of this life-changing transition, from leaving my pampered civilian life and getting "broken in" at Basic Training, to physically re-inventing myself, and fighting my way into the ranks of America's military elite. I never belonged there -- I never really fit in or felt comfortable there -- but I had GOTTEN there somehow, and had to daily prove myself worthy of being there... a challenge for anyone, the trial of a lifetime for me.

And somewhere in there, I felt there was a story to share.

The "Table of Contents" is over there in the right-side margin, under "SHORT STORIES: in chronological order." Each story has been listed sequentially, so reading them in numerical order will give you the full straight-through storyline. Just click on each title to go directly there. The most recent posting is listed just above this Table of Contents under "This ain't your daddy's blog," so if you just want to check into what's new, click on that title.

You'll find the story behind this project described just below the Table of Contents under "JUST SO'S YA' KNOW," and the background story about me laid out in the "002 - Author's Note," listed in the Table of Contents. A few of the individual short stories even have pictures.

I've still got a bunch of writing left to go, and, without some major wholesale editing, this project, in its entirety, will likely wind up in the 900- to 1,000-page range. Hence the reason for breaking it up into individual short stories -- I'll be able to break the total anthology up into a series of smaller anthologies: maybe a trilogy of 300-pagers. Who knows!

Please feel free to leave comments on any or all of the stories. I need all the input I can get on what works and what doesn't, what can go and what can stay, and trust me, I'll read them all.

In the meantime, thanks for visiting.

What an honor, for me.

Steve Stipp (a.k.a. GreatHairySilverback)
February 22nd, 2009

1 - PROLOGUE

2011-12-31T18:51:00.000-08:00

CASE IN POINT
A Prologue

So, I stumble back into our campsite, numbed as much from boredom as from the wet cold of mid-December in the Ozarks. The ten surviving members of our original sixteen-man Combat Control School class have just spent the last two stultifying hours huddled around a field-portable TACAN—that’s a TACtical Air Navigation beacon—learning how to tote, assemble, and operate the huge God be-damned monstrosity under a day-long freezing overcast. As for me, the only thing I think I’ve gotten out of the whole miserable exercise is about an hour-and-a-half of a standing nap.
I am exhausted and utterly demoralized. The only thing that’s gotten me through this day at all is the fact that it’s the eighth day out of the final ten that we have to spend in the field before graduation. And even that is something I couldn’t possibly care less about anymore.
My feet are wet and frozen into muddy popsicles. My camouflaged fatigues are crusted and torn and damp—both sets—which makes changing my sodden clothes a completely useless gesture. I’m hungry, sore, cold, wet, and dead tired, and I’ve only taken a shit twice in the eight days we’ve been out here. All I want to do right now is get off my feet, and slip off into blessed oblivion, mentally reciting the last of my desperate mantras, “In three days this will all be a memory. In three days this will all be a memory. In three days…”
But it is not to be.
As I shuffle up to the dead coals of our abandoned fire, one of the instructors marches into our circle of tents. His weapons and web gear, canteens and ammo pouches clank and clatter proudly. His cammies still have their starched creases, for cryin’ out loud. Mine don’t look that good when I first pick them up at the dry cleaners.
Now, I’m about as low on the student food chain as you can get, and I am grateful for that anonymity at times like these. Apparently, one of our poor, abused student NCOs is about to get him a Grand Atomic Wedgy for some trivial oversight—one of us lower ranking slobs probably has his socks on inside-out, or something critical like that—and, as usual, it will be a public spectacle. I don’t have the energy to pay it any attention though, and I begin the slow, groaning, creaking descent to my sitting spot on the log beside the charcoal mud of our late great “campfire.”
But the instructor grabs my elbow just as I’m reaching the half-stooped phase of my hunker, and announces, loudly enough for anyone within gunshot range to hear, “Airman Stipp! Your frag! The truck leaves in twenty minutes! Better hustle!”
He stuffs a piece of paper into my hand—my Fragmentary Order, or “frag”—claps me hard on the back (everybody in gunshot range probably heard that too), and marches off into the mists again.
Wha’? Is this some kind of joke?
In the center of a slowly contracting circle of fellow classmates then, I stare dumbfounded at the dirty wad of Xerox paper in my hand. These are mission orders. The kind that high commanders hand to lower commanders, but commanders all! This is a clinical summary of a tactical situation that must be resolved immediately, by a team of “elite specialists”—namely, us—led by…who? Me? They’re giving me the frag? I look around like they’ve just dropped a dead rat into my palm. What am I supposed to do with this? A lowly airman. The lowliest airman in the bunch, in fact. I’m the class joke, the clueless FNG, the annoying deadweight that keeps pulling down the grade curve.
And now they’ve decided to hand this, the final and most difficult frag of the curriculum, to me?
Of course! That’s precisely why they’ve chosen me to hand it to.
“Well, what’s it say?” It’s Greg Dorn, one of the three rookies that came here with me from the McChord Team—my home base—trying to goose me out of my stupor. I mentally stumble back on track, and read aloud from the paper.
“Southeast Command advises: Green Beret team egressing from hostile territory with multiple prisoners and wounded. Will require mass evac at earliest possible time. Insert one ten-man Combat Control Team (that’s us) to Drop Zone Delta (map insert 1), ingress overland five kilometers to Rendezvous Point Echo (map insert 2). Make contact with friendlies, establish a secure perimeter, and set up a 3,500 foot LZ (that’s a Landing Zone—basically just a dirt runway), with full lighting and UHF comm for night recovery ops. CCT will direct and protect the C-130 extraction aircraft through landing, loading, and departure, then police the area and egress on foot. Action to commence immediately.”
I look up, my mouth hanging open. Most of the class—the other lowly airmen, at least—are watching me, waiting for words to issue forth. The four student NCOs (sergeants)—by rank, the official class leaders—just scowl at me, as if this was all some scheme of mine to steal their moment of glory. I am fully prepared to hand it over to them though, while I go trotting off into the woods to take my third crap of the week, which has suddenly become an urgent priority for me again. But that will not happen.
“Okay then,” says Greg, trying to jump-start me again, “Tell us what to do.”
God bless his enthusiastic little heart.
My mind whirls into action—in much the same way a helicopter might spin up to speed if none of its moving parts were actually bolted together—and I start fumbling through impromptu assignments. Fortunately, a couple of my fellow Little Fish are right beside me the whole way, offering suggestions.
“You’ll need two pricks,” says Goebler (by which he means PRC-77s… heavy backpack radios) “one primary, one back-up.”
“Uh, yeh,” I reply.
“I’ll take one,” says Torrero, volunteering from the back of the circle.
“Okay,” I answer, really taking the bull by the horns now.
I half-heartedly get everyone moving, rummaging through their gear for their standard combat loads while I formulate a rough outline of a plan. Greg says he’ll pack my stuff up for me, since I’m going to be real busy, then he disappears with the rest, leaving me standing by the dead campfire, scribbling notes on the back of the frag.

With five minutes left to go, and the big deuce-and-a-half truck idling noisily nearby, I finally complete my computations. Several of the guys have already tossed their gear onto the canvas-shelled bed of the truck, and are now hopping and stomping and chuffing great skirls of steam into the chilly air in front of me. I notice none of the NCOs are among them. Now, referring constantly to my notes, I send them running to gather up the mission-specific stuff. I’ve calculated exactly how many lights we’ll need to sufficiently outline a 3,500 foot runway, and figured out how many each man will have to carry in his own rucksack to get them all to the LZ without killing anybody. I know how many red and green lens covers we’ll need to mark the approach and departure ends of the runway. We’ll need extra batteries for the PRCs, pen flares, and some fundamental weather gear for the air traffic control part of the operation… defused Claymores, trip flares, and extra ammo for the perimeter defense part. As I call out each item—over the protestations of the impatient instructors waiting by the truck—someone darts out of the crowd, and rounds it up. Until, at last, everything on my list has been called and loaded.
And twenty-two minutes after receiving the frag, all ten of us, along with a small mountain of equipment, are huddled under the tarp canopy of the truck, and the tailgate is being slammed shut. The truck jerks into gear with a whistling diesel sound, and we pull out through the bushes onto the nearby dirt road.
It’s a forty-five minute drive from our field encampment to the airfield at Little Rock Air Force Base, forty-five minutes that I spend trying to finalize my calculations while we barrel down the road, rifling a fifty-mile-an-hour wind chill through the group. I am shivering violently, and my penchant for motion sickness is making it tough to look at my list for longer than a few seconds at a time while the truck is rolling. I finally give up, still about a half hour out from the base, and concentrate instead on fending off the razor-edged cut of the wind.
And that’s when it really hits me. I mean, I’d understood it before, but now it’s really starting to sink in. I, Airman Steve Stipp, the lowliest of the low in this hardcore, cutthroat class of ate-up warrior wannabes, have just been given a frag, the last frag of the course. And they’ve given me only twenty minutes to prepare for it—plus these forty-five nearly useless minutes of hurtling through the snow-dappled Ozarks on the way to the base. And that’s just plain unfair!
Granted, they had warned us at the beginning of this final field portion of the class that during these ten days, we would have to get in five combat-load parachute jumps in order to graduate, two of them night jumps. Each of these jumps would then play a component role in each of the five frag scenarios they’d be handing out during that time. And in each case, 24 hours before each scheduled jump, a frag would be issued to one of our class leaders—one of our valiant non-commissioned officers, or NCOs—who would then have those 24 hours to thoroughly plan their op prior to actually executing it the following day. Ten days, five jumps, two days for each.
But we only have four NCOs in our class now. You do the math.
We used to have five, but the senior and most team-spirited among them—Sergeant Cooper, our original “class leader”—self-eliminated when, in only his second week at the school, he went and played racquetball without goggles, but with his contacts in. Naturally—almost invariably—he took a shot right in the eye, damaged it, and was med-evac’ed home. And then there were four.
We had presumed that one of those remaining NCOs—probably Sergeant Haley, the next most senior among them—would just have to handle a second frag, whether he wanted to or not, just to meet our quota of five frags and five jumps. That had seemed reasonable. One of the few advantages of being the resident cannon fodder in a group like this is that you never have to worry about this level of crap. It’s all above your pay grade.
So much for that tonight.
In a fit of creative spite apparently, the instructors have decided that this last one should go to the dweeb at the bottom of the totem pole instead. C’est moi. The weather’s been bad all day, so probably no jump will happen anyway, and higher winds are expected with the fall of night. That should clear out the fog and the overcast, but will probably cancel the parachute portion of the program precisely because of the higher wind velocity. So, as long as the jump itself isn’t going to happen, wouldn’t it be fun to watch the class goober flounder and drown as the anvils are tossed in on him?
And why stop with a mere LZ establishment? Let’s make it a night drop! In surly weather! On short notice! Incredibly short notice—twenty minutes instead of twenty-four hours! And let’s throw in a five-mile covert overland march to get from the DZ (Drop Zone) to the LZ (the Landing Zone)! Just for the hell of it! Let’s really bury this dork! And that’s exactly what they’ve done… stood me at the bottom of the silo, and dumped in the fertilizer. Apparently they’re planning on filling it all the way up to the top too.

The gray sunset fades to darkness as we lumber through the base and onto the flightline. Our classrooms and parachute rigging tables are in a hangar right off the main parking apron. Everyone is frozen and stiff as the tailgate bangs open and we clamber down onto the pavement. I “order” a chain of men to pass the gear from the truck to the warm hangar, and the unloading passes quickly.
Inside, the instructors graciously allow us ten minutes to thaw out and take a leak, to fill our canteens and batten down our equipment. I spend this time furiously scribbling more notes, and allocating gear and tasks to each individual man, including myself. Greg nobly volunteers to prep my parachute for me. Just as well. Since I’m the one who originally packed it—seven weeks ago in the parachute-packing phase of the class—I’m probably going to die tonight anyway.
When at last the instructor bellows for silence and calls me up to the blackboard to give my briefing, I’m still scribbling as I walk up the aisle. But I’ve got a rough battle plan assembled in my head, and by the time I reach the podium, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Again I recap the mission, state our objectives, draw a little map on the board, and point out our landmarks.
At 2130 (that’s 9:30pm, for the unenlightened), our C-130 drop ship will put us out over this DZ (a big open field within sight of our camp). Once on the ground, we will form up and head out, southbound, through these dense woods, for about five klicks (kilometers), until we reach this little dirt road here. If our night nav is on-target, we should hit the road right about here, where it runs straight as an arrow for a little over a mile. We just need 3,500 feet of that straightaway. Here the team will spread out, forming a rough defensive perimeter around our runway-to-be, five men to a side.

Each man will have X-amount of Elco lights (the portable runway lights) that he will be responsible for placing at the appropriate interval down the length of the runway before assuming his defensive position. The lights will remain off until radio contact has been made with the inbound aircraft, at which time, in sequence (so as not to completely abandon all our defensive positions at the same time), each man will return to activate his assigned lights.
I address each man on the team individually, one by one, by name, telling him specifically what he’ll be carrying, what he’ll need to do with it when he gets there, and where his defensive station will be. I lay out our order of march, assigning a point man, a rear guard, two flankers, a second radioman, a compass man, and a pacer (the guy who counts our steps, and keeps track of the distance we’ve traveled on foot).

It takes just under fifteen minutes to deliver my little oratory. But when it’s done, I’m actually feeling pretty damned good about it. It’s a viable plan—downright brilliant, considering the absurd time constraints on my preparations—and everyone seems to have absorbed it well, if not a little grimly. Even the instructors have nothing to say when I’m done except, “All right ladies, let’s mount up.”
I let out a shaky sigh of relief, and head back to my seat. Greg claps me on the shoulder, and hands me my readied parachute. Good old Greg.
For most of another fifteen minutes then, the room fills with all the snapping, clicking, bonking, shuffling, stomping sounds of a military machine assembling itself, as the gear is disseminated per my instructions, and each man packs it up and dons his individual battle armor.
And when I’m done, I’m one heavy little bastard myself.
In addition to my fifty pound parachute, harness, and reserve, I’ve got all my web gear hanging from its own belt and harness, including a red-lensed flashlight, a K-Bar combat knife, two pouches of .22 blank ammunition (three banana-clips of thirty rounds each to a pouch), a compass and med kit, plus a canteen that I don’t notice (until too late) is empty. In addition, almost thirty pounds of runway lights, lens covers, and flares fill my rucksack to bursting.
My GAU-5 (which rhymes with “cow-drive,” by the way)—the chopped down Special Forces variant of the ubiquitous M-16 assault rifle—is slung over one shoulder, barrel-down, flash suppressor pointed down my leg and tied to my rigging with what amounts to a thin shoestring. And because I’m to be the glorious commander of this ship of fools, I also get to carry one of the two PRC-77s, which will ride on my back like a car battery once I’m on the ground. And don’t forget the layers of cold weather jackets and thermies, plus my field cap, jump helmet, and goggles. I’ve also painted my face to look like a freshly tossed salad.
If nothing else, I certainly look the part of a real Action Jackson field commander.
I’m exhausted and dazed and nervous, but I’ve got a tenuous feeling that I actually might have pulled this one off, despite all their efforts to overwhelm me, and despite the fact that nothing has actually happened yet. And when, at last, we troop out the doors, through a sharp and stiffening wind—under abruptly clear skies, studded with stars and fast moving cotton puffs of clouds torn from the previous overcast—I’m marching, with no small amount of pride, at the head of this column of noble lunatics.
My noble lunatics, at least for the next couple of hours.
It’s the only good moment of the day for me. And the last one of the night. Unbeknownst to me, one great fistful of Cosmic Shit is, at this very moment, hitting one huge Karmic Fan somewhere. And guess who’s standing downrange, innocently looking the wrong direction.
As I tromp up the C-130’s troop ramp, that all too familiar stench of JP-4 jet fuel wafts out of the windowless cargo hold, and reminds me to take some Dramamine before the flight. This is when I discover that my canteen is empty. I’d been too busy back in the hangar to fill it up. So I toss the vile things down my throat now, dry, bitter, and sticking to the back of my tongue.
Only the beginning, my friend. Only the beginning.
One by one, the flight crew cranks over each of the four propellers, and soon the open cargo bay is reverberating with their heavy turbine roar. Escorted by one of the instructors, I make the rounds of “my men”—most of whom are still glowering impatiently at me—checking their straps and connections. I feel ridiculous.
At last I am back at my end of the troop seat—an appallingly uncomfortable cloth-and-pipe “bench” that runs the length of each side of the compartment—and belted in. We start to taxi, the ramp whines closed, the lights dim to red, and I close my eyes (yet another defense mechanism to fend off the inevitable motion sickness). We trundle and bump over the uneven pavement for several minutes, then we rock to a stop, run the engines up through their final checks, and taxi into position on the runway.
For some reason, we sit there an inordinately long time. But I don’t care. My eyes are closed, my earplugs are in, and I’m breathing deep and slow… until two of our instructors burst into the middle of the compartment, screaming for everyone to get up and out. Now!
Did we take-off already? No, but we are abandoning ship, right here, right now.
I don’t feel quite as bad about my own stupidity when I see nearly every other man on the plane bouncing up and down in their seats for the next several seconds. For we’ve all managed to release at least one wrong buckle in our haste to unbelt and evacuate. We’re covered in buckles after all, and just about everyone seems to be getting repeatedly yanked back down into their seats as they pop connectors, only to discover that it’s not their seatbelt clasps they’ve released. After several embarrassing failed attempts to stand up, I finally release myself, snatch up my rucksack from the center pile, and join the queue for the exit door.
But there are no inflatable slides on a military aircraft. No ladders or rolling stairs either. Just a six foot drop to the concrete, wearing over a hundred pounds of gear, in the dark, and on legs (and arches) stiff from the cold. I crunch to the ground next to the guy in front of me, and we both limp off the runway into the grass. Fire trucks are already wailing their way out to us.

What the hell?
They sit us in the grass with our backs against our chutes and rucks, and we watch as the little Keystone Kop parody plays out in front of us. It lasts for more than half an hour, until they declare the aircraft safe enough to be towed back to the parking apron. A blue “bread van” pulls up, and takes the flight crew back to the ramp to crank up another C-130. We, on the other hand, are left to chill even further in the tall wet grass.
A tug drags the first plane away—smoke in the cockpit, they finally tell us—the fire trucks pack up and leave, and we’re left alone under the stars. The wind is brisk and uneven, almost hesitant, but still full of frigid bluster. And the grass is wet. But it’s now after 10:00pm, and no other aircraft are due in or out, so they leave us right where we are to await our new aircraft.
Eventually, a new C-130 thrums and drones over to us, stopping, once again, in take-off position on the runway. I stagger to my feet, and join the others in their slow shuffle over to the lowered cargo ramp. I don’t even pretend to be interested in my team’s snaps and buckles this time, and plop down immediately into my rearmost seat.
At something like a quarter till eleven then, we finally lumber into the sky, and turn toward our drop zone. It should be a ridiculously short flight—after all, it only took forty-five minutes to drive it in a loaded deuce-and-a-half—but the repercussions from that cosmic collision of feces and fan have only just begun to reveal themselves.
As predicted by our resident pessimists back at the camp, the wind has stiffened yet again, ricocheting through the mountains and chopping up the skies into turbulent pockets of twenty and thirty mile an hour gusts. The legal wind “speed limit” for jumping with the standard round parachutes that we are wearing is thirteen miles an hour. And the winds are way over that. But the instructors are yet hopeful, and decide to keep circling until some magical lull presents itself. Our tactical static-line jump altitude is only 1,500 feet—barely above the dark mountaintops, and plowing right through the worsening turbulence—so the ride has now not only lengthened, but it has noticeably roughened as well. And there’s only so much my closed eyes and a pair of dry Dramamine can handle.
Now, as time stretches out, and the ten-minute flight slowly elongates to twenty, then thirty, then forty minutes, “matter” finally triumphs over “mind,” and my scrumptious lunch decides to return for an encore (I’d missed dinner in the scramble to set up this glorious mission). I am prepared for this, at least. And after about ten minutes of my usual futile attempts at resistance—which really only drags out the misery while things rise to their inevitable conclusion—I toss my cookies into the requisite bag and lean back, sweating and pasty faced, but at last relieved of that burden. We are required to carry our barf out the door with us though, so I spend a moment securing my little treasure so that it can be easily reached at jump time.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re still battering our way through the invisible moguls with no end in sight, and I’m begging the loadmaster for another bag. Having witnessed my previous performance, he is able to locate several more, and gives them all to me.
I use one almost immediately. A little liquid, but mostly dry heaves. The effort leaves me weak, dizzy, and thirsty though, and all I can think about is how much I’d really like the instructors to just give up on this one. Let’s just turn around and land. Either that or shoot me. Give me some live ammo, and I’ll do it myself.
But no. If they put off this mission until tomorrow night, I’ll have too much time to perfect my dazzling marching orders, and what kind of fun would that be?
Twenty more wretched minutes jostle by as this blind, stinking, droning machine blunders through the bumpy skies. And I am audibly moaning now. Though the vibration of a good gentle moan is usually fairly therapeutic in the quelling of an upset stomach, tonight it’s doing nothing. But the fact is, I just don’t care anymore. I am miserable with a capitol F, and I can’t believe my gut is boiling yet again, preparing for yet another reprise of its trademark Technicolor Yawn®.
This time it’s all dry heaves and spastic abdominal muscles. I twitch and convulse for another couple of minutes, and finally collapse with my empty barf bag in hand. I am utterly drained, sweating like a triathlete, and tumbling at the nexus of a world that is now spinning wildly around me. I want to weep, but I haven’t got the energy. Or the fluids.
So, naturally, this is when the more malicious of our instructor cadre marches into the middle of the bouncing cargo bay, and, holding up three fingers on one hand, and a closed fist on the other (to show us what 13 looks like), announces that the winds are now at “thirteen knots!” His sinister grin belies the rather amazing coincidence that the winds should just happen to be at exactly the maximum allowable jump velocity—because, of course, they aren’t. They haven’t lessened a single knot. We’re still slamming through the same twenty-mile-an-hour buffets we have been for the last hour-and-a-half. Our instructors have simply tired of the circling, not to mention the re-runs of me blowing phantom chunks into that same empty bag, and have opted to just get this over with.
“Hook up!” he yells.
I swoon to my feet, somehow fumble my leaden rucksack onto its hooks under my reserve chute, tighten my helmet strap, snap my static line onto the anchor cable overhead, collect up my barf bags, and lurch my way down the bucking floor to the side jump door.
The lead instructor hauls the door open as I approach, unleashing a raw shaft of hurricane-force wind into the compartment, and thrusts his head out into the thundering slipstream. Hands clutching both sides of the combing, he scans the pitch black universe outside. I watch him as if in a trance. The freezing torrent of air seems to have placated my stomach somewhat, but the dizziness is slow to subside.
The instructor waves me over to the door beside him.
Since I’m the dashing designated leader of this motley crew, this is the part where he shows me how to sight and time the exact moment of exit. The standard technique is for me, as the Head Honcho here, to wait for just the right instant, then signal my men to “Go! Go! Go!” I’ll stand on the opposite side of the doorway—right where the instructor is now, in the core of the wind tunnel—and usher each man out, following the last man into the void myself. Such was our teaching.
Still bleary-eyed and dopey though, I wobble into place next to the instructor, and follow his pointed finger out into the darkness. He’s shouting something about lights, but I lose most of it in the maelstrom. I can see what he’s pointing at though—a broad rectangle of four red lights, sliding through the solid black nothingness out there—the four corners of our drop zone, marked out by the instructors on the ground. It’s interesting to watch, but right now I’m mostly fixated on the revivifying effect of that screaming Arctic slipstream tearing past me in the doorway. It’s slowly clearing my head and scouring away the deep nausea. I do notice, however, that the drift of those four points is not bringing them any closer. Rather, they seem to be floating past us, like cars on the opposite side of a freeway divider. I’m puzzling this over in my swirling brain, when the instructor smacks my shoulder and shouts “Go!”
By this he means, “Get your men going!”
In my fading delirium however, I take it quite literally. And in a mindless lunge, I hurl myself bodily into the freezing ether. I am now, officially, a complete fucking idiot.
What the hell did I just do?!!
Rather than being the last out the door, I am the first.
For three seconds, I tumble through the hard, slick, icy air. Then I am hoisted upward, abruptly but smoothly, by the risers above my shoulders and the straps between my legs (never underestimate the importance of proper testicular placement prior to any jump). The savage roar of the wind is instantly snuffed, replaced by the snap, pop, and ruffle of an unfurling parachute canopy overhead.
And just like that, I am cured of all maladies and imbalances. I am invigorated, breathlessly alive, clear-headed—and most of a damned MILE away from the four red lights to my left! A mile! Okay, maybe a kilometer. I’m barely a thousand feet up in the air by now, sinking at 22 feet per second, under a chute that will contribute only 10 mph of forward speed to my travel over the ground. And I’m over the frappin’ Ozark Mountains and forests at nearly midnight, a kilometer from the damned DZ!
I am dead! And the rest of “my men” are probably all crowded around the jump door right now, laughing and pointing, drinking champagne, and watching my lonely, unbelievably stupid parachute recede into the abyss by itself.
Well, the least I can do is turn myself toward the distant drop zone, and try to get as close as I can before plowing into some invisible cliff face in the dark. I line myself up with the little red lights—which seem to be mysteriously winking on and off now, as if something were passing in front of them—then turn my attentions to my pack release (the so-called “Red Apple,” a big, red, wooden knob located under the reserve chute on my chest). I find it, and give it a vigorous heave upward. It releases, and my 75-pound rucksack falls away, jerking to a stop at the end of its 20-foot tether.
I am looking straight down, watching it plunge into the inky blackness below, when something huge whooshes by my feet going the other way… fast. I twist around in my harness to see what it was. And in the feeble starlight, I barely make out the soft, tree-studded swayback of a ridgeline, backing away and rising steadily above me.
I have just swooped over the top of a ridgeline separating our drop zone from the next valley over! They put me out over the wrong valley! Couldn’t that pilot see how far away the DZ lights were when he hit the “Go” button?
Jesus, I am really screw…
Then it dawns on me. The speed with which the ridgeline shot past me has given it away.
They put me out “over there” because the winds are still howling at over twenty F’ing miles an hour! They put me out way upwind to allow the winds to carry me back to where I was supposed to be. That ridgeline flashed by me so fast because my chute’s built-in 10 mph forward speed was being added to the wind’s twenty- to twenty-five mph velocity. I have to slow the fudge down, right now, before I slam into the ground at over thirty horizontal miles an hour!
Quickly, I haul down on my right toggle-line, and the parachute responds with a languid turn to the right. And once the red lights are at my back, I let go of the line. I’m traveling backwards now. The wind is still shoving me towards the DZ at at least 20 mph, but my chute is now countering it with its own 10 mph. Which means I’m still going to hit the invisible ground at more than 10 mph, dropping at 22 feet per second, and going backwards!
Oh, this is going to leave a mark.
But I’ve now done all that I can do, and I look back down between my frozen feet in one last desperate effort to forewarn myself of the impending impact. It’s just darkness down there though. I can barely make out my toes, and with a little imagination, I think I can see my rucksack swinging like a pendulum twenty feet further below.
Suddenly, I hear a distant crunch, and my attention is momentarily transfixed by my rucksack, which is now bouncing away ahead of me—behind me—pulling its line taut in the process. It has found the ground first. Of course! I should have…
WHAM!!! My heels catch something, and an instant later, my ass and head (apparently interchangeable on this night) smash into it in turn. With a bone-jarring crash and a bounce, I smack the ground like a great big camouflaged sack of loose change.
I hit and roll onto my side, most of the air bashed from my lungs. Ahead of me, I see my chute still fully and firmly inflated, dragging me towards the dark trees. My heavy rucksack is acting like an anchor though, furrowing its way along behind me, and slowing me down. And as I drag along between them, my stunned senses return enough for me to fumble for the riser-release buckles at each of my shoulders. They’re always such sticky sons-of-bitches, especially when there’s any tension on them. But tonight, the one on the left lets go right away. My chute goes limp, and flutters to the ground.
So do I.
“Oh… God… damn,” I gasp.
I don’t tarry long, though. One thing that’s been thoroughly hammered into us since the start of this school is to “Never Be The Last.” There are a hundred push-ups waiting for the last man to the rally point—for the last man to do anything, really. And even though I suspect I may well be the only person from that C-130 that is not still on board it right now, well… a hundred push-ups is a hundred push-ups.
I struggle to my feet, assessing my every ache and pain as I start to disconnect things. First, my chute. I withdraw the folded B-4 bag I’d stowed among my crotch straps, and drop it on the ground. I unhook my rucksack tether, and toss the cord into the bag. Then, swooping one arm under the chute’s risers, I start to march towards the deflated canopy, alternating the swoops until the entire length of suspension lines and silken folds are daisy-chained around my arms, from pits to wrists. I’m only halfway through the process though, when I hear a curious sound wafting across the grain of the wind. A snapping, fluttering sound, followed by a discreet “oh shit,” and that flaccid bag-o-meat ka-flump! that goes along with a body slamming to earth. A string of “ow’s” and “shits” and other gut-punched four-letter utterances accompany a bumping, scuffing, scraping sound, all of which implies another arrival—comparable to mine—of another gallant sky-trooper. At least it looks like I didn’t leap alone.
I hurry my post-jump ministrations, dump my gathered chute into the B-4 bag, break the shoestring moorings of my GAU-5 and set it aside, then shuck my harness and helmet, and zip them up with the rest of the parachute paraphernalia in the bag. Only my reserve chute—a tight little “loaf” of green bundled material, about the size of an over-stuffed shoebox—remains outside the bag. I take it now, and hook its two clips onto the handles of the loaded B-4 bag.
Thump! Crunch! “Aw Christ!” Scuffle, drag, bump. “Son of a…”
Ah, another valiant ally. I shrug my way, painfully, into my bloated rucksack, slap my field cap on my head, chamber a round, and sling the GAU. Then I heave the stuffed B-4 bag over my head, with the connected reserve chute pulled down under my chin, and begin the long tromp over to the instructor’s jeep, idling at the rally point.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh…” Ka-flump! Bump-da bump! “Ouch! Mother…!” Draaaag.
Just six more heroes to go. I accelerate to a jouncing, jangling, flopping trot. Don’t want to do no push-ups. Not tonight. Everything hurts enough as it is.
The continuing arrivals fade in volume as I near the cluster of vehicles, where they sit purring steam into the frosty breeze. A jeep (for the instructors), a deuce-and-a-half (to carry off our bags), and the obligatory Meat Wagon or “Field Ambulance” (in case of injuries). It’s the rules.
Whump! “Ah, fuck!” Somewhere behind me.
Swish! Crunch! Ba-wump! “Aaauurrgggh! Shit!”
Oh yes, the professionals are on the job tonight.
I jog right up to the deuce, and heft my B-4 bag onto its bed. And suddenly, the remaining weapons and bullets and canteens and coats and radios and rucksacks still hanging on my body don’t seem so heavy anymore. Just to impress the observers with my mission focus then, I immediately drop to one knee, shed the ruck, unlatch its top-flap, exposing the PRC, and begin to set it up. A distant “son of a bitch!” trickles through the engine noises, and another “shit!” or two.
Yes indeedy, the gang’s all here.
The radio powers up, and once its little foot-long antenna has been attached, I find our mission freq and make a little signal check, knowing that no one’s going to answer it. Then, demonstrably satisfied with the state of my communications, I hook the handset onto a D-ring on my web gear, package everything back up, and pitch it all back onto my aching shoulders again. As I do, a thin and lonely shout filters in from the outfield.
“Medic! Medic!”
Damn! And things were going so well.
Cigarette embers arc out of the Meat Wagon’s windows as they drop the thing into gear, and trundle off into the darkness. Its headlights come on a moment later.
In the meantime, a couple more of my guys jog into the rally point, heave their bags onto the deuce, and plod over to me, trying gamely to stifle their puffing and panting in front of the instructors. Nobody says a thing about my premature ejection from the aircraft.
“Son of a bitch,” a somewhat less than reverent shadow gasps, “There’s no way that was thirteen knots of wind up there.”
“Thirteen?” the instructor behind the wheel of the jeep chuckles, “More like twenty-three, probably twenty-five when you went out that door. What the hell’s wrong with you dumbasses?”
We all stare at him, dumbstruck and speechless, while the steam chugs from our mouths. Like it was our idea or something! Clearly he’s kidding, in a cruel kind of way, but I know he’s seriously testing Rocky’s self-restraint. Little Rocky—Ricky Spradlin—our class’s designated feisty runt. Barely five feet tall, wired and wiry, fun but volatile. It figures he’s one of the first to the rally point. But right now he’s glaring at the instructor as if debating between decapitation, castration, or just a good old country ass-whoopin’. Trained, experienced, or not, I’d be hard-put to give the instructor even odds against a wound-up-and-wailing Little Rocky.
Another heavily burdened figure lumbers out of the darkness, and collapses against the truck’s tailgate. It’s Percy Hackett, my designated pacer, and the class’s official bitcher.
“Jesus… Christ,” he wheezes, “That about t’ killed me.”
“Almost,” somebody behind me sighs, evidently disappointed.
In the distance, twin spears of red light flare to life and begin to spin. The Meat Wagon’s emergency lights. Uh-oh. The instructor in the jeep’s right seat fumbles with his own radio for a moment, then mumbles something into the mike that’s buried deep in the meat of his huge fist.
“What’s up?” Hackett sniffs.
Silence for a moment, while the radio squawks and crackles behind us. Then Rocky speaks up for the rest of us. “What? You think we know something you don’t?”
“Looks like Torrero broke his leg,” the big instructor mutters disgustedly, tossing the radio mike onto the floorboard. Then, turning to face me, “Better figure out what he’s carrying, and start divvying it up among the rest of you.” His compassion is just breathtaking.
I don’t have to say the word “shit.” Hackett does it for me. Then he slaps the side of his GAU-5 in frustration, and fires a round into the dirt.
BANG!
Everybody jumps. Even the horse-with-no-name sitting in the jeep.
“What the…! Awww…” Hackett knows what’s coming next.
“Well now, that was just fucking brilliant,” the instructor—now standing—barks. “You know the drill, airman. Drop!”
“But… I…”
“Drop! And give me four-hundred!”
“Four-hundred?!”
“You heard me. You’re number eight. Now drop. And count it off, loud.”
“Shit.” Hackett snatches the errant GAU off his shoulder, and, thinking better of it only at the last second, refrains from spiking it into the ground, choosing instead to prop it delicately against one of the deuce’s tires.
“For some reason, I just don’t think that safety’s on, airman!”
Hackett stops, halfway to the ground, and swivels to snap the weapon’s safety on. You can hear his teeth grinding from clear over here. Then he’s on his hands and toes, pumping and counting.
“One, two, three, four, five…!”
Four-hundred push-ups. Jesus. But everybody knows the CCS Prime Directive: “There’s no excuse for a weapon going off unexpectedly. It’s loud. Bad guys can hear it. Good guys can get shot. So you will never, ever allow it to happen.” The first man to cap off an unscheduled round owed fifty push-ups, and each subsequent bonehead thereafter had to add fifty more to that of the one before (on the presumption that the only thing stupider than a moron banging one off like that, is another moron doing the same thing after he just saw somebody else doing a million push-ups). Hackett is the eighth bonehead in as many days to accidentally do it.
I was the second bonehead of the class, back on the afternoon of the second day in the field. Looking back on it now, it’s a trade-off I’m only too happy to have made—the humiliation of being one of the first to screw up, in lieu of being one of the last, and having to do push-ups for the rest of my military career.
From out of the midnight gloom comes an impossible silhouette; what appears to be an eight-foot-high mountain of luggage, swaying up to the deuce, and crumpling onto its bed. It turns out to be good old Greg Dorn, staggering under the burden of his own load plus a second B-4 bag bloated with Torrero’s discarded jump gear. He’s breathing hard, but still radiating enough gung-ho calmness and bottled energy to carry it all right back out there again.
“… twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two…” says Hackett.
Greg doesn’t even look down as he steps towards me around Hackett’s pumping form. He straightens his field cap—God forbid he should appear mussed after the diversions of the last two hours—and drops his gloved hands to his hips. “Torrero landed right after me. Landed with the wind. Almost overshot the whole DZ in the dark. Hit hard, and headfirst. I could hear the bone snap from clear over where I was standing. They’re gonna’ have to evac him to Little Rock General.”
“Shit,” we all reply in unison.
“Forty, forty-one, forty-two…” says Hackett.
Great. I haven’t even started the night overland portion of the frag, and I’m already down to 80% of my original force. One guy’s getting a bumpy ride off the DZ with his leg in a splint—and, as luck would have it, he’s the guy that volunteered to carry the other damned prick—and another’s just begun an hour’s worth of push-ups. The mission clock’s about to start ticking as soon as the last ambulatory member of the team reaches the RP and finishes his push-ups for being last. I’m freezing, and hopping back and forth on clubfeet. It’s after midnight in the shivering depths of an Arkansas December, and I can no longer remember why I’m here.
Dammit! Right now—at this very moment in time—I’ve got friends, going to college down in Gainesville, Florida, that are probably getting laid, right now, even as we speak! Well, truth be told, knowing them, they’re probably playing Dungeons & Dragons or something equally geekish. But that’s not the point. The point is that they—and the rest of the world, for that matter—are comfortable right now, zoned out in front of the TV, rolling dice, or making the bed springs squeak—whatever—even as we wage our miserable little pretend-war out here on this wind-whipped field, debating alternatives to my brilliant mission plan and ignoring Hackett’s push-ups as they slow and quiet behind us. He’s barely finished his first fifty.
Fuck me.
Two more human pack-mules stagger out of the darkness, shrug their bags onto the truck, chuckle at Hackett’s fading exertions, and approach our huddle with Torrero’s rucksack carried between them. The divvying up begins—his lights and lens covers, the anemometer, and of course, that goddamned prick. As if everyone’s loads were not absurdly heavy enough already.
Hackett is on his hands and knees, cursing and gasping furiously—he hasn’t quite reached eighty yet, and this is already his third pause—when the last two guys finally barrel out of the darkness, racing each other to avoid the ignominy of being the dreaded Last Guy. The Head Instructor decides they’re both a couple of losers, and now we have three exhausted people counting off push-ups together.
As they’re pumping, another instructor announces that the mission clock has just been started. We now have two hours to be completely set up and lit up on our anonymous little stretch of dirt backroad, which is still five klicks away. I sigh, and call for everyone to saddle up and start moving. We’ve got several minutes of marching just to get to the edge of the DZ where I’d designated our overland to begin. Our two last-place pusher-uppers can catch up to us before we reach the trees. Hackett is just going to have to be a write-off. We can’t wait for him.
Rocky, my point man, takes the cue, and immediately starts trotting towards the DZ’s southeast corner. The rest of us are hard-pressed to even keep him in sight, as it’s always been throughout the entire course whenever Li’l Rocky has taken the lead. Behind us, the two Last Guys finish their respective fifty each, and scramble back into their gear to follow us. Hackett is a limp rag, paused yet again and gasping, his own count stalled at just over a hundred. The instructors though, taking all things into account, decide to waive the rest of his calisthenic debt, and release him to join us.
And so begins the overland odyssey.

The last two arrivals catch up to us before we’ve even moved fifty yards. Hackett comes wheezing up to our little parade just before we reach the tree line, and slumps into the number four slot, right behind me, puffing, panting, and cussing up a storm. In a hushed tone, I interrupt his fuming to remind him that (a) this is supposed to be a covert move, so keep it down—the instructors are still with us—and (b) here’s the edge of the DZ, so start your pace count now.
It’s the latter point that re-focuses his seething energy, moreso than the former, and the profanity fades into the darkness along with the rest of us.
We seem then, for the moment at least, to finally be on-track. Everybody together—well, all but one, anyway—everything in place. Nothing to do now but cover the distance discreetly, and call it a night.
Sometimes I can just be so naïve.
For starters, I now see that I have “over-tacticalized” the move. What can I say? This is the first tactical overnight land march we’ve done since the class began. I have no precedent to follow. Considering the distance to be covered, and the time constraints under which we’re operating, it’s overkill to keep nine heavily burdened men in a tree-to-tree half-crouch the whole way. Probably not accomplishing much with those two flankers that I’ve got paralleling us either, about ten yards out on either side of the column. Just begging to lose them somewhere along the line. But right now, with three instructors strolling among us in the pitch black of the forest, and so little time to get where we want to go, I can’t think of a good “tactical” way to undo what’s been overdone. So we forge ahead as is.
Then Hackett starts to bitch again. Despite the silence we’re all striving so hard for here, not to mention the omnipresence of the instructors, he’s just at the end of his tether. He’s so pissed off, so exhausted, and now so utterly beside himself, what with the frustration of not being able to keep a current pace count with all the stopping and starting, ducking and darting, circumnavigating low hills and clambering over invisible fallen logs, that he just can’t help himself. But I’m feeling battered enough myself—so sore, cold, shaky-kneed weak, and deeply bone-tired—that I’m no longer willing to let that kind of shittiness go unchecked. And after a couple more sharp whispers at him to keep it down, I finally rap the side of my weapon twice—the signal to drop and freeze—and scamper back beside him.
One of the instructors ambles up next to us like a curious cow.
“What’s the count up to right now?” I ask Hackett.
“I don’t know,” he fusses, “Somethin’ like nineteen-fifty.”
Good. 1,950 paces. At roughly 11 paces per 10 yards—my own personal measured standard—that’s roughly a mile. 1.6 klicks out of 5. That’s good enough for me. “Fine. You’re fired.”
“What?”
“You’re fired. I’ll take the pace count from here. You go relieve Sgt. Donado at rear-guard.”
“What the hell do you think you’re…?”
“Shut up. I’m sick of your bitching. Go to the rear… now.” Then, without waiting for his next response, I stand up, rap my weapon again, and signal a forward march. Nobody else says a word. Even Hackett’s receding outrage is subdued. I’ve never done anything like that before in my life, and I’m too mentally obliterated to take any pride or relief from it right now. But the rigors of the evening finally feel a little less trying without the incessant sparks flying off the man behind me. The march itself doesn’t get even a little bit easier.
We cross several dirt roads along the way. In each case, Rocky brings us to a stop, and silently signals me with the nature of the problem. I invariably signal him to do a quick reconnoiter, then make the crossing once he’s sure it’s clear. We all know there’s not going to be anybody out on these roads at two in the morning, but you never know what the instructors might pull. Maybe I’m not being too tactical about all this.

Then one by one—with each of us acting “terribly intent” about not being observed—we dart across the road into the far side scrub. It takes a few minutes to get everybody across this way, and that’s annoying for everybody, including me. But I’m not willing to drop our guard now, just because we’re all dead exhausted and fed up with this nightmare deployment. After all, the instructors are with us for a reason. If they weren’t, we could all just be crashing through the woods, flashlights waving all over the place, shouting dirty jokes at one another, and it wouldn’t make any difference, as long as we made the LZ in good time. So there’s a legitimate purpose to all this super-stealthy play-acting.
A couple of small clearings break up the march as well, but we can’t just blithely stroll across the open areas just because it’d be easier. People get killed when they make themselves an easy target. So we have to circle each clearing, just inside the trees, and that delays things even more. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at estimating distances, even when they’re not line-of-sight. I’m also pretty adept at picking a notable landmark on the far side of each clearing from which to resume our straight march, and this precludes me having to “estimate” when we’ve circled far enough. And as a final bonus, I’m the only one in the group who seems to understand “celestial navigation” on night maneuvers, which means I don’t have to keep my eyes on my compass all the damned time. The result of all this is a strong inner confidence that, despite the detours and diversions, we are still on-track, and accurately on pace. I have a very clear picture in my head of the map from which this mission was derived, and I’m certain I could pinpoint our exact location on it at any time.
Crossing the open strip beneath a promenade of high-tension power lines confirms all this for me. We’re a little later getting to it than I’d presumed, but I know right where we are, and it seems there’s finally a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

On the pro side of the ledger, my navigational confidence pays off when we finally break out of the woods right at the beginning (or end) of the straightaway portion of our target road. Our “LZ.” On the con side, thanks to all my hyper-consciousness on max-tactical movement, it has taken us an hour-and-fifty minutes just to get here. And the instructors had only given us two hours in which to finish the entire mission.
Time to scramble.
I call the team into a huddle, set up a quick, close, temporary perimeter, and have the guy carrying Torrero’s anemometer take a fast wind reading. While he’s doing that, I have another guy shoot a quick compass bearing down the edge of the road. And when both of them give me their findings, the numbers vary by only ten-to-fifteen degrees. The road is running northeast-to-southwest, with us hunkered down at its northeast end. And the wind is slicing through us from behind, running almost straight down the road itself. So the decision is easy.
“Okay, this is the departure end of the runway,” I whisper. “We’ll deploy in reverse order from this point, heading that way.” I refer to the pencil markings on my map, waving my red-lensed flashlight at it. And based on our pre-planned runway placement—which takes into account the positions of the tallest trees relative to the aircraft’s approach and departure routes—I determine that our approach end lights will wind up right about where our fictional Green Beret team is supposed to be waiting.
“Command Post will be down there, at the approach end, on this side. Corbin, since you’ve got Torrero’s ‘prick’ now, you switch with Haley, and drop your lights here, on the far side of the road. Over there. Haley, you just drop yours further down, in this area. Just follow the obvious sequence.” Haley grunts disgustedly. He’s the senior-most of the four remaining NCOs, and is clearly pissed at having to take my orders. Right now though, I just don’t give the intercourse of a flying rodent. “I’ll call for lights-on on team channel five as soon as the aircraft calls ten minutes out. Any questions?”
Nothing but sulking and heavy breathing. “Okay. Let’s go.”
With the instructors moseying casually right down the middle of the road then, we head out. Half the team scampers across to the far side of the road, while my half parallels it on the near side. Every so many hundred feet, one of the guys appears at the road’s edge, drops an Elco light in place, then ducks back into the shadows. And after so many lights, with his own supply depleted, he drops off from the moving pack altogether and waits in the weeds, watching over his lights. It takes almost fifteen painstaking minutes to work our way all the way down to the opposite end of the LZ this way, but when we finally get there, it’s just Sgt. Donado, two instructors, and me. I hustle to set up my radio and establish a defensible position, while Sal drops a perpendicular line of three lights, stepping away from each side of the runway, and caps them all with green “approach end” lens covers.
One of the instructors—clearly as eager as the rest of us to call it a night already—walks up to me, and immediately starts talking like an inbound pilot calling on my radio.
“Padlock Control, this is Coil Zero-One on point-seven, radio check, over.”
I feel pretty danged stupid talking into my dead handset and pretending like it’s not my instructor I’m addressing, but I do it anyway. “Coil Zero-One, this is Padlock Control. You’re loud and clear. Go ahead.”
“Padlock,” the instructor answers, “We’ve been holding out here about fifteen minutes now. What’s your status, over?”
This is bullshit, of course. If an aircraft had actually arrived in our vicinity before we were fully set up, its pilot wouldn’t have waited until now to contact us. This is just a jab at me personally, pointing out the fact that I’ve already blown the deadline by five minutes. And right now, that just pisses me off. I act as though he never said anything about it at all.
“Coil 01, LZ and assets are in place. Runway zero-five in use. Wind zero-six-zero at one-five, gusting to two-zero. Altimeter unknown. Ready for lights-on at your call.”
“Roger that, Padlock. We’re three minutes out, on wide downwind to runway zero-five right now. Lights on, please.”
This instructor is definitely ready to get this night over with. I am only too happy to oblige. I quickly rechannelize to Team Channel five, and make one short transmission. “Lights on, lights on.” Then Sal and I both hustle over to our own Elcos, and one by one, start snapping them on. At the far distant end of the runway, where Airman Corbin has heard me on the other PRC, lights begin to wink on at the same time. And shortly thereafter, one by one, the lights in between start to fill in.
I’m too preoccupied at first to notice it, but by the time Sal and I are hunkered down around the radio again, our weapons aimed outward as if we’re actually thinking about defending our position, it becomes apparent that something’s gone wrong.
All the runway lights—with the exception of the lines of green approach lights next to Sal and me, and a single dim red light at the departure end—are white. Uncapped. There should be two strands of red rollout lights, similar to our green ones, running perpendicular away from either side of the runway’s far end. But there’s not. The lights are all there, but with that one dull red exception, they’re all white.
Shit. The instructor has noticed it too. Where are the colored lights?
I call Corbin on the PRC, and he says he’ll go check. More time passes. In fact, six more minutes transpire, running us further and further over the deadline. But no one can find the missing red lenses… until someone goes and looks at that lone red-capped light on the far left. And there they find all six of the red lenses, stacked atop that one light. This explains why the light had appeared so dim, but doesn’t explain how anyone could have not noticed an eight-inch-tall stack of lenses towering above a single light.
Everybody’s pissed. The instructors are downright abusive. But the lenses finally get distributed, and our runway is officially declared operative… two hours and eleven minutes after the clock started.
We have failed. I have failed.
Now I’m depressed. On top of everything else, now I’m feeling like whale shit too. No longer just cold, aching, dog tired, and overwhelmed by the sudden leap in my responsibilities, I am now mortified and weighed down by guilt as well. Because, bottom line, I have dropped the ball. For everybody. Which means we’ve all failed, and will have to do the whole damned thing all over again.
Shuffling around like zombies, we gather up our scattered equipment, and haul it back to the deuce-and-a-half that has magically appeared on our runway. Everything is dumped aboard, the exhausted team clambers up after it, and I find my own seat among them, silent and alone in the gloomy crowd. We are trucked back to our dark campsite, somewhere between two and three o’clock in the frigid, blustery morning, and retreat to our individual tents.
I don’t even undress. I just claw my way into my sleeping bag, coats, gloves, and boots still soaked and frozen to me, and collapse into the death sleep of the emotionally riven.

Remind me again—what the hell am I doing here?

2 - AUTHOR'S NOTE

2011-12-28T16:17:00.000-08:00

A LITTLE BACKGROUND IN THE FOREGROUND
Author’s Note

Everything you’re about to read is true. All of it.
I made none of these stories up, nor any of the characters in them.
Everything really happened as described. Really…
… to the best of my memory, anyway.

Granted, a single person’s recollection of events is never a perfect resource, especially mine, but that’s the only resource I called upon in the writing of this account. So, yes, it will come with all the slanted perspectives, embellishments of time, and paraphrased dialogue of the world as viewed first through my 19- and 20-year-old eyes, then later retold through my 50-year-old filters. For these events occurred in 1977 and 1978, but weren’t committed to paper until the early to mid 2000s.
And yes, I’ve taken the usual step of changing the names of the very real people that were involved, not only to protect their innocence and anonymity, but also because, for the most part, I’ve forgotten most of their real names by now anyway. To tell you the truth, I’m actually more concerned that some of the fictitious names I’ve chosen for them might have come precariously close to their real names. And if that did happen, then allow me to apologize in advance—I didn’t mean to do that.
But I’ve also taken the additional step of trying to imbue this memoir with not only all of the original emotion, reasoning and rationales of these moments in time, but also with every bit of my own frequently appalling ignorance as well. Sure, I can look back now and understand what happened in the context of unfolding history, or with the 20/20 hindsight of the future looking back on the past. And I could portray these events—and especially these amazing characters—with all the depth and generosity afforded by time and my own evolving maturity.

But I’ve chosen not to do that here.

I’ve made it a point to relive these adventures in the dim, narrow, and often shortsighted light of the moment. And I did this not only out of a personal desire for truth in this depiction, but also because, well—so many of the choices I made and the actions I took at the time were based on that very ignorance, and as such, cannot be explained any other way.
So here it all is, warts, boogers, zits and tears, and everything in between.
All of it. I promise.

Secondly, let’s set the record straight about something else that’s even more important to me than all the “biased honesty” mentioned above. And that is this…
Though this most definitely is the story of my brief but eventful membership in the elite fraternity of America’s special forces, what it is not is a suggestion about my suitability for the job. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Because, to put it succinctly, I sucked at it. And I knew it.
Hence the title of this book.
So let me make sure that everyone gets that, especially the real Spec Ops troops out there who have dedicated their lives—and I do mean their lives—to this very dangerous but vital and noble career choice:

I do not count myself among your ranks.

I am not, and never was, in your league. Not even at the peak of my involvement or enthusiasm. I was a dabbler, and nothing more, a curious onlooker who stuck his nose far enough in the door that I wound up getting completely sucked in, and spent the next year-and-a-half just hanging on for dear life. This wasn’t some gallant crusade on my part, some lifelong dream, or a grand quest for a cause that I deeply believed in. It was just a chance for me to play G.I. Joe to the extreme, to jump out of some airplanes, and to play with some loud toys. That’s all. And I took it. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. And now… well… now there’s this story to tell.
The funny part is—at least for the purposes of this book—the extent to which I was so monumentally unqualified for the job of Air Force Combat Controller is precisely the extent to which I am so very qualified to describe it now. This is simply because, unlike my dedicated classmates and mission-oriented teammates at the time, I was more of a “regular guy” than they ever were, more of a band nerd than a jock, more of a wannabe than an oughta-be, and everybody knew it. None moreso than me.

They were GREAT. I was just THERE.
So, if you, dear reader, are or ever were a member of this fraternal elite yourself, be you Ranger, Recon or SEAL, Green Beret, CCT or Delta—if this is or ever was your true calling in life—then you have my undying respect and admiration. Truly. I am proud and honored to have known such people as you, to have worked beside you, and I am exalted to have been (however inappropriately) counted among you.
But you probably won’t enjoy this little collection of reminiscences very much.
For one thing, it was a weird time historically. And for another, as I might have mentioned already, I sucked at it.
Sure, our equipment and methodologies were relatively primitive compared to today, but worst of all, I personally wasn’t in it for the right reasons. I wasn’t focused or properly motivated, I had no objective other than to ‘see what it was like,’ and bottom line, I just wasn’t very good at it. I was just in it for the ride… as you’ll soon enough see.
If, however, you are not a member of this elite brotherhood—if everything you know and appreciate about this nation’s finest warriors is what you’ve read in books, or seen in the movies or on the Discovery Channel—well, you might like this a little better. Because this is what it looks like from the inside (or looked like back in the 70s, anyway) through the eyes of someone more like you. Namely, me. If your curiosity had pushed you that one extra step further, and you’d ventured into this arena yourself—just for a bit, just for a taste—this is what you would have seen and done.
This is the story of a regular old slightly weird everyday guy—me, a moderately intelligent and athletic, but otherwise unheroic, ignoble, and generally clueless standard-issue guy—who crossed over, briefly, into a realm of silent greatness, who had to push himself far beyond his every boundary just to even exist among these people, and who, in his very brief exposure to this lifestyle, saw and did more than he ever believed himself capable.
This is the story of A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing.

And finally, one last thing that I think it’s important you know before we get started here—namely, who and what I was before all this happened.

Have you ever seen the movie Empire of the Sun, directed by Steven Spielberg? It’s a fabulous movie—one of his best, in my opinion, and my personal favorite from his vast catalog of stunning masterpieces. It starred a young Christian Bale—who would later grow up to play Batman, in Batman Returns—in an absolutely astonishing tour de force of acting, especially for a kid in his early teens at the time.
For those of you who’ve never seen this film, Christian played the pampered son—or perhaps more like the “spoiled-rotten heir”—to a wealthy British diplomat, in China, just before the Japanese invasion and the outbreak of World War II. He’d always lived in exotic locales around the world, had never known personal hardship, and had always had doting parents, servants, expensive toys, and a thorough, tutored education. He wasn’t a bad kid—he was bright, inquisitive, intelligent, and polite—he was a Boy Scout, and he was big into aviation. But he’d never known suffering, denial or privation, nor violence or loss in his lifetime. And he’d sure as hell never had to survive.
So, he was basically a good-natured but unscarred mama’s boy… just like me.
In the movie, the Japanese invaded mainland China, and in the panicked rush of civilians clogging the streets and bridges of Shanghai, trying to escape ahead of the rolling tanks, our child-hero got separated from his parents, and suddenly found himself alone in a terrifying and hostile world… parents gone, house empty, no servants or even neighbors to call upon—they’d all been rounded up by the Japanese—and with the last of the food rotting in the dead refrigerator.
Then, on the verge of starvation and madness, he was befriended by a pair of scrappy Americans, scroungers laying low and flying under the Japanese radar, played by Jon Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano. And he was with them when they too were rounded up by the Japanese, and sent off to a prison camp outside the city… where they remained for the next 5, 6, 7 years or so, until the end of the war and the surrender of the Japanese.
It’s an amazing story, following this coddled kid’s painful growth into a worldly and self-sufficient survivor. Combined with his love of all things aeronautic—and his absolute worship of the P-51 Mustang, “the Cadillac of the Skies!”—the whole thing just resonated with me like a tuning fork struck right between my eyes.
Because that kid was me at that age.

Although my mother and father were by no means wealthy during my childhood and adolescence—quite the opposite, in fact—they were still loving, attentive, and protective, and had created a home, a “safe zone,” that I could always return to for comfort and security. My mother was a hands-on full-time home-maker, and, with four kids (spanning ten years) in the brood by the time I’d “come of age,” she was a busy and dedicated steward of our developing lives. My father, on the other hand, was a Professor of Geology at the University of Miami, a co-inventor of the modern carbon-14 dating process, a workaholic, and a logical and erudite atheist. So, between Mom’s loving, compassionate, and nurturing encouragement, and Dad’s intelligence, his ability to explain the complex, and his dry and blistering sarcastic wit, I got the best of both barrels all the way up into adulthood.
But I’d never once been in a fight. Not once. I’d never so much as thrown a punch—not even in the near-daily scraps with my punky younger brother—and, truth be told, I didn’t even like contact sports much. I was athletic as hell, mind you—I was nimble, fast (second-fastest in my entire large high school, in fact), strong, and coordinated—but I never liked anything that was “high-impact,” like tackle football… or fighting. So I simply never did those.
I was smart, though—relatively speaking—got good grades (at least until my senior year, when I just quit trying), enjoyed “public speaking,” played the guitar, piano and trombone, and was a member of both the AV and Chess Teams.

Yes, I was that high a degree of nerd, my friends.
I never learned to “drink.” Nothing ‘moral’ about it; just a set of taste buds that utterly rebelled at the horrifically bitter taste of alcohol, in any form. Period. Couldn’t even stand the smell of it. The same with drugs. And that missing piece from the puzzle of my youth, combined with my natural tendency to overthink and fret over everything, meant that I never knew an uninhibited moment in any social situations… so I never got comfortable with them. I never went to any parties, never learned (or wanted to learn) to dance, was ridiculously slow and cautious in developing the few close friendships I ever had, and was terrible with women. I couldn’t get a date with a girl at gunpoint, and I was a virgin until I was 19, when—as Neil Diamond put it—“I became a man at the hands of a woman almost twice my age.”
(Actually, she was exactly twice my age)
So, I was a social oaf and a self-imposed outcast, a teetotaler (except that I hated tea as well), an atheist, and a band geek, all wrapped up in a strong, nimble, six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, greasy-haired, blue-eyed body. I wasn’t hard to look at, I could be funny at times, and I was even fairly artistic, but in just a few too many ways, I didn’t fit in anywhere. And when my senior year finally rolled around, I needed somewhere to go.

My family had taken a huge roadtrip—from Miami to San Francisco to Seattle, then on to Butte, Denver and Chicago, with a long haul back home again—in the summer of ’74, between my junior and senior years in high school. And one of the stops along the way was a tour of the Air Force Academy outside Boulder, Colorado. I’d always thought that flying fighters would be cool (although, in reality, what I really wanted to be was an arcade pilot, where the job was little more than a competitive and abstract test of skills, not an actual life-and-death struggle for aerial supremacy or the defense of a nation), and Dad was desperate to motivate me to improve my grade point average somehow.
Unfortunately, the gesture backfired… for both of us. The campus, while lovely, was austere and intimidating to me. The curriculum was daunting, to say the least, and the rigid discipline and martial ardor had me ready to bolt down the mountain—on foot, if need be—long before the tour was over. And as it turned out, the loss of this central aspiration of mine really unhinged what little work ethic I had left. Throughout my miserable senior year then, my grades just plummeted. Fact is, I came one “special project” short of failing 12th grade altogether.
But graduate I did, and I left high school at a sprint, determined to never look back. I also forgot all about my dreams of becoming the world’s greatest fighter ace, and concentrated instead on struggling through my first year in college.
I hated college too, though. Most people find that appalling, especially considering that, since my father was a professor at the local university—just one leisurely mile from our house, through the shaded streets of Coral Gables—my tuition (and housing) were free! All my poor, struggling parents had to pay for was my books! And all I had to do was show up interested!

But I just friggin’ hated it. I had no interest in anything, career-wise, never did figure out what my major should be, and after only a semester-and-a-half, in February of 1976, I just quit going.
I fully understood the meaning of The Bigger Picture when my father repeatedly shouted, “But it’s FREE!,” but that didn’t make me want it any more. And when, later that year, I quit the unique job I’d held for some time at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, he reached the end of his tether, and laid down an ultimatum: if you’re not working or going to school by September, you’ll be paying rent here.
I celebrated this pronouncement by taking the last of what little money I’d managed to save, pooled it with that of my best friend “Eldon” (yes, his name’s been changed as well), and we headed out in my tired old '70 Ford Maverick on a “Last Fling” kind of roadtrip up the east coast. No real plan, other than to see if we could push it all the way up to Montreal, Canada, where they were holding the Olympics that year, before we ran out of money. And though, in hindsight, it wound up being a “funny story”—full of stupid misadventures, the inconvenient repercussions of thundering off into the void without a plan, and limping home, exhausted, broke, blatting along on a blown exhaust gasket, sick to death of that lone ABBA cassette that we’d played over and over and over again in a desperate bid to stay awake, and dead tired of each other—at the time it didn’t seem “funny” at all.
I was actually pretty damned angry and disgusted with myself.
What a loser I was!
Well, one day, a week or two before we’d left Miami on that cursed odyssey, I’d dropped in on an Air Force recruiter, entirely on an offhanded whim, and looking to have just one last question answered by him… namely; was there any way at all for me to become a fighter pilot without a college degree? Maybe some semi-secret “backdoor route,” where you’re judged on your innate flying skills, or your hand-eye coordination, or your spatial recognition and split-second decision-making prowess, or anything other than your ability to maintain a C+ average in school.
The recruiter thought that was pretty funny.
No. In order to be a pilot, you had to be an officer. And in order to be an officer, you had to have a college degree. Period. No special handshakes or secret words or winks from your Congressman—just get that pigskin, then come talk to us.
Fine. Good enough for me. That was all I needed to hear. My flying career in the U.S. Air Force was gone, and I could accept that.
I was rising to head out the door then, when he slapped a long piece of paper, slathered top to bottom in small print, on his desktop, and said, “But why don’t you see what kind of jobs you would be qualified for? Come on. Just for curiosity’s sake. It’ll take you two minutes.”
And I, being the unassertive tower of jello that I was, just couldn’t think of a polite (or believably fictitious) way to squirm out of it (heaven forefend that I should just say 'no thanks,' and leave), and I sat back down to read through the list.
Over 200 different enlisted jobs, 99.5% of which were entirely unappealing. But, since he was waiting and staring into my face while I read, I finally pointed to the .5% one, and said, “That might be interesting.”
He spun the paper around, and read it out loud. “Air Traffic Control. Oo, good one. A tough one. Wanna’ see if you’d qualify?”
“Well, no, I… I’ve got this… thing I’ve got to…”
“Come on. What could it hurt? Go take a written test—it’s free, you pick the date, and they’ll provide the boxed lunch. No strings attached, no signature required on nuttin’! Just for curiosity’s sake… just to see how you stack up.”
He apparently knew an easily cornered weenie when he saw one, because, just to get that visit over with, I knuckled under and agreed to take the damned test. Two weeks later, I slogged through the four-hour knowledge and skill test, and without waiting to learn the results, I headed out with Eldon on our ill-fated road trip the very next day.
And I forgot all about that test… until the day we sputtered and wheezed back into my driveway, and shut down that nasty, cat-piss-smellin’, bulldozer-soundin’ Maverick for the last time… finally… after two hellish weeks on the road.
By then—at the depths of my exhaustion, disgust and self-loathing—I was ready to do something… anything to put my loser-life back on track again. And that’s when that test came back to mind.

They should have the results back by now!
The very next day, I returned to that recruiter’s office. And sure enough, the results were back… and my overall score was high enough that I’d qualified for all BUT two jobs—the two rejects being Vehicle Maintenance, and Accounting (no surprises there). So, if I wanted it, I could sign up that day, and be a full-time practicing air traffic controller by that same time next year! Maybe not quite the same as being a pilot, but I’d get to tell pilots where to go, and at the end of four years, I’d have a whole career waiting for me with the FAA.
Sold!

The point of all this is, I didn’t go into the Air Force following a lifelong dream, or seeking some noble “higher ground” for which to strive. I wasn’t trying to better myself, or dedicate myself to the defense of my homeland. I went in because, at the time, I hated myself too much to keep doing what I was doing, and I didn’t have any other “outs” lined up as an alternative.
Within a month, I was sworn in on Delayed Enlistment, and six months after that, I was headed off for Basic Training—right where this story begins.
On the day that I left Miami for good, I’d never even heard of “Combat Control,” didn’t even know the Air Force had its own “special forces,” and had no inclination toward doing anything other than learning how to talk to airplanes, and telling officers where to go. I’d still never been in a fight, still never lived anywhere other than my parents’ house, and was scared shitless as the day of departure marched closer.

Yep, that was me. That was the guy that “led” those nine other men out the door of that C-130 into the night skies north of Little Rock ten months later.

How the hell did that happen?

That ought to make one hell of a story… don’t you think?

Steve Stipp
December 26th, 2008

Story I: PARADIGM SHIFT

2011-12-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

I
PARADIGM SHIFT

1
March, 1977
Miami, Florida
AN ABYSSAL THRESHOLD

So…
I’m cool. I’m terrified. Take your pick. It all seems to depend on whether I’m inhaling or exhaling at the moment. But I’m definitely “there,” baby.
I’m cruising—we’re cruising—just me, my Mom, and my baby brother Gavin. He’s nine, going on ten, but to me he’s still my little “baby” brother. And we’re cruising through the streets of Miami at eight in the morning, in our two-tone white-over-blue ’76 AMC Pacer. We’re on our way to the Military Induction Center off Bird Road. I’m wearing my best tan polyester slacks, a dark brown faux-silk shirt festooned with writhing tape measures—go figure—and white deck shoes.
How do you get any cooler than that?
What had seemed so simple and trivial—more like casual, even cavalier, actually—just six months ago when I’d first signed up with the Air Force on their Delayed Enlistment Program, has now suddenly become unnervingly real. And huge! Too big to face with a full bladder, in fact.
Today I’m going into the friggin’ military, for Criminy sakes! Well, the Air Force, anyway. Vanishing into The Machine. For some reason that I can no longer remember, I’m voluntarily abandoning the warm, comfortable, familiar womb of home—cutting the proverbial umbilical—and striking out on my own. Or something like that.
So why does it feel like the womb’s abandoning me?
We’re a family of six—three boys, one girl, and two parents—yet only half of us are present in this car right now. This is one hell of a momentous occasion for me, the crossing of an abyssal threshold. Yet there’s just Mom behind the wheel, and baby brother Gavin sitting stony quiet in the back seat, along for the ride to see me off. You’d think the event would warrant at least a token family gesture—five bored hands waving at the curbside—something! Anything!
But this is it. Amazing.
At a time like this, why can’t anybody in this car think of anything to talk about?

We pass Coral Gables High School on the right. All my closest friends went there. One of them still does—he’s probably in there right now, in fact. The rest are all off at college.
Damn. What the hell am I doing?
As we cross Le Jeune Road, I point out our turn, coming up on the right in three blocks. It’s a crappy little two-block-long “street,” little more than a cracked two-lane alleyway between the back doors of some ugly, old, whitewashed, windowless, square buildings. And among them is the Military Induction Center. I know this because this is where I had to go, first, to take my Qualification Test some nine months ago (which determined what Air Force jobs I was even eligible for), and second, to take my physical and get sworn in six months ago. I’ve been on Delayed Enlistment ever since, marking time at home, and awaiting my slot into their Air Traffic Control School. Theoretically now, presuming all goes as planned, I should finish Basic Training just in time for that slot to open up, and be able to step right into it on the next class cycle.
Theoretically.

Mom wheels the Pacer onto that shitty little side street, and snuggles against the curb, idling warily up to the Center’s doors. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels more like we’re rolling up on the back door of some seedy old speakeasy or something. And it’s only now that I realize just how rapidly I’m breathing. Hell, I’m almost hyperventilating!
I’ve decided that I want to delay my enlistment some more. A whole lot more.
I’m flashing back to my first time on a high-dive platform—those final pulse-pounding seconds, balanced atop the flexing board, looking down at the distant surface of the pool as if it were the Atlantic Ocean viewed from orbit—weighing the pros and cons of Retreat versus The Plunge, The Humiliation versus The Terror.
I’ve gotten this far on momentum alone, it seems, moving forward on the abstract impetus of “Going To Be A Soldier Some Day.” Some day. But now that day is here. There’s The Door, right there. Right now. The mouth of the beast. The feeder port of the machine. And there ain’t nothin’ abstract about that.
The Pacer crunches to a stop. Two guys, sharing one last smoke just outside “The Door,” grant us only a passing glance before returning to their own final rites of freedom. It’s not yet 8:00am, and this entire ugly, blank, sun-bleached backstreet is empty—deserted—save for the two smokers, my Mom, my baby brother, this doofy-looking Pacer… and me.
And the next move is all mine.

Nobody moves to follow me out the door. No last curbside hug for Stevie. We covered all that back at the house. Got places to go, things to do. Mom offers some final words of love and encouragement—for some reason, I can’t seem to read her emotions right now—but she doesn’t move from behind the wheel. Then Gavin hands me an envelope with “To Steve” written on the front of it in his childish scrawl, and tells me to read it later when I’ve got the time. He’s still being uncharacteristically quiet.
And then we’re done. Apparently. A couple of awkward seconds spent staring at each other makes that painfully clear. Then I’m out of the car.
I guess the umbilical has just been snipped.

2
A GOOFY KINDERGARTNER AGAIN

It’s noon. We’re now four hours into the process of in-processing, and they’re finally letting us take a break. I’m hunched on a metal folding chair, one of roughly thirty that fill the building’s large central room like the seating for an AA meeting. I’ve got a boxed lunch gutted in my lap, and I’m gnawing on a flaccid, triangle-cut, ham-and-cheese sandwich. A mini-bag of chips is splayed open in the box, an apple is balanced between my knees, and a one-pint carton of milk is sitting atop my paperwork stacked on the seat next to me. And I feel stupid. I feel like a goofy kindergartner again.
I’ve spent the entire morning making the circuit of the smaller rooms that surround this big “hub room,” interviewing with recruiters, getting briefed by what I presume are military lawyers, and saying “ah” for medical corpsmen… filling out paperwork, affixing signatures, wiping fingerprinting ink off my fingers, and of course, “droppin’ ‘em and spreadin’ ‘em.” Oh yeah, there’s nothing more life-affirming and ego-building than standing naked in a chorus line of skinny hippies, and doing the conveyor-belt version of “turn your head and cough.” And I’m here to tell you, a bored male nurse tasked with doing nothing but hernia checks all morning, a half dozen guys at a time, is none too gentle when he gets around to ramming those fingers up behind your hairy sack.
If you’ll pardon my Lebanese.
But the point is, I don’t feel one step closer to the military now than I did when I first came through That Door. I still look like a shaggy civilian—all the more so among these confident, organized, razor-sharp, machine-like Military Personnel that have been herding us around like cattle. And this artless, soulless building, with its buffed-but-yellowing checkerboard floor, scuffed white baseboards, and stock airplane/submarine/ aircraft carrier/tank photographs dangling from every wall, just depresses me.
Not unlike most of these other scraggly looking specimens, I’m sure, I… well, truth be told, I miss my mommy. In a grown-up, macho sorta’ way, of course.
I just feel alone.
Not lonely. Just “alone”… isolated, a little lost. And a lot overwhelmed.
We’ve got another half hour before the final round begins, culminating with our official swearing-in ceremony, and our exodus to the buses. All my paperwork’s done—everything’s filled out, stamped, initialed, and signed on every line—and, with the exception of one last red-tape reviewer, I’ve got no one else to see. Just time to kill. And nothing to read.
No, wait a minute. I’ve got that envelope from Gavin.
I dust the potato chip residue from my fingers, wrestle the letter from my one and only piece of “luggage,” and open it up.

The little bastard.
Maybe now wasn’t the best time for me to read this. But I’m past the point of no return.
Somehow, despite the years of cruelty and torment, harassment and neglect, he’s chosen to remember me in only the most glowing of terms. How? I just don’t get it. He’s always just been my pain-in-the-ass Little Brother, the little annoyance that I’ve spared no quarter talking down to, shoving him out of my inner circle, and denying him access to my “busy life.” Even I know what a complete asshole I’ve always been with him. So does everyone else. I ought to be clubbed to my knees for it. This letter should be filled with condemnation and vitriol.
So why does he call me a “great brother?” Why does he list, in his clumsy juvenile prose, all the ways that I’ve “amazed” him, or made him proud? It just doesn’t make any sense.
And how… (shit)… how can he say that he already misses me?
Goddammit, I don’t need this right now.
I fold the single sheet back into its envelope, and slip it out of sight in my luggage.
Shit.

3
STRANGERS BOUND FOR BROTHERHOOD

The swearing-in ceremony is nothing more than a repeat of the ritual I went through last September. Forty or fifty clueless recruits, standing, in all their widely varied forms of fashion outrage, at some semblance of attention, right hands raised (most of them), and repeating after the officer at the front of the room—a female lieutenant—who stands behind a podium flanked by flags. We mumble, in at least five different accents, and with as little zeal as possible, the words she recites for us.
And then it’s over.
“Congratulations,” she says, in a way that sounds suspiciously malevolent, “and welcome to the United States Armed Forces.”
There will be five or six different buses circulating through the pick-up point out back of the building over the next three or four hours or so, at least one for each branch of the service—the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Since each has a different Basic Training base, located at different corners of the country, the new recruits will be flying out of Miami International on different flights, leaving at different times, and therefore requiring separate departures on the buses. The load of scrawny, pimply-faced Air Force conscripts—of which I am now a charter member—will be the third to leave, somewhere around 2:30 in the afternoon.
And we’ve got nothing else to do now but wait.
We wave goodbye to a handful of new Marines-to-be—the first busload—as they stumble out into the blinding Florida sunshine and vanish. Gone. To Parris Island, of all places. The poor bastards. The first to be consumed by The Beast.
The rest of us find our own corners to huddle into—whether in packs or alone, taking solace from either the communion or the anonymity—and settle in to wait out the ticking clock. Some of the “squids”—wow, I’m insulting my sister services already—whose bus will be the last one out, around five, actually curl up on the floor, using their luggage as pillows, and go to sleep. The magazine rack is emptied in seconds.
I, for one, pull a Snickers bar out of my pocket—smuggled from my boxed lunch—find as much privacy as I can among the crowded folding chairs, and return to Gavin’s letter.
Amazing.

Oh, the bus ride is fine. A generic military-white touring bus, traveling empty save for the dozen or so of us headed to Air Force Basic on the 3:15 flight—one or two cautious conversations between strangers-bound-for-brotherhood, none of them including me. My choice.
At the Continental Airlines curb, the only guy in uniform besides the driver ushers us off the bus, and escorts us to the gate like a mother duck leading her badly dressed ducklings across a busy street. Once he confirms that we’re at the right place and there’s an actual aircraft waiting there for us to board, he hands us our tickets, wishes us a safe flight and good luck in our huge and looming future, then walks away. And here we are, alone—on our own—for the first time today.
Aside from the obvious, what now?

Sitting here now, in my window seat on this beautiful DC-10—my first time ever on this gorgeous new model of aircraft, by the way, which is pretty cool—I look out at the baggage handlers scrambling to get out of the way, and the marshalers strolling in circles, twirling their orange batons in boredom. And I’m thinking about those fifteen wasted minutes at the gate when our last hope of escape had been squandered. There’d been no one there to keep us from just walking off, and forgetting about this whole crazy idea called “military service.” But, after a day of being led around by the nose hairs, we are sheep. We are cattle, just milling around and looking for the next chute to open up.
Now I notice the ground marshaler centering himself, holding his little glow-sticks over his head. I feel the brakes release, and Miami backs away from me.
Damn. I’ve really done it to myself this time.

4
Lackland Air Force Base
THIS AIN’T KANSAS ANYMORE, TOTO

After bouncing out of the airport at Houston, our DC-10 has finally landed in San Antonio, having drifted into skies burnt orange. Sunset swells on the horizon as we taxi in. I’m in no great rush to stand once we reach the gate though—and apparently, with each of the guys in my group watching each other for behavioral clues, neither is anyone else—but soon enough the passenger stampede moves past us and we’re out of excuses.
Now plodding up the jetway, I wonder about who’s going to catch us at this end of the Induction Center’s long bomb, knowing that no matter how gentle the reception, this ain’t Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in the wind now, blowing into alien territory, and hoping that the aliens don’t offend too easily.
The guy in the blue uniform at the gate is pretty conspicuous. And I’m sure our stunned expressions, mixed with wary curiosity, are familiar to him as well. He introduces himself, counts heads, and leads us straight to a small, private, USO lounge between the concourses. None of us has any checked baggage—we were told to only bring what we could fit into the equivalent of a gym bag—so there’s no diversion through baggage claim. He points out the magazine rack, the coffee machine, and the restrooms, and tells us to make ourselves comfortable. There’re two more flights we have to wait for before heading out to the bus.
Oh goody. More time to spend contemplating the consequences of our casual—and in some cases, spontaneous—choices. I mean, it’s March 2nd, 1977. I’m a nineteen-year-old college dropout, with only two months left before turning twenty. I’ve quit a good—and unique—job at the Miami Planetarium, and abandoned a free college education—a free one, as my Dad has often repeated—to come and do… “this.”
Nobody else I know is doing “this.” They’re all off at various colleges and universities scattered around the country—most of them moving on in the company of their old high school buddies—putting up with academia for a few more years, and extending their adolescence just that much longer at the same time. I’m going the other direction, for some reason, severing all my ties at once. And that’s left me with a real feeling of working without a net. And not as a tightrope walker either. No, I’m more like a Human Cannonball, launching myself into the void, hoping somebody values me enough to slide some mattresses into my path before I hit.
Another gaggle of hesitant, wide-eyed hippies is ushered into the room, nodding nervously and seeking out their own seats. One more planeload to go, our escort assures us, then he disappears out the door again.
I think I’ve got the shortest hair of anyone here, a lingering after-effect of my ROTC days at the University of Miami. And, looking at some of the meticulous coifs surrounding me, I suspect I’m going to have it the easiest whenever they get around to shaving our heads with those infamous fleecing shears. Some of these guys look like they could lose a leg easier than their hair. I try to imagine what each of these Love Children is going to look like with stubbled scalps.
This last group was flown in from New York. One of them sits down next to me, and introduces himself as “Mouse.” I’m not sure why—sure, he’s a skinny little guy, a little short, and his eyes are a little beady, though not uniquely so—but he says that’s just what everyone’s always called him. His real name is Grzeszak, pronounced “Gretchack.”
Yes, “Mouse” is much easier.
He makes note of my shorter hair. I explain about AFROTC—or “FARTC,” as my Dad preferred to call it. He talks about joining just to get into the medical field, I talk about air traffic control. It’s all rather perfunctory—pretend-curiosity—but it kills another twenty minutes or so until the last group wanders in, this one from Seattle. Then, with a wave, our escort leads us all out into the airport again, through the terminal like pre-schoolers holding hands, and out to our waiting blue bus.
Twilit night has fallen. A dull molten glow is shriveling behind us to the west. San Antonio is lit up like Las Vegas to the south. And I’m not seeing a net—or a mattress—anywhere.

From the freeway, at night, San Antonio looks like any other modern American city. Sodium-lit boulevards crowded with fast-food joints, liquor stores, and low-end hotels, drifting past the bus windows like irradiated fish in a polluted river. It’s almost as if the city wants you to see all the reasons for leaving before you even think about staying.
Well, they don’t need to oversell that point to me.
Forty-five silent minutes later, we exit onto a dimly lit overpass, and approach a guarded gate that looks exactly like a prison guard shack.
And behind that is Lackland Air Force Base… which looks exactly like a prison.
What a coincidence.
Okay, I learned my lesson. You can take me home now.

The bus never has to stop. The gate guard just waves us through, then steps back into the light and warmth of his little shack.
We can’t see much in the evening darkness, but every face is pressed to the glass. We pass a full-scale fighter, frozen in an aggressive climbing bank, atop a concrete pedestal. I recognize it as a Korean War vintage F-86 Saber. Then, as if it exhausted its entire aesthetic palette with that one static display, Lackland surrenders to its governmental functionality, and becomes just another depressing flatland grid of streets. It’s winter in central Texas, so the rare tree or two is pretty much denuded, the grass looks dry and sparse, and there’s a cold, barren starkness to everything. Or is it just me?
From this level, trundling through the grid layout in alternating left and right turns—following a seemingly random stair-step path to some nondescript building in the midst of all these chilly shadows—I feel like I’m aboard a tiny bus full of ants, crawling across a giant chess board. The pieces—the buildings—are scattered, one to a square, as if poised in mid-battle and waiting for the next move. It’s creepy. Each pocket of the grid seems to have one of only two things in it: either a single building with a small parking lot, or just an empty field of dying grass. That’s it. It’s as if they designed the street grid first, then realized too late that they didn’t have anywhere near enough structures to fill it. So they just sprinkled what they had as evenly as they could, and left it at that.
I’m sure it’s just my own uneasiness speaking here, but there is something fundamentally wrong about this place.

5
THE GRAND ANTI-CLIMAX

The bus pulls up to the curb in front of the in-processing facility, but the driver tells us to stay seated and wait. The facility is a single-story, ribbed-concrete shoebox of a building. It looks like a small elementary school, with a brightly illuminated lobby, crowded with desk-chairs that take up the middle third of the building behind floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The lobby’s light spills out over the stairs and the walkway that cascade down to us, and a lone blue-suited figure is parting that light as he trots down to meet us.
Oh shit, here it comes. The scene with the screaming bull-sergeant standing at the front of the bus, barking insults to our dubious lineages, and roaring at us to get our sorry asses off his goddamned bus right-the-hell NOW! I’ve always known this moment was coming, but it’s arrived far too fast for me to prepare myself. Everyone sits up straight, and braces for the impact.
But when the bus door opens, it’s only a young, baby-faced kid from Iowa (or Idaho, or Indiana, or Illinois… some place that starts with an “I,” I’m sure)—a mere two-striper, if I’m reading the pins on his jacket collar correctly—who smiles broadly, introduces himself, and asks us to please gather up our belongings and join him inside the building, where it’s nice and warm. Yes, he actually says “please.” And “nice.” Then he turns and scampers back up into the light without looking back.
What the hell was that?
Who cares? Whatever it was, I can live with it.
We scramble after him, and scurry up the steps into the lobby.

More paperwork.
The Grand Anti-Climax.
“Start memorizing your Social Security number now,” he advises, as he wades through the rows of desk-chairs, collecting and passing out one piece of paper after the next, “You’re going to be using it for everything.” This guy’s just chock full of helpful little homilies.
It seems that, much like at the airport, we’re waiting on yet another busload of shaggy recruits—collected from several more flights—to arrive and complete the evening’s festivities. In the meantime, let us fill out and gather what we may.
At the front of the room, behind a cheap folding table, sit three lowly airmen—our first contacts with The Real Working Military—clerks one and all, furrowing through the stacks of our paperwork like bored rodents. Alternately, one or the other of them gets up and walks among the unshaven and unwashed sitting in the desk-chairs, and either returns some shred of red-tape that they’ve typed on, stamped, and signed themselves, or gathers up whatever address card or medical waiver or Next of Kin form they’ve just had us fill out. And each time, while handing-out and picking-up, they pass on yet another little tidbit of worldly advice.
“Don’t let ‘em catch you with your hands in your pockets,” says Airman I-State, “They’ll hurt your pride.”
What? They’ll hurt my “pride?”
At just after 9:00, the other busload squeals to a stop outside, right at the edge of the light, and that same baby-faced Iowa/Idaho/Indiana/Illinois Guy trots out to greet them. A cold spill of air skirls in through the open door, and the chill reminds me of just where I am.
As these new guys pour into the room, the clerks filter through them, collecting more file folders, and disseminating more paperwork of their own. And the ritual resumes, unbroken.
“Don’t worry, guys. The first night’s bad, but then it’s all downhill from there.”
What? Does that mean it’s going to get better or worse than this? “This” meaning the unrelenting “nightmare” of sitting at a desk-chair filling out forms? God, I sure hope it gets better than this.
Sarcasm does not become me.
Yes it does.

By 9:30, even the later guys are done with the Triplicate Shuffle, and we’re all tucking the last of our records back into our folders. The kid from the “I” state gets up, and addresses us once more as he moseys toward the door, zipping up his little blue waistcoat.
“Okay, I know you guys have had a long day. You’re probably tired and a little bit hungry. So, now we’re going to take you to get some chow. Then you’ll meet your Training Instructors, and we’ll let you get some sleep. Okay? All right then, let’s go.”
“Training Instructors,” for the love of Mike. “T.I.s.” Not Drill Instructors, or “D.I.s,” like the Army or Marines, but “T.I.s.” Even the initials sound wimpy.
In a riot of squealing, groaning, barking desk-chairs-on-tile, we shuffle out of the nice warm lobby, all our worldly possessions and all of our paperwork in hand, and pile back onto the same two buses that brought us here. Then we’re off again, into the darkened grid of the alien world known as Lackland Air Force Base.

6
FLAMING ANVILS FROM HELL

I can’t believe this.
You know, you come to something like this with certain expectations. You’ve heard all the rumors, seen all the movies, talked to people who’ve been there. So you’re expecting stuff like… your “quarters” being little more than rustic old wooden hillbilly shacks filled with stacked bunks and locked trunks, bellowing red-faced Drill Instructors, push-ups for every wrong answer, and “chow” meaning “slop,” “mush,” or “gruel.”
But this place is just not living up to those expectations. So far, Lackland—and the Air Force in general—has been more like a Third World luxury hotel. The staff is polite and courteous, they’ll answer your questions and show you to your room, but you’ve got to carry your own luggage. And though the place may be spotless, it’s still basically just a functional government facility, ugly, unimaginative, and minimalist, but polished and buffed to within an inch of its life. And the same goes for this chow hall.
Set inside a dull, white-washed crate of a building, this is a full-blown cafeteria—gleaming waxed tile floors, sparkling chrome bins, racks, and serving counters, immaculate silverware wrapped in napkins, glimmering ranks of dishes, plates and glassware, and a serving staff dressed in unstained white aprons and caps. Desserts and drinks are laid out at the end of the chrome countertop, and each of the steam trays is filled with mouth-watering heaps of meat, smashed taters, and several different types of veggies. Nothing anywhere that even distantly resembles “gruel,” or even canned food, for that matter. I feel like I’m at a Morrison’s.
This is fabulous! And I am definitely hungry. But I just don’t know what to make of this place. More surreal than grim, it’s still been an unsettling transition. I feel like I should be more nervous than I am, but I’m just not. I’m tired, maybe getting a little punch-drunk, but maybe I’m just settling in already.
I load up several plates, check them through the guy at the register—the food’s free, but I guess they need to account for it all—then take a seat with three other hippies around a square table, and dig in. Conversation, and eventually even laughter, is cautious and quiet, but it slowly builds. It seems that everybody’s a little stunned. Nothing is like what we’ve been anticipating and dreading all these months. We keep expecting a flaming anvil-from-hell to drop on us at any second, but… the crickets still chirp, the stars still twinkle, and damn, that’s good pot roast.
It’s almost 10:30 by the time they finally get us all herded back onto the buses, openly laughing and goofing with each other. And as we pull away, out of the light and onto the darkened chessboard again, our escort has to stand up and wave us to silence just to be heard.
“All right, gentlemen. Now we’re going to take you to your permanent barracks. This is where you’ll be living for the next six weeks. When we get there, you’ll see a lighted area under an overhang. We’ll need you to form up there in Flight order, four lines to a Flight. Okay? Just put your bags down next to your feet, and wait there. Your T.I.s will be down shortly, and they’ll take you from there. Get a good night’s sleep, and enjoy your stay with us here at Lackland.”
Then he sits down again.
What is this? A museum tour? Did I get on the right flight out of Miami?
The bus pivots around another empty corner, and there before us, lit up like a rocket gantry, is “home.”

Lackland is a confusing and very bland amalgam of the old—to the point of being downright decrepit—and the relatively new—meaning, “made of concrete and brick” rather than rotting wood. Recruits fill every barracks building apparently, the newest trainees simply rotating into whatever billets—old or new—the most recent graduates have vacated. Luckily for us, the latest batch had occupied one of the newest structures, bequeathing it to us with their departures.
From directly above, this building would look like a huge pound sign (#), with two extra crossbars in the middle and the center filled in solid. Each of its twelve wings is elevated, hiked about fifteen feet up off the ground on stilts—well, thick blue I-beams, anyway—with only that solid middle block actually resting on the ground. And each of those wings is two-stories deep, starting on the second floor, of course. One floor, of one wing, equals one barracks room, with bedding for fifty. Multiply that by twelve wings, and two floors per wing—that’s twenty-four barracks rooms, filled with twelve hundred recruits, in just one building! And that’s not even counting the classrooms, admin offices, and the large cafeteria that make up the central core.
It’s an imposing structure, with the concrete pad under its nearest wing almost ablaze with light. It quickly becomes apparent that that pad is where we’re headed.
The buses swing around, and park with their doors pointed towards the light. Cold air gasps into the bus as our escort stands once more, and points at the brightly illuminated pad.
“That’s where we need you to form up, gentlemen—under that roof, facing that stairwell door, in Flight order, four lines to a Flight, bags at your feet. Got it? Okay. Have a nice night, and welcome to the Air Force.”
Stop doing that! I shout inside my head. This ain’t Disneyland!
We stream out of the buses, unescorted this time, and wander towards the light like lost spirits. Behind us, we hear air brakes releasing, followed by the diesel roar of our buses pulling out into the night. And we are alone. I actually catch myself thinking, “Jeez, I hope our T.I.s get here soon.”
Milling around under the lights, we start seeking out people with similar Flight numbers to our own. Back at the In-Processing Facility, our clerical hosts had written numbers on our folders that corresponded with our Training Squadrons and Flights. Though none of us knows the meaning of the numbers themselves, we quickly discover that everyone has a "3723”—apparently the Squadron number—but there’s two different Flight numbers. I jostle into place among the other “260s,” and the clumps soon melt into lines. Four lines per Flight.
It’s pretty chilly, and we’re feeling kind of conspicuous, standing around in our long hair and mismatched civilian clothes, fidgeting and giggling and murmuring in hushed tones in the only pool of light in the area. Until, somewhere deep in the bowels of the building—somewhere up inside that stairwell—we hear a muffled boom, followed immediately by an echoed muddle of shouting voices. And they’re getting louder. They’re coming down the stairs.
Our T.I.s are here.
We shut up and straighten up—as much as a ragtag bunch of clueless losers can, anyway—and turn to face the stairwell door.
It’s about time. I was starting to get cold.

7
MY MOTHER, MY DADDY, MY PRIEST, AND MY GOD

The door explodes open, slamming against the side of the building with shattering force, despite its pneumatic resistance arm. Out fly two furious sergeants—I presume they’re sergeants anyway. They charge straight into our ranks, bellowing as if we’re all responsible for wrecking their cars on the same mass blind date or something.
“What the hell are you lookin’ at, maggot! EYES FRONT!!!”
God, am I glad I’m not at the front of this line.
“Stand at attention! NOW!”
“Get your heels together! FISTS AT YOUR SIDES! FISTS AT YOUR SIDES!!!”
“You call this a line?! Straighten this mess up! NOW!”
“What’s your name, bwah?!”
“Um… John Roo….”
“Don’t look at me, goddammit! EYES FRONT!”
“Sorry… I, uh…”
“WHAT did you just say to me, bwah?”
“I said… uh… John…”
“Shut the hell up! And how many times have I gotta’ tell you EYES FUCKIN’ FRONT!!!”
Jesus, the man’s got the brim of his Smoky Bear hat jammed against the kid’s forehead so hard that it’s bent down. How can he even tell which way the recruit’s eyes are looking with that brim blocking his…?
“What the hell are you lookin’ at, dirtbag?!” The words burst into my ear at point blank range like a cherry bomb going off on my shoulder. It’s the other T.I. He’s somehow managed to barge right up beside me, unseen, and is now shoving against me with his chest and screaming at the side of my head. Out of sheer reflex, I flinch and turn my head towards the voice.
“DON’CHOO LOOKIT ME, SHITHEAD! You’re at attention! Put your eyes on the back of that dumbshit’s head in front of you, AND KEEP ‘EM THERE!”
“Yessir,” I warble, trying to reassemble my scattered wits.
“Did I tell you to SAY somethin’?!”
“No sir. I…”
“SIR no sir! You will not address me without starting AND ending every sentence with SIR! Is that clear, maggot?!”
“Y-yessir.”
“WHAT?!!!”
“SIR! Yes SIR!”
Without a second’s hesitation, he whirls away from me, butting brims and brows with the next guy in his sights.
“What are you smilin’ at, lard-ass?!”
And so it goes, for at least three hours—well, ten, fifteen minutes anyway—with the two of them storming through our ranks like enraged football coaches, shrieking and shoving, swearing and brow-beating, doing everything short of physically pounding us into the pavement. And when at last our motley crew has shaped up enough to resemble eight lines of mismatched wooden soldiers, frozen ramrod stiff and staring straight ahead, the two T.I.s stroll menacingly back to the front of the formation, then simultaneously turn to face us. Together, and without speaking, they first slam to attention, then snap right into a lethally sharp pair of parade rests—feet spread, arms locked behind their backs—at ease at attention.
Jesus. What are these guys wearing? They look like regular green fatigues, but there’s not a wrinkle in ‘em. Anywhere! Not even at the backs of their knees, at the folds of their elbows, or even at the belt lines where their shirts are tucked in. They look like they’re wearing the olive-drab equivalent of the Tin Man’s costume. These guys must have had their uniforms pressed and starched right on their bodies.
“God damn, if you ain’t the sorriest bunch of brain-dead stupid-fucks I’ve ever seen in my life!”
Ah, now that re-centers my attention.
The shorter one—the wiry, ferret-faced one who’s wearing sunglasses at almost eleven o’clock at night—scans us slowly with his dark opaque eyes, then shakes his head. “Lord give me stren’th. I just got rid of one worthless load of civvy trash, the worst I thought I’d ever seen. But this mangy-lookin’ bunch of… HEY! What’d I tell you about lookin’ at me?! EYES FRONT!”
I don’t even want to know to whom he’s shouting.
The bigger beefier one—he’s got the angry, jowly look of an old bulldog—picks up where the first one left off. “My name is Sergeant Lawson! Staff Sergeant Marshall Lawson! ‘Sir’ to you! And over my strongest objections, I have been assigned as the Training Instructor for Flight 260!”
Oh great. I’m in 260.
“This…” and he bobs his head toward the runt beside him, “… is Staff Sergeant Renfro, who you will also address as either Sgt. Renfro or ‘sir.’ He’ll be in charge of Flight 261. As of this moment, you are ours. Starting right now,” he bellows, stepping toward us poor bastards in Flight 260 and getting louder, “and for the next forty-two days, I will be your mother, I will be your daddy, your priest, and your god! Whatever I say goes! Period! And it goes now! You don’t hesitate, you don’t question, you don’t ask for a second opinion! Anything I say is a lawful order! And that means that failure to comply constitutes a courts martial offense, and carries the weight of incarceration and/or dishonorable discharge with it! And the same goes for Staff Sergeant Renfro here! IS THAT CLEAR?!!!”
A stunned smattering of ‘yesses’ and ‘sirs,’ plus a few extra ‘sirs’ (just in case) ripple through our shivering columns.
“What the fuck was THAT?!!,” the two T.I.s bray in unison. Renfro lunges back into the group, hopping from man to man like an agitated Chihuahua.
“What did I just tell you was the proper way to address me?!” Lawson barks at the second kid in line specifically, as if it was all his fault.
“Sir, yes SIR!”
“I can’t hear you!”
“SIR YES SIR!”
“Does everybody understand that?!”
This time we’ve got it. This time we’re ready for it.
“SIR YES SIR!”
If anyone had been asleep in this building, I guarantee they’re up now for sure. The two sergeants skulk back to the front, Renfro prowling through the scroungy bunch as if looking for the man who just raped his sister. Lawson continues on, undistracted.
“You’re going to go upstairs to your barracks now. When I give the command, you will pick up your bags, and march through that door—single file, one line at a time, starting with this line (indicating mine). At the first landing—that’s the second floor, for all you math wizzes—you will see two doors. Flight 260 will enter the door on the right, Flight 261 the left. That’s the right door for 260, the left door for 261. You will go inside, find a bunk, put your bag on it, then stand at the head of the bed, at attention, and wait for Sgt. Renfro or myself! Is that clear?!”
“SIR YES SIR!”
“Then MOVE!”
We lunge for our bags, faces bumping asses, stumbling over our own feet, then start a series of rear-end collisions as everyone shoves toward the door at once.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” shouts Sgt. Lawson. “Get back in line, and drop your bags! NOW!”
We turn around and fumble back into our original positions… quickly.
“Now, goddammit, when I tell you to move, you pick up your bags in one simple motion… like this!” His hand lashes out and snatches the first kid’s gym bag off the concrete in a lightning strike. “Then—IN AN ORDERLY MANNER—you will quick-march up those goddamned stairs and find yourselves a goddamned bunk before I gotta’ start planting my size-12 boots up some goddamned asses! Now DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THAT MUCH, LADIES?!!!”
“SIR YES SIR!”
“What the hell are you laughin’ at, airman?!” Sgt. Renfro again, out of sight to my left. I hear something that sounds like somebody’s luggage being kicked aside, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to look to find out. “You see something funny over there, Chuckles?!”
“No sir.”
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?!!!”
“SIR! No SIR!”
While Sgt. Renfro continues to flay the kid alive with that machete-tongue of his, Sgt. Lawson suddenly snarls, “Pick up your bags!”
We dive for our luggage, and straighten right back up.
“Goddammit! My grandmother can do better than that! DROP ‘EM!”
Crumpita-bump-flumpita… bump!
It sounds like somebody just tipped over a bin full of watermelons. Sgt. Renfro is still railing away on his own “troops” as if there was nobody else around but him and them. Sgt. Lawson marches into our midst, similarly ignoring his fellow T.I.’s ranting, his bulldog face jabbing toward each man he passes.
“Did I not JUST SHOW YOU how to do this?! Is this rocket-science or something?!”
One kid starts to answer “sir yes sir,” but quickly realizes he’s the only one responding, and cuts himself off.
“I’m talkin’ to all you geniuses! Was I not clear on what I wanted you to do?!”
“SIR YES SIR!”
“Then goddammit, DO IT! Pick ‘em up!”
We snatch our bags up again.
“THAT SUCKED! Drop ‘em!”
Flump… bumpita-crump!
“Pick ‘em up!”
We bend and snatch.
“Again!”
Blump-bumpita… flump!
“DID I SAY ANYTHING ABOUT DROPPIN’ EM?!!!”
And so it goes for another five minutes. Sgt. Renfro even gets his own crew in on the fun, and now we’re all enjoying the Pick-em-Up, Put-em-Down game. Until, just as we’re settling into the rhythm of the exercise, Sgt. Lawson abruptly yells, “Now get upstairs!”
Caught by surprise, half of us drop our bags again out of sheer repetition, while the rest of us jump forward and stumble into each other. I’m beginning to believe we really are as pathetic as they say we are.
“You useless bunch of pussies! Get back in line, and drop your damned bags!”
Sgt. Renfro releases a huge exasperated sigh, drops his fists to his hips, and starts pacing in a circle. Silence lands on us like a collapsed tent. Sgt. Lawson just stands there, glaring at us as if we were the scum floating on the surface of the gene pool. Then he throws his arms up, and turns to Renfro.
“Do you see what they’re giving me to work with here?”
“I know it,” Renfro agrees theatrically, waving his own hand at Flight 261, “Look what they made me step in. I ain’t never gonna’ get this shit scraped off my shoe.”
Somebody snickers at that, and Renfro hurls himself into the group.
“Who the FUCK is laughin’!”
And while he tears through his rigid formation again, screaming for a confession that even he must know will never come, Sgt. Lawson just stands there, arms folded, glaring at us as though it’s taking all the self-control he can muster just to keep from tossing a grenade into the middle of us and walking away. Then, without warning, he suddenly barks, “Pick ‘em up!”
As a single desperate organism, we bend and straighten as one, and every bag is off the ground.
Damn! In just twenty minutes, we’ve mastered picking our bags up. I’m so proud.
Sgt. Lawson just keeps staring at us in malevolent silence though. But at least we’re not resuming The Game. He has to shout to be heard over Renfro’s blistering diatribe, but amazingly enough, we all hear him.
“Get upstairs! Now!”
Somehow my line manages to move off evenly, and before I know it, I’m inside the concrete stairwell, following right behind the bell-bottomed ass of the guy in front of me. Until…
“Get back down here!”
Aw, now what? We spin wearily, and bumble back down the stairs.
Out in the cold night air again, we reassemble under the din of Sgt. Renfro still playing “Pick-em-up, Put-em-down” with the poor bastards of Flight 261.
But Sgt. Lawson does not deign to explain our recall. He just holds us in a smoldering scowl for a moment, then snaps “Get up those stairs… now!”
Expecting to be called back again at any second, we storm the stairs once more. But this time we manage to make it all the way into our room unimpeded.
Like Musical Chairs though, I don’t want to be the only one left hunting for a bunk when Sgt. Lawson comes charging into the room. So I foolishly grab one of the first beds I come to, pitch my bag into the middle of it, and whirl back to attention. The forty other guys in my Flight stampede past me like a concert crowd fleeing a fire, skidding and scrabbling for position, heaving luggage, and snapping to sloppy braces at the heads of their beds. In probably thirty seconds, every bunk is claimed, and the room—save for the heavy breathing that’s snorting from all four corners—goes quiet.
But Sgt. Lawson is nowhere in sight.
Outside, in the stairwell, we can hear 261 assaulting the steps, then retreating, then assaulting again—playing a whole new game that, thankfully, we have been spared. Perhaps Sgt. Lawson is unable to get past them. No, he could walk down the center of a busy freeway, and the world would part to go around him. He’s just biding his time, letting us sweat—probably standing next to Sgt. Renfro, and trying not to pee his pants laughing at us.
Oh yes indeed. Welcome to the real Lackland Air Force Base.

8
DOESN’T ANYONE KNOW HOW TO TURN ON A GODDAMNED LIGHT?

Our barracks room is on the first level of one wing of the building. Our sister flight’s is in the next wing around the corner, angling ninety degrees away from ours. The shared stairway occupies the corner between us.
Essentially, the room is just a stretched rectangle, split into two long narrow halves by a wall running lengthwise down the center. At the far end of the room, the wall stops short of completing the division, creating instead a gap that leaves the bunking area in a sort of long, squared-off U-shape. Tall, vertical, gunmetal-gray lockers line every inch of the inside and outside walls, with the beds—and their attendant foot lockers—running down the middle of the room. High, narrow windows run along the horizontal space between the tops of the lockers and the ceiling, letting in the wash of the street- and pad-lights outside.
When I’d first scampered in the door, I’d noticed that I was facing straight down a dark hallway that cut across the root of our wing. The first bay of the barracks had opened up immediately on my left, the second bay at the opposite end of the hall, with a small T.I.’s office sandwiched in between them. I chose the third bed, in the first row, of the first bay, being the military brainchild that I am. No way I’ll be drawing any unwanted attention in this location. No sir-ree Bob.
On the right side of the hallway as I’d first come in, were three doorways leading into unknown darkened rooms. I’m still wondering what those are for, when Sgt. Lawson steamrolls through the door, fast and mad, as if on his way to spank a belligerent child. He stops so abruptly that he actually slides a short distance, and stares into the gloom of our bay. He peruses us for a moment—looking at us like we’re all wearing chicken suits and flippers—then slaps at a switch on the inside wall. The room fills with sputtering fluorescent light.
“Doesn’t anyone know how to turn on a goddamned light?” He starts to walk away, then pauses to add, “Leave your shit on the bed, and wait for me in the Day Room.”
What’s a Day Room?
“This is the Day Room over here. The one with the lights on! Come on! Move it!”
We pour across the hall, while he shouts identical orders to the occupants of the second bay, and we enter the middle of the three lesser rooms on that side. It’s basically just a small square room, white-tiled and cold, without a lick of furniture save for a single wooden podium. A forest of model airplanes dangles from the ceiling.
With nothing to sit on though, we all just stand around sheepishly, looking a little chilled and scared. Outside, in the stairwell, Sgt. Renfro’s still running his flight up and down the steps.
On my watch, it shows 11:10.

Sgt. Lawson seems bored and tired now. Though his expression is still grim, his voice never rises again. Even Flight 261 has gone quiet outside, following the slamming of their door.
Lawson takes a quick roll call, mangling and mispronouncing one name after the next. My ass, knees, and ankles are killing me from sitting on this hard naked floor. Then Lawson growls his way through a quick description of our situation here, pointing out a few highlights of our lovely barracks.
On this side of the hallway, opposing our bunk bays, the Day Room we’re sitting in is the middle of three rooms. The first—the closest to the entrance door—is our bathroom (officially referred to as “the latrine”), a large, spotlessly clean, fully tiled chamber, with eight sinks, four shitter stalls, four urinals, and a big open communal shower, with something like ten shower heads around its walls. We’ll be expected to keep it immaculate, under penalty of being bludgeoned to death, I’m guessing.
The room on the other side of the Day Room is just general equipment storage.
There’s also a large closet that takes up one whole wall of the Day Room right behind us. That is where we’ll be storing our luggage and any personal gear that we might have brought along with us, starting tomorrow, once we’ve been issued our uniforms. That closet will be padlocked, and will not be reopened again until graduation day, a month-and-a-half from now.
“So say goodbye to all the electric razors, pictures of Mom, books and porn magazines that we specifically told you not to bring here. All you’re supposed to have in those bags is one change of clothes, any prescription medicines, and your paperwork. You wasted your time and effort bringing anything else along.
“All right,” he sighs, straightening up and ambling toward the door, “out in the hallway there is a pile of field jackets of all different sizes. When I tell you to, I want you to get out there, find one that fits you, put it on, then come back in here and sit down. Is that clear?”
Nodding heads and mumbled ‘sirs’ and ‘yesses’ confirm for him that we are, in fact, still a herd of idiots. He drops his head, draws a deep breath, and “patiently” tries again. “Is that clear?”
“SIR YES SIR!”
“On your feet!”
We jump like the floor’s been electrified.
“Now go!”
We jam ourselves through the doorway like The Fifty Stooges… and find ourselves in pitch darkness. With the exception of the afterglow spilling into the hall from the Day Room, we are standing in deep shadow. And no one—including me—dares to take the singular initiative of throwing the light switch, no matter what Lawson says, at least not without having been specifically told to do so. So, we grope in the dark.
I can feel—and smell the mothball aroma of—the field jackets, heaped at my feet. But I have no way of reading the labels. So, like everyone else, I just snatch up one after another, and jam my arms through the sleeves, checking the fit. It’s amazing that, with all the flying arms in that darkened hallway, we aren’t continuously punching each other out.
“Hurry the fuck up!” the Day Room roars.
This is taking me way too long. But nothing I’ve been able to grab so far has fit. Once the crowd starts to thin though, there’s a little more light, and fewer jackets to choose from. And I finally find what I need. I’m not the last one to re-enter the Day Room, but I’m one of the last, and Lawson glowers at me like he just found out my real name is Steve Hitler.
Again, he wonders aloud at the mental midgetry of the rabble before him, at the level of skull density that would preclude even one person out of fifty from figuring out how to throw a fucking light switch.
The welcoming harangue goes on for another ten minutes or so, until he’s finally as fed up with the process as we are. He tells us where to hang up our ratty civilian clothes, gives us fifteen minutes to use the facilities, then promises lights-out, whether we’re ready or not.
We bolt for our bags, grab our toiletries, and pile into the Latrine as a mob. With a limited number of sinks, mirrors and toilets though, we have to rotate through the various stations, and double up one behind another at the sinks. The room resounds with squeaking sneakers, mumbled apologies, flushing toilets and hissing faucets, then the thunder of our exodus back out into the bays.
I shed clothing down to my underwear—Sgt. Lawson had specifically informed us that there would be no pajamas, no T-shirts, and sure as hell no nude sleeping in his barracks—pitch everything into my wall locker, and leap into bed. Once the tumult has died down, Sgt. Lawson slaps off the lights, and stands there, big and dangerous, hands on hips, backlit in the entranceway.
“Lights-out means you go to sleep! Now! No talkin’ and no getting’ out of bed. Understood?”
“Sir yes sir.”
He decides not to focus on our sloppy, half-hearted response this time. “So… lights-out! Get some sleep. You’re gonna’ need it tomorrow.” And he slams the door behind him.

Now that the tornado has finally passed, I lay here in the silence and the semi-darkness, staring up at the ceiling, dimly lit as it is by the glow of streetlights leaking in through the high windows. And I wonder at my self-inflicted plight.
I feel like a virgin on my first night in prison, suddenly very aware of the frightening consequences of my choices, and the permanence of those consequences. Everybody here is a stranger to me, all of them either as uncomfortable and terrified as I am, or downright overtly hostile to me. There will exist no such thing as “leisure” for a long time to come. There will be only work, work, and more work, an endless striving to please an unpleasable host. And all without reward, save for the opportunity to keep doing more of the same.
It’s a little tough to remember the up-side to all this, or what could have possibly led me to even consider such a role in the first place. I just feel lost, out of control, like I’m accelerating down a steepening slide that ends twenty feet above a dumpster. Anything could happen—bad or good—but it’s the idea that nothing’s in my hands anymore, that this first simple little step has doomed me to a complete multi-year course of action that I am no longer capable of altering.
Again, it’s not that I’m “lonely,” per se—that simply is not an aspect of my personality—and besides, in this case, there are clearly a lot of other refugees in this boat with me. But I do feel alone, simply because of how all the familiar aspects of my life are now gone. All of them. Everything, from the people I know, love, and trust, to the social codes by which I’ve always lived. Even the tempo at which my world has always danced. All gone—to be replaced with a slap to the face, a hard shove through a forbidding door, and a harsh screaming introduction to this unfriendly, unforgiving new cast of characters.
It’s scary. Of course it is. But I find my own crumbling resolve being bolstered somewhat by the subdued sniffles and whimpers that I can hear rising from other distant bunks.
Someone here is weaker than I am.
I can handle this better than at least one other person here.
I can do this.

Story II: A BRAVE NEW WORLD

2011-12-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

II
A BRAVE NEW WORLD

1
March, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
THEY ACTUALLY PLAY REVEILLE HERE!

Holy shit! They actually play reveille here!
A bugle—a recorded one—is bleating over the intercom!

At five in the morning!
I bolt upright in a wad of itchy green blankets, and fend off my first instinct to panic. I have no idea where I am, or how I got here, or what…
There’s a large, imposing figure, standing at parade rest in a darkened hallway nearby, staring down at me. I think. He’s cast in silhouette, all shadow on this facing side.
What the…?
That annoying horn cuts off, and the silhouetted figure suddenly lunges into the room. He swats at something on the wall, all the while bellowing, “Get up! Get up! Get up! Get the fuck up!”

The room explodes with light, and through squinting, watering eyes, I see the mystery figure storm out of the room, carrying his litany off with him. “Get up! Get up! Let’s go! Get your sorry asses up! Now!”
It’s ‘The Sergeant.’ I’m in ‘The Barracks.’ This is ‘The Hour.’
Oh God, it’s all coming back to me now.
Sgt. Lawson stomps past the end of the room again, this time going the other way—headed out the main door—shouting.
“Five minutes! Hit the head! Get dressed! Put your field jackets on! And be downstairs in five minutes! Don’t make me come back up here and drag…!”
SLAM!
The door closes behind him, cutting him off.
Holy shit!
In a mad scramble, I scamper barefoot into the Latrine, and relieve myself in one of the sit-down stalls (all the urinals are already taken). Then I’m skidding to a halt at my locker, and tearing my clothes off the hangers. All around the room, shoes and pants and shirts are cartwheeling in the air, feet are thundering on the bare floor, and everyone’s repeating their own desperate little affirmations. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…”
At least it rhymes.

We don’t make it. We ain’t even close. So we get to run up and down the stairs a couple of times—sidling past our sister flight going the other way on one occasion—until Sgt. Lawson decides we’ve gotten the message, and allows us to form up next to 261 under the pad lights.
We’re puffing and panting and gasping steam into the chilly morning darkness as he addresses us. He lectures us on our glacial rate of learning, our sloppy appearance, and how we’re gonna’ be by-God getting this shit down right soon, or be discovering what living a Life in Hell really means.
Oh, I think I’m starting to get a pretty good idea already, thank-you very much.
Two pads down, under another distant wing of the building, I hear the rumble of booted feet pouring out of another stairwell. And almost as quickly as it started, it abruptly ends again. It’s tough to tell exactly what’s going on down there—I don’t dare look, and as much as I may be drowsily tuning out Sgt. Lawson’s monologue, his volume still makes it difficult to hear anything else—but after several seconds of some other T.I. shouting at his troops, I pick out what sounds like a rhythmic counting, synched with an equally rhythmic mass-clomping sound.
My God, they’re actually doing exercises at this hour of the morning!
Sgt. Lawson bellows again, mauling what I presume was once an English word—it sounds something like “Hm-MYARRRch!”—and the line in front of me lurches into motion.
We’re going to breakfast.

The meal, this morning, seems markedly different from the one last night.
Or maybe it’s just my imagination.
First, of course, is our dress code. No longer merely out of place in our multi-hued polyester and varying degrees of shaggy locks, our group ensemble has now also been uniformly enhanced by the addition of our field jackets. Quite the fashion statement.
But perhaps most notable is the change in ambience. Now, under the combined assault of both T.I.s, we are shuffling down the food line in squeaky-sneaker side-steps, moving our trays along with both hands, addressing our servers as “sirs” or “ma’ams,” and exchanging grim, furtive glances whenever we’re not staring straight ahead.
In addition, as ordered, the first person to an empty table now must set his tray down, but remain standing with his hand in the air. The next three people must home in on whatever table has a badly dressed hippie standing next to it with his arm upraised, until all seats at that table are claimed. Then, and only then, may all four sit and eat. There’s no talking, and any facial expression that might imply a less than total concentration on the task of finishing our meals right the hell NOW becomes an instant target of a unified Lawson/Renfro offensive.
We are furiously rushed through our “dining experience”—the only people who actually get to finish their meals are those who’ve ordered basically nothing… a single orange or a bowl of grits, perhaps—and almost every tray is returned to the dishwasher’s hopper with sizable clumps of food still scattered across it. Then it’s a hair-flying dash back out into formation under the pad-lights outside.
The last guys out the door are flat-out sprinting, with Sgt. Renfro yapping and nipping at their heels. Sgt. Lawson already has the rest of us formed up and quivering in place, prowling around us like a lion waiting for the stupidest zebra in the herd to break wind.
And when at last we’re all reassembled out in the cold gray-pink glow of the sunrise, we are graciously granted an entire half hour with which to get back upstairs, make our beds, brush our teeth, shit-shower-and-shave, get dressed in whatever change of clothes we’ve brought with us, then get the hell back down here and into formation again.
For today is the day that we start to look like we’re in the Air Force.

2
THE FLEECING OF THE LAMBS

We have to march to get there.
Us—the same fifty clueless goobers that just stumbled off the proverbial turnip truck only last night—tromping along in a ragtag formation that more resembles an uncoordinated centipede than even a bad, small town, high school marching band.
Freshman flights like ours are called “Rainbow Flights,” and for obvious reasons. No two people are dressed the same, haircuts range from afros to ponytails, and the footwear covers the entire spectrum from sneakers to cowboy boots to disco elevator shoes. The only thing about us that matches, aside from the grim countenance of doom on every face, is the little white paper flag that flutters from each man’s front belt loop—the temporary equivalent of a nametag. It looks like a discount price tag, as if we’d all just been purchased by the Air Force this morning, and they forgot to cut the Blue Light labels off.
Of course, Sgt. Lawson orbits us the whole way, like an errant moon around the universe’s sorriest planet, screaming and berating us for everything from our rumpled appearance to the rising gas prices off-base. And everyone we pass along our winding route across the chessboard—every car that gets held up, waiting for us to cross all those streets—just stares at us like we’ve got our pants around our ankles, and sparklers sputtering out of our asses.
But ultimately we make it… to here. The barbershop.
I’m standing here now—at attention, of course—field jacket rolled up under one arm, staring straight ahead at the four barber chairs (only two of which have actual barbers behind them), and at the stupefied clot of humanity crammed into this one small room, reflected in the wall-length mirror behind them. Facing the barbers, there’s only space enough for us to stand about four-deep. So we’re arranged, shoulder-to-shoulder, in about fourteen short little lines, watching our fellow lambs getting shorn before us.
And the barbers are nothing if not efficient. No wasted words, no wasted movements, no actual hair-cutting skills either, apparently. Sgt. Lawson barks for the next recruit to take a seat. A white sheet, or “bib,” is whirled around his throat, and the industrial-strength electric shears go to work. Usually, three or four fast swipes is enough to completely denude the crown of a man’s skull, at which point his head is shoved forward—until his chin thunks against his own sternum—and the back of his neck is raked clean in another couple of vertical strokes. The sides are where the barber’s individuality really gets to shine though, as he scours the temples right down to the bedrock in the fewest scoops possible, heedless of any protuberances that might lie in his path, like moles, jaws, or ears.
The hair drops to the floor in clumps the size of possums. From a distance, you’d think they were just swatting rodents off our heads and shoulders. An entire toupee flops onto the growing pile of hair at the barber’s feet with every swipe of his fleecing shears. Then the bib is snatched away, the T.I. bellows again, and another shell-shocked customer staggers out the door, while a wide-eyed and apprehensive replacement takes his chair.
I’d started off third in my little queue, enrapt by the carnage and chilled by the insectile buzzing of the clippers, which, by the way, never bogged down once, not even in Johnson’s ‘fro, though it came off in chunks like big, fuzzy, blackboard erasers. Now Hildebrandt—the pasty-faced kid in front of me, with the one long eyebrow—steps forward. And I am next.
It still catches me off guard however, when the next bellow from Sgt. Lawson is directed at me. I lurch towards the empty chair, while the barber flips an entire cat’s worth of hair off his sheet. And time abruptly slows.
As I swing my butt over the seat cushion, that sheet—that hairy bib—comes sailing over my right shoulder like a funeral shroud, finds my throat, and cinches down tight. The mirror’s behind me now, so I don’t get that final chance to see myself unshorn before the huge clippers clunk against my forehead, and furrow their way to the back in one fast motion. I have to stifle the natural urge to gasp—not from the shock of losing my hair so much as the sheer machine-like callousness of the act—and before I can even bring my eyes back up to look at the rows of shaggy civilians still standing before me, the barber’s already ploughed three more rows down to my scalp, and is forcing my head down for the next assault.
It’s over before I realize it. The bib burns a stripe across my neck as the “stylist” snatches it away, and Sgt. Lawson shouts “Next!”
I stumble out the door, and join the ranks of the hairless assembling in the fifty-degree sunshine outside. One of them is Airman Grzeszak—“Mouse.” And now I can see how he got that nickname. Without that mangy ruff of hair hanging down to his collar, his huge Mickey Mouse ears have sprung out like wings. They must extend four or five inches straight out from the sides of his head. And they’re almost perfectly round! Combined with his small cranium and those beady little eyes, he really does look just like a sickly little rat.

Anyway, since there’s no T.I. out here right now, as a group, we find it irresistible to run our hands over our newly bald pates, chuckling quietly in stunned disbelief. Well, we’re not exactly “bald” really. Just sorta’ “stubbled.” Severely stubbled. I’ve known guys in high school with denser five o’clock shadows than what I’ve got left on my head. And of course this bristly pattern of iron filings only enhances the daring fashion statement I’m already making with my brown polyester bell-bottoms and lovely mothball-scented field jacket.
God, I look so pathetic. I just want to cry—and then laugh—out of sheer embarrassment.

3
SMILE FOR THE DAMNED CAMERA

And now they want to take our pictures? Now?
I’ve never looked so abominably stupid in all my life! I don’t even want to be seen, much less photographed! Oh yeah, this is how I want to be immortalized, looking like the butt of an especially mean fraternity hazing. But here we go anyway.
We’re lined up, single-file, behind a tired old renovated warehouse—“renovated,” meaning “repainted barf beige”—shuffling along in dour silence, one man at a time, up the drab loading dock stairs, and into a single dark doorway. Every few seconds, I can see a flash of light inside that door, and then the line jostles forward another three feet.
My God, they’re actually doing this! Dressed in my appalling mix of tacky party clothes and ugly, baggy, unmarked, green field jacket—my ravaged scalp still sloughing off a constant mist of “hair dust” that has powdered my shoulders dark—the last thing I want to do right now is enter that room and smile for the damned camera.
But, like the rest of the sheep, I keep my head up, my eyes more-or-less straight ahead, my mouth shut, and my part of the line nudging forward.
As it turns out though, once inside the “studio,” the queue wends past a couple of tables against one wall, atop which are several boxes. These contain all different sizes of “bus driver hats”—the dress blue “wheel caps” that you always see the flag-bearer at a military funeral wearing when he salutes the bereaved widow—and, in the other boxes, amazingly enough, fake blue uniform bibs! Literally! Costume uniform “fronts!” I can’t believe it.
Sgt. Lawson stands in one corner, repeating, every few minutes, the same litany to each new clump of recruits that comes through the door. “Find a hat and a false-front that fit your head and neck—in that order—and move over here to this line. Come on! Let’s go! We haven’t got all day!”
I reach into the bib box, and try on the first one I get my hands on. Amazing. It snaps around my neck like a priest’s collar, and drapes over both shoulders, leaving me with the front half of a dress blue shirt, a knotted blue tie, and a dark blue dress jacket front, complete with silver Air Force insignia on the collar tabs, all sewn together into a single waist-length ‘kerchief.’ Add a size 7-3/4” wheel hat, cranked down onto my head like a tight bathing cap, with the brim riding low over my eyes, and from the ribs up, at least—the only part of me that the camera will be seeing—I look like I’m fully accoutered in a complete set of dress blues.
When my turn comes, the photographer’s assistant guides me to a stool parked in front of a gold-fringed American flag, squares off the shoulders of my fake uniform bib so that it hangs convincingly over my faux-silk shirt (with the writhing tape measures all over it), then tells me to sit up straight, lift my chin, and look proudly into the lens of the camera. I’ve barely found the damned camera, hiding in the shadows under the reflector panels, when the flash goes off with a pop, and the assistant points me toward some more boxes where I can drop off my “uniform.”
I step out into the sunlight, back to being dressed like a homeless chemo patient again, and find myself actually chuckling for the first time since meeting my new “Dad” here at Lackland.
What the hell are they going to do to us next?

4
YOUR NEW MILITARY ENSEMBLE

Clothing Issue.

Another one of the older buildings on base. A windowless, cream-colored, water-stained concrete box, sitting alone in the middle of a treeless acre of scalped grass. Inside, it’s all dark wood paneling on the walls, dark wood tile on the floor, and large open bins everywhere. Plain blue wooden benches—the simple kind you’d expect to see in a Little League baseball dugout—form a perimeter around the open centers of each of the connecting rooms. The ceiling is close, and below that, an ugly grid of exposed sprinkler pipes criss-crosses just above our heads, low enough to do chin-ups off them without having to jump up to the bars. And though—like everything else on this base apparently—every surface is at least spotless, if not buffed to a swirly high gloss, it still manages to feel its age: a little damp, musty… sagging.
We’ve been herded into this first room, and arranged in a compacted formation, facing the bins along one wall. And while Sgt. Lawson blusters among us, describing the impending process in short, gruff syllables, silent workers follow in his wake, dropping olive-drab canvas bags at our feet. These are our new duffel bags. And we are about to fill them up… with clothes.
Step One: attach separate shoulder strap to D-rings, creating a lovely four-foot-long shoulder-bag that hangs, flaccid, almost to the floor.
Step Two: strip down to your tattered undies, and put all your civilian clothes in your new shoulder-bag. All the way to the bottom, please.
Step Three: room by room, make your way around all the bins, collecting up all the pieces of your new military ensemble. You’ll be wearing some of it. The rest will go into your duffel, along with your civvies.
First room: fatigue pants and blouses, T-shirts, belts, and caps. Try on different sizes, making sure that they fit comfortably. They can afford to be a little large—tailoring can always shorten and tighten—but make sure they’ve got enough room to move. And once you’ve got what you need, grab several more of the same size, and tamp them down into the bottom of the duffel bag. With the cap, find one that fits just right, then take the next size up instead. When your hair grows back in, the fit will become much tighter.
And off we go. Fifty scrawny kids, barefoot, pasty-white and bird-chested, crowded around the bins, stepping in and out of ugly green pants, shrugging in and out of ugly long-sleeve green shirts, and pulling our heads through T-shirt necks, all in complete silence. The duffel bags fill up quickly. Then, as soon as we’re all back in “formation” in the center of the room again, looking about as dorky as humanly possible in our baggy green frumpery—with our pant legs heaped over our bare feet, our sleeves hanging long, and our untucked shirts draped over our shoulders, ballooning out enough to hide a fully-inflated inner-tube around each waist—they lead us into the next room.
Here it’s all socks, shoes and boots, mountains of them, piled loosely in bins, by size, and tied together in pairs by the laces. We’re introduced to “chukka boots” (ugly, clunky boots, that barely rise to ankle-height), “low quarters” (regular dress shoes), and of course, the staple of all military footwear, combat boots. And all of them are uncomfortable. The socks are all uniformly black, and come out of the bin feeling already stretched and loose. There’s about ten minutes of tugging and pulling and wrestling with laces then, with everyone seated around the room on the Little League benches. Then we’re off to the next room, where it starts all over again, this time rummaging for our dress blues.
And there’s a tailor in this room. Two of them, in fact.
This time, not only do we have to rifle through all the pants and shirts and socks and hats (bus driver hats and piss-cutters both) again, but then we have to join the queue stepping up to one of the two tailor’s pedestals, so that they can stick pins in us, draw on us with chalk, and best of all, measure our inseams. Then we bundle up our newly selected blues, and leave them with the tailors to be altered. We won’t see them again for fourteen days, they tell us. But once they’re returned to us, at least something will fit well out of all the crap I’ve waded through today. Something small to look forward to, I guess.
It takes us a little over an hour to finally fight our way out the back door and into the mid-morning sunshine. And there, right in the middle of the street, Sgt. Lawson forms us up into four loose ranks—arrayed more like an audience than a marching formation—facing the ass-end of the Clothing Issue building. He yanks a terrified “volunteer” from our fold, and, with the rest of us standing or kneeling in the road, watching him and blocking traffic at the same time, he proceeds to show us a few things about uniform wear that we apparently need to know right the hell now!
Like “never be caught wearing a hat indoors.” And, similarly, “never be caught outdoors without one on your head.” “This is where you stow your fatigue cap when you’re not wearing it”—with the bill of the hat jammed down the back of your pants—and “this is where you stow your blue piss-cutter” (that goofy little hat that looks like you’re wearing the top of a sealed milk carton on your head)—tucked up under the front of your belt like a small guest towel. “This is how you salute when wearing each of these different caps.” And “this is a gig line”—the vertical line formed by your shirt buttons, the edge of your belt buckle, and your fly—and it must always be straight and perfectly aligned.
Yes… yes, I can see how important that would be…
Blah blah blah. I’m starting to swoon, forgetting almost as much as I’m retaining.
But, with his usual abruptness, Sgt. Lawson concludes his curbside edification with a bark, turns us on our heels, and starts us marching for home.

“Home?” Did I just say “home?” No, I didn’t mean that.
Hell, the barracks don’t even qualify as a “safe zone.”
And yet, as we’re parading back through the streets of Lackland—still tromping along with all the cohesiveness of a pack of Cub Scouts on a nature hike—I can’t help but feel that at least one hurdle is now behind me. I’m not sure which one, or how exactly I managed to get past it without noticing, but somehow the landscape just seems a little less alien to me now. Not that it actually feels like “home”—Lord, right now it’s hard for me to picture that ever happening—so much as it just feels that I am suddenly a little less of a foreigner here. You know? I’m a long way from fitting in, but at least I no longer stand out.
We pass another flight going the opposite direction on the other side of the street. And though I’ll grant you, they don’t have overstuffed duffel bags full of first-day uniforms slung over their shoulders and bouncing at their hips—no, their boots all strike the sidewalk with a tighter rhythm, and their fatigue shirts have actual name tags embroidered above their chest pockets—they’re still similarly grim-faced, still marching under the continuous harassment of their own little horse-fly of a T.I., they're still clad in baggy green, and they're still bald. Oh, and they have cute little briefcases under their arms instead of duffels. But other than that, we’re practically mirror images of each other.
In other words, we no longer glow in the dark. We’re no longer a Rainbow Flight.
I’m suddenly a real Airman Basic (AB) in the United States Air Force!
And though that hardly qualifies as an honor in the grand scheme of things, it does mean that, well, part of this “experience” is now behind me. The Plunge. The first step—the big step—the one that took me off the end of the high-dive, anyway. That one big, spastic, flailing drop, followed by that loud, stinging belly flop. That was it. Clumsy, embarrassing, terrifying, and a little painful, but—most importantly now—behind me.
I’m in the water now. It’s damned cold, doesn’t smell very good, and it’s pretty choppy too. But as it turns out, I might just know how to swim.

Story III: LEARNING THE ROPES

2011-12-19T06:57:00.000-08:00

III
LEARNING THE ROPES

1
March, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
URINAL COLONEL

It turns out they really do expect you to make your bed so crisp and tight that they can bounce a quarter off it. I’d always presumed that that was just some kind of myth, a military parable, like walking twenty miles to school every day, uphill both ways, barefoot and in the snow. But no, once back in our barracks, Sgt. Lawson actually wrenches a bunk into shape for us—to show us how it’s done—then produces a quarter. Flipping it onto the drumhead he’s created with the top blanket, he directs our attention to the quarter’s single rebound, then informs us that every bed, every morning, will produce the exact same result, or there will be demerits.
Good God, no! Not demerits!
What is this? Boy Scout camp?
The same goes for our underwear drawers (somehow that sounds redundant).
Not only will every pair o’ skivvies, every T-shirt, and every sock be folded, but they will be folded in a very specific, and a very precise way, as well as being positioned in very specific places. Conformity is the rule. Our toiletries will have very specific placements, our hanging stuff will be in a very specific order, and all our class materials—our little portfolios, our manuals, our notebooks—are likewise to be situated only in their assigned places. Even our array of shoes must be lined up under our beds in a very specific sequence—based on height, I guess—from combat boots down to our shower flip-flops.
So much to learn, so little of it meaningful.
He also introduces us to the concept of the “GI Party.”
A GI Party is basically just the military’s version of “spring-cleaning”—severe spring-cleaning. I’m talking micro-scrubbing every nook and cranny, with toothbrushes if necessary. I’m talking about rubber-glove-and-sponge cleaning of every inch of every toilet and urinal, inside and out. And I’m talking about waxing and buffing the entire vinyl tile floor, in both bays, the Day Room, and the corridor. Everything scoured, dusted, and polished to the nth degree, sufficient to survive a detailed white glove inspection. And we can expect these “parties” at least once a week, if not two or three times, frequently without forewarning.
In fact, we will now wrap up this glorious day with our very first watered-down version of a GI Party.

Oh gumdy good drops.
Now, I had been advised, prior to leaving my home in Miami—as had everyone else in this flight, apparently—that, at least while in Basic Training, you should never willingly volunteer for anything. Ever! It seems though, that Sgt. Lawson is well aware of this particular mindset, as he now stands before us, looks us all in the eyes, and asks for our first volunteer.
As predicted, no one rises to the occasion.
An evil smile hoists up the corners of his bulldog jowls. He’s seen this all before.

“If I don’t get a volunteer, I’ll just have to pick someone out myself.” Still no response. God, I feel so heroic—but I’m no more silent than anyone else. “I’ve got a bunch of different jobs here,” he continues, “and you’re all gonna get something. So you might as well step forward now.” Still nothing. “You never know. I might just give the better jobs to the first volunteers… save the shit details for all you masterminds who think you can beat the system. Now—do I have a volunteer for this first detail, or not?”
Some poor slob raises his hand nervously. “Sir, I’ll take it, sir.”
“Excellent. You’re the Latrine Queen. Grab a brush and a sponge and some cleanser out of the supply closet, and start scrubbing toilets.”
The kid looks crushed. He was a volunteer, for Chrissakes!
“Like I said,” Sgt. Lawson cackles, “I might give you the better job for volunteering—might—and I really might. But I also might not. So don’t waste your time trying to out-think me.”
An uncomfortable chuckle shivers through the group, while a guy standing behind the new Latrine Queen pats him on the back, and murmurs, “You’re our first Urinal Colonel.”
Subdued laughter breaks out, and Sgt. Lawson lets it play for a moment. Then he points to the comedian. “You’re on the Potty Squad too, smartass. And you, and you, and you.” All four smiles drop, and the laughter shrivels right up with it. “Go. You’re working for him now.”

The “Urinal Colonel” is the only one smiling as they head off.
Sgt. Lawson turns back to the rest of us. “Now, I need another volunteer.”

2
A MORON LIKE ME

You’d think, after yesterday’s lesson in volunteerism, that I’d have known better. Wouldn’t you? Then again, if I was capable of knowing better, I wouldn’t be here in the first place, would I?
As it was, I’d held off volunteering until a couple more of those jobs had been dispensed—and neither one of them had been too bad: one guy wielding a feather duster, the other a bottle of Windex and a towel—and then I put my own hand up. I got a mop and a bucket, and a small detail of non-volunteers to move beds and boots and trunks out of my way.
Shit.
Naturally, the next guy to raise his hand got the power buffer and the wax. The cool job with the cool tools. I was so jealous.
Today though, once our early morning exercises were done—sit-ups, scissor-kicks, jumping-jacks and the like—followed by the usual short cold jog around the periphery of the asphalt marching pad, another harried breakfast, and another half hour mad dash to get upstairs, make beds, take showers, get dressed, then get back down here under our wing of the building, the opportunity to volunteer has once more arisen.
Sgt. Lawson had already gone through his first batch of student Squad Leaders, firing them en masse from their positions at the front of our formation’s four lines, and assimilating them back among the rest of the rank and file. Now he needs new ones—volunteers, preferably. New idiots to march in the lead, relay his commands, pass on the dirty work, and catch all the shit for not only their own screw-ups, but for those of every man in his line—or “squad”—as well.
What kind of a moron would intentionally submit himself to that kind of extra abuse?
A moron like me, apparently.
I raise a tentative hand. And without a second’s hesitation, he jabs a finger at me, then waves it at the front of my line.
“You. Up here! Come on!”
I step out of line, and trot to the front, feeling every pair of eyes upon me. The line has to shuffle backwards a step or two to accommodate me. What the hell was I thinking? I’m sure there was some thought process that preceded the lifting of my arm, but right now I’m having a hard time recalling what it was.
Oh yeh. The marching. The guy that had previously led my squad was as clueless as the rest of these clowns when it came to stepping off on the right foot, snapping and pivoting the right way, and, on occasion, even just keeping in rhythm with Sgt. Lawson’s cadence. It disrupted everyone else in the line, and it drove me crazy. After three-and-a-half years of marching band though, not to mention a semester-and-a-half of ROTC in college, I know how to march.
Things like doing an “about face.” Half the guys here still spin themselves right off their feet whenever they have to do it. It’s embarrassing. It’s almost second nature to me though.
Yeh, this is one place I can shine.
Sgt. Lawson fires me two days later.

3
TWICE BITTEN

Inoculations.
Damn. I hate shots. I hate needles.
Fortunately, as the omnipresent Sgt. Lawson has just informed us, here at Lackland Air Force Base, they don’t do needles. They do airguns.
A flight of female recruits is trickling out the exit door of the trailer that comprises the Vaccination Clinic. One at a time they exit, one light-blue short-sleeve hiked up high on each shoulder, dabbing at their deltoids with cotton balls, and sporting facial expressions that range from girlish-and-giggling to wide-eyed-and-sucker-punched, as if they’d just smelled a fart in a confessional or something. And it wasn’t them that cut the cheese.
I don’t know what to make of their reactions. Were the airguns better or worse than the usual hypodermics? They’re faster, says Sgt. Lawson, and more hygienic.
That, of course, falls well short of answering my unspoken question.
It’s day 3, and a cutting little winter breeze is being held at bay by a cascade of unfiltered Texas sunlight. It had actually felt pretty good marching over here this morning. So naturally, they’ve got us standing under a corrugated tin shelter, in the only shade in the area, formed up with our sister flight—good old 261—and their mother cobra, Sgt. Renfro. And here, in the shadow of the shelter roof, it’s downright brisk.
While Sergeants Lawson and Renfro pace back and forth impatiently, consorting in whispers, the male and female recruits ogle each other as if they haven’t seen a member of the opposite gender in decades. Though their mannish blue slacks and clunky black shoes do nothing to enhance their femininity—nor does their complete lack of make-up—I have to admit, even the plainer representatives of that female flight are a sight for sore eyes right now. They giggle, we murmur, and both sides send a simple but obvious semaphore back and forth with their eyebrows… until the women’s T.I. comes out the clinic door, and strides right through all that electricity.
She stops, glaring at us and sniffing at the air—as if she can actually smell the damned pheromones coursing between us—then yaps at her milling charges to form up, now! This seems to startle Sgt. Lawson out of his conversation with Renfro, and he turns to find his fifty swingin’ dicks shuffling around with sheepish grins still on their faces. (Actually, there’s only forty-nine of us now. We’ve already lost one guy—after just two nights of crying himself to sleep, he quit).
Lawson whirls, and barks us to attention. Then, in preparation for our own run through the vaccination machine, he orders us to unbutton our fatigue shirts and remove our left arms from their sleeves. Now we’re looking really cool. Big, baggy, ill-fitting, ugly-assed, green shirts hanging off of only one shoulder per man. Yep; if we weren’t already impressing the hell out of the ladies with our bald heads, stupid looking fatigue caps tugged down almost to our ears, and unmarked rookie-level uniforms billowing in the wind, then wearing our shit this way is bound to bring ‘em a-runnin’.
As the girls are marched off, a medical corpsman, dressed in white, strolls through our ranks handing out cotton balls. These are for dabbing the blood off our riven arms, I’m guessing. Then we’re stepped up to the door, onto this next conveyor belt. And in a long single-file line, we shuffle up the rickety wooden steps and into the doublewide.
Inside—in what should have been the trailer’s living room—a small army of white-clad medics, nurses, and even one full-fledged doctor (I’m presuming), are milling around our slowly advancing flight, like ground crews around a parade of aircraft. But the key players are apparently the two guys with the airguns. They’re standing with their backs against the left wall, looking like robot welders on an automotive assembly line. And as each naked arm passes by, they reach out, jam the stubby barrel of their airgun against the exposed flesh, and fire. With a hiss and a clack—and a little jump of surprise from the assaulted recruit—it’s all over.
That doesn’t look so bad!
I keep shambling forward, following the line, as the medical ants swarm back and forth through us, feeding vials of vaccine to the shooters, swabbing our arms with alcohol, and checking the valves and pressure levels on the compressed air tanks, to which the airguns are connected by rubber hoses. Then I’m up.
The first shooter punches me in the muscle with the plastic tip of that barrel, and snick!, I’m bitten on the arm! It actually nips at me, the way I’d imagine a lightning-fast snakebite would. It’s not pleasant, but then it’s so sharp and quick, who cares. I’m still mulling this over in my head, when the second shooter plants his own gun just below and behind the first guy’s mark, and snap!, I’m twice-bitten! Then it’s down the little trailer-hall to the other door, and back out into the chilly sunshine.
Done. Just like that.
We’re supposed to stand around here for a little bit, even after the rest of the gang has gone through the gauntlet, just to make sure nobody’s going to faint or go into convulsions or anything. And in that time, the rigidity of imposed discipline is momentarily suspended. So everybody’s strolling around in little circles, dabbing at their arms with their little cotton balls, and gossiping about the experience. Some people hardly show any evidence at all of their inoculation rites, while others—like me—are left with a small half-grape-sized lump leaking blood. But we’re all playing up the agony and brutality of the airguns, as if they’d practically lopped our arms off with an ax, all for the benefit and edification of those still waiting to enter the clinic.
For this reason, I let the blood trickle almost to my elbow before stanching it.
BWAH-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaa…!

4
A SINGULAR MOMENT OF DRAMA

Lights out after another long, exhausting day of being bounced around the bars of our cage by the Great Hairy Luggage Ape, Sgt. Lawson.
His boot steps have receded and vanished down the stairwell, and the boom of the lower outside door closing has rung itself out. All is quiet in the barracks now, save for the shuffle and rustle and throat-clearing of a room full of jangled kids squirming down into their blankets for the night.
I draw and release a huge sigh of my own, discharging the residual energy from a day’s worth of walking on eggshells. And at last, it feels like the great growling engine of Basic Training has shut down for good, quietly ticking and settling into silence.
Every metaphor in a storm.
Then, as if he’s been waiting all evening long for just this moment of poise, from three beds down the line from mine, Airman Medina suddenly spits out, “Fuck this!”
A curtain of green and white flies into the air, as the wiry little Mexican throws his bed covers aside, and leaps to his feet. The rest of the room sits up to watch him. Airman Hidalgo, the towering, soft-spoken Puerto Rican black belt, whispers from his far corner of the room. “Ay man, get back in bed.”
Medina ignores him. And, in his droopy white skivvies—for, as everyone knows, Medina has no ass whatsoever—he storms over to his wall locker, and rips its door open.
What the hell does he think he’s doing? He’s not supposed to be out of bed! And if Sgt. Lawson hears any of this commotion downstairs, he’ll be back up here within thirty seconds, wailing away on everybody in the room (we’re all convinced he sits down in the First Sergeant’s office all night, listening to us through the two-way intercom system).
But without hesitation, Medina clambers like a monkey up the inside shelving of his locker. He has to struggle for a moment at the very top—the peak of which is sloped, like the roof of a house, and offers no handholds to anyone attempting to scale it—until his hand finds the eight-foot-high window sill beyond.
More whispered words from other cots.
“What the hell are you doing, man?”
“Hey, get down from there!”
“Ssssh!”
“What if Sgt. Lawson hears you?”
Medina ignores us all, and hoists himself onto the top of his locker. He squats there for several more seconds, bathed in the wash of the streetlights, peering longingly out the window like a kid who has to endure piano lessons while all his friends are outside playing baseball. Then, without any warning, he seizes the handle, flips it up, shoves the window open—it swings out like a transom—and rolls out through the opening. For a moment, only one hand remains, still clutching at the metal window frame from outside, then it too slips away.
And Airman Medina is gone.
In his underwear.
Out the second story window of a building mounted on stilts.
In the dead of a central Texas winter night.
“What the fuck…?”
Yep. That one mystery voice pretty well sums it up for all of us.
I turn to find that, in the dim reflected glow from those high windows, every last man in the room is propped up on one or more elbows, eyes wide, mouth open, some staring at the open transom, most exchanging stunned glances between each other.
Somebody snickers. Another giggles.
“Son of a bitch.”
Airman Medina has just gone Absent WithOut Leave… AWOL.
“He’ll be back,” mutters Hidalgo, who then flops over, draws his blankets back up to his neck, and goes to sleep.
The rest of us are a little slower accepting all this. But slowly—one, then two, then three at a time—we all lay back down again and bundle up. The cold air coming through that window is chilling the room quickly.
I can’t believe it. His locker door is still ajar, the sheets and blankets on his bed still flayed open like an abandoned chrysalis. I can’t decide whether I’m appalled, disappointed, or proud of the little runt. But, as a singular moment of drama, that was pretty danged cool.
What the hell does he think he’s going to do, though? Where could he possibly hope to go from that narrow ledge, eight feet below the window line, and eighteen feet above the ground? And with temperatures barely in the upper 30s, how far does he really think he’s going to get, dressed only in them ratty drawers of his?
In my mind’s eye, I can see him out there right now, pacing back and forth between the pillars on that ledge, in his bare feet, fully illuminated by all those street and pad lights out there, lit up like a short half-naked singer on a stage, and peering over the edge of that slender mantle at the precipitous drop to the ground, gauging whether that painful landing is going to be worth it. For there’ll be no turning back once he steps off into space. But while he’s considering the merits of his choices, he’s got to be shivering his dick off. Christ, it’s getting cold enough in here! It must be downright Arctic for a naked dumbass out there, stuck on that frozen ledge in bare feet.
Then I begin to wonder, even if he does decide to abandon his escape plans and come back inside, how can he do it? There’s no locker out there on the ledge for him to scale. Just a vertical slab of smooth concrete, eight feet tall and damned cold.
I lay there listening, whether for the sounds of struggle, a cry for help, or the thump and muffled yelp of Amn. Medina hitting the ground, I don’t care. I won’t be able to sleep until…
I hear a grunt and a chuff of expelled air. I hear another one, then a hand suddenly appears on the window frame. A second one appears a moment later. More huffing and puffing and grunting, then a bare foot gets flung over the sill. From there it’s a brief one-man wrestling match until the entire quivering body of Amn. Medina squirrels its way back in through the window, and hunkers down on the angled crest of his locker.
Without saying a word, he quietly closes and locks the window again, and scampers half way down the shelves before dropping the rest of the way to the floor. He freezes there for several seconds, biting his lip and swallowing the pain of landing on cold feet. Then he closes his locker door, and climbs back into bed.
He says nothing, and neither does anyone else in the room.
I honestly have no idea what that was all about.

5
HURRICANE HANNAH

Sgt. Bell is a short black woman. Barely taller than the podium in our Day Room. She wears her hair straightened, and swept back into a wave under her tiny blue cap, like a 1950s airline stewardess. She storms around with a screaming hostile chip on both shoulders—plus an extra one up her ass, I do believe—and in the heat of one of her almost perpetual frenzies, her face assumes the same furious rictus that you’d expect to find on the angriest head of a totem pole.
And she is our Assistant T.I.
When Sgt. Lawson isn’t available for our daily dosage of abuse, Sgt. Bell is his second-string quarterback.
We call her Hurricane Hannah (I have no idea what her real first name is).
We’ve already had several problems with her “leadership technique,” in particular when marching under her direction from one appointment to another. In just the few short days since she was introduced to us, she’s already achieved a certain infamy among the burr-heads of our flight for doing things like calling “To the right, harch!,” then ranting and raving at us because, as a semi-coherent formation, we’d then proceeded to turn right, when she’d “clearly” said left.
Well, I guess that’s what we get for all of us being delusional and lying at the same time.
And when she’s ranting, she gets shrill. And by that, I mean loud, nails-on-blackboard, baby-shrieking, nasal nasty! Everything is an outrage to her. Everything that comes out of her is in the form of a threat—so much so that it actually has the unexpected side effect of making every threat an empty one. So, while we may hate the constant berating and hornet-like bitching, it’s no worse than a loud stereo—after a while, you can just tune it out.
But, if nothing else, she at least serves one key function: she makes Sgt. Lawson seem downright calm, cool, and rational in comparison.
So today she’s decided to show this village full of idiots just how difficult it is to teach anything to a bunch of chuckleheads like us, who take everything so literally, and won’t dare show an ounce of initiative, or even exhibit the most rudimentary grasp of the larger picture here. She’s going to show us just what she has to put up with, day after doodle-fucking day, when dealing with the likes of us.
First she herds us all into the tiny Day Room, and sits us down on the cold tile floor. Then she calls for a volunteer, one who smokes and has a pack of cigarettes handy. Foolishly, another slow-learner—Airman Bemer—volunteers, and steps up beside her. She takes his cigarettes, and stands him in the middle of the room, facing one wall, while she backs up behind him, facing the other. Now back to back, she tells him to pretend that he’s the instructor and she’s the recruit, and it’s his job to teach her—in the simplest, most concise and straightforward way he can—how to light a cigarette and smoke it. He can’t turn around and watch her, and he can’t touch her or the cigarettes himself. He has to do it all with words, and words alone, without looking.
Seems simple enough. And Bemer seems sufficiently confident himself.
So he begins. “All right, first take a cigarette out of the pack.”
Since the pack is already open, Sgt. Bell is able to extract one cigarette without spontaneously combusting. It is clear from her dim-witted expression and oafish gestures however, that this high level of competence will not last for long.
“Now put the cigarette in your mouth,” says Amn. Bemer.
Sgt. Bell tosses the entire thing into her mouth like a Tic Tac, and it is gone. One good clap on the back, and she’d swallow it. The room erupts in laughter, which is Bemer’s first clue that his student might just be as stupid as she’s been saying we all are. Without being able to see, he guesses at what her error might have been.
“No no. Just put one end of it in your mouth.”
Hurricane Hannah nods densely, pulls the cigarette out for a second, then re-inserts it over halfway into her mouth again, and seals her lips around it. Only the filter tip is showing. Again the room shudders with unaccustomed laughter. It feels good. Bemer is definitely looking confused now. How could she have gotten that one wrong?
“All right, put just the filtered end—the brown end—between your lips. Leave the rest of the cigarette outside of your mouth.”
Hurricane seems a trifle stymied by this at first. But then, with a shrug of resignation, she removes the cigarette, twists the filter head off of it, sticks it back between her lips, and stands there staring at the beheaded butt in her hand. The laughter spills out again.
“Now what do I do?” she mumbles around the tiny brown stub.
“Is the cigarette hanging from your lips? Unfiltered end out?”
“No. The cigarette’s in my hand—‘outside my mouth,’ like you said—and the brown filter’s between my lips. Right?”
“What? You broke it?”
“Well… yeh.”
We’re all laughing like hyenas now. All except Bemer of course, who’s grimacing at the thought of one of his precious babies being torn apart. Still, he can’t help but laugh as well. It’s the first uninhibited release we’ve had in ten solid days of abuse.
“All right, let’s try this again. Throw that one away, and take out another cigarette. Then place the whole cigarette, filter first, between your lips, with all but the filter hanging outside of your mouth. Tell me when you think you’ve got that right.”
Oo, such effrontery. Hurricane glares at us with that “oh-he’s-gonna-pay-for-that” look, and quickly pops a fresh cigarette between her lips. “Okay. Got it.”
“Okay. Now take this lighter…”
He passes his little blue Bic back to her.
“… and light it.”
“And what?”
“Touch the flame to the cigarette, and start it burning.”
She looks utterly perplexed by that one, but again, with a resigned shrug, she goes at it. Fortunately, she doesn’t waste time making a point about needing instruction with the lighter too. She just flicks it a couple of times, then touches the flame to the cigarette.
Right in the middle.
Even with the other forty-eight of us trying to stifle the urge to laugh, Bemer can tell his student is still not on the same page as himself.
“Is it burning?”
The cigarette burns through, buckles, and half of it drops to the floor.
“Oh yeh. It’s burning.”
We howl. Damn if that isn’t about the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
Bemer sighs and drops his face into his hand. “Is the tip burning? The end of the cigarette opposite the filter?”
Hurricane looks at the smoldering stub between her fingers. “It is now.”
We’re falling out all over the floor. Rolling in the proverbial aisles. Busting guts, slapping knees, trying not to pee our pants. Bemer just knows another one of his sacred children has just been sacrificed to this silly game.
“What did you do?” he wails.
“I didn’t do nothing! I just did what you told me to, sir!”
God, that does sound familiar. You’d almost think there was a point here somewhere.
Bemer nods, lets his hands flop to his sides in surrender, and tries to turn around. Hurricane unleashes one of her patented yaps. “Don’t you turn around, Airman! You ain’t through yet!”
He throws up his hands, and sighs again.
“Fine. If I’ve got any left, take out another cigarette, and let’s try it again.”

6
JUST TRYING THEM ON FOR SIZE

It turns out that the reason Sgt. Lawson was hiring and firing potential Squad Leaders all last week, was because, well... he was just trying them on for size, I guess. Myself included.
Now, almost two weeks into the curriculum, he’s announcing his final selections. And we didn’t even know there was a selection process going on.
At the head of the pack, in the position of Flight Leader now, is Airman Hidalgo. Good choice. The calm, soft-spoken power that he exudes is perfect for commanding a rabble like this. And the four Squad Leader slots go to Bemer (Hurricane Hannah’s smoking instructor), Johnson (the big, friendly black kid, whose fro had come off in such interesting clumps at the barber’s), a pale white bespectacled goober named Cukor… and me. Yes, me. Squad Leader, Fourth Squad.
To commemorate this momentous occasion, we are each given an ugly red plastic nametag—to be pinned over the embroidered nametag sewn above the right chest pockets of our fatigue shirts—which simply says “Squad Leader.” Or, in Hidalgo’s case, “Flight Leader.” Sgt. Lawson makes no bones about what a miserable pain-in-the-ass these assignments will be—all the extra attention that will be paid to us, all the extra responsibilities above and beyond our own, all the greater expectations, and all without reward—then he congratulates us, and leaves us with instructions on how he expects the barracks to look when he returns this evening.
In other words, he’s leaving the organization of this detail entirely to us.
Talk about the blindfolded leading the blind.

7
OLD MAN GRIGGS

Airman George Griggs is, at age twenty-seven, the flight’s official Old Man. In fact, that’s just what we call him: Old Man Griggs.
Needless to say, he loves us when we call him that. Loves us the way a father loves his son... the day after giving him a drum set for his birthday. In other words, with a great deal of teeth grinding. Fact is though, other than Griggs, only one other guy in the flight is even older than twenty-one, and he’s only twenty-three.
To be fair (to us), Griggs looks a hell of a lot older than the twenty-seven he claims to be. If I didn’t know any better, I’d put him closer to forty-five. Fully clothed, he looks like a doughy accountant, or maybe the manager of a Winn Dixie—a thick, beefy kind of guy, who wears coke-bottle birth-control glasses, skinny black ties, and short-sleeved rocket scientist shirts. He’s also the only one of the original fifty of us that was already bald before the Air Force barbers attacked. But stripped down to his skivvies, a frightening steroid case is suddenly revealed, a massive accumulation of old musculature sheathed in a loose coat of pale leathery skin. He looks like a couple of decades of body sculpting gone to extreme, then gone to seed. Impressive and depressing at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong. George is a decent, intelligent, and very funny guy. He just looks like a set of bagpipes that got left out in a hailstorm.
Well, as irony would have it, big old half-blind George went and joined the Air Force to work with lasers. And, although I don’t quite see the correlation myself, somehow that job requires some extra special eye exams that he must pass before being allowed to move on to higher training.
Or something like that.
So today, while the rest of us were in class, learning about the differences between an Airman Basic and a Lieutenant Colonel, our left feet from our right, and our asses from our elbows, good old Airman Griggs was off at Wilford Hall—the huge medical center here at Lackland (which also, by the way, serves as the Air Force’s official Burn Center… just thought you’d want to know that)—getting his eyes probed, poked, and dilated. We’d expected him back in class by the end of the lunch break. He never showed up at all though.
Instead, now at the end of our scholastic day, we return to the barracks to find Airman Griggs sitting on the edge of his bed, smiling nervously, and fidgeting like he hasn’t quite calmed a day-long case of the shakes yet. And as it turns out, that’s exactly why he’s fidgeting.
It seems that the Old Man got himself arrested today… for going AWOL! Big old goofy four-eyed George Griggs got picked up, off-base, at a 7-11, by Lackland Security Police (the SPs, or “Sock Puppets”), and spent the rest of the day in various commanders’ offices being grilled and re-grilled about why he did it.
Hell, we can’t wait to hear why he did it. I mean, come on! This is Uncle George we’re talking about here!
Well, George tells it like this…
It seems that the last eye-test he’d had to take this morning involved having his pupils chemically dilated. No big deal, normally. Except that, once the test was done, the medics had simply released him to return to his flight... on the other side of the base... on a screaming bright cloudless day... without an escort or a ride... and with this eyes still dilated wide open.
Now, Griggsy didn’t know any better—he had no precedence for this kind of thing—and he was operating under the standard Basic Training credo that you never question your superiors (and at Basic, everybody is your superior), or even dare to suggest alternative scenarios.
So, when he was released from his exams at Wilford Hall and was told to return to his flight—without having been given enough time for his pupils to un-dilate—though he wasn’t convinced it was the appropriate thing to do, he’d done as any good mindless grunt ought, and headed out into the dazzling sunlight to walk back to his barracks.
Now we throw in a few more factors: (1) Lackland Air Force Base is a very large installation, with our barracks and Wilford Hall at diametrically opposed corners, (2) we’ve barely been here a couple of weeks, and our occasional marching sojourns have yet to exceed the invisible boundary of a roughly six block area around our building. So none of us—Airman Griggs included—is familiar with the base beyond our little quarantined area. And (3), Lackland is split into at least two halves—if not more—by a multi-lane divided highway that cuts right through the middle. Driving- and walking-bridges span it in several places, as well as a stoplighted intersection or two. But that highway also separates the hospital’s side of the base from our side, here in Peon Land.
In other words, even if Old Man Griggs hadn’t been almost completely blinded by the mid-Texas sun boring into his gaping pupils, he’d still have stood a pretty good chance of straying way off course during his long hike back to here. But the fact was that he was virtually blind on top of all that. And he did stray.
Forced to stumble along the sidewalks, his hand shading his hard-squinting and watering eyes, he’d kept his gaze on his feet (the sky was just too fiercely bright), and kept the sound of the nearby highway traffic to his right. At some point, he knew he’d come to some form of cross-over—a road-bridge, foot-bridge, or stoplighted crosswalk—and he’d get across the highway there. And in the meantime, hopefully his eyes would undilate.
But he seemed to walk for a long time without coming to a crossing. So, when the foot traffic on the sidewalk began to thicken, he opted to simply follow somebody else’s feet for a while, figuring that most of the uniformed people traveling on foot had to be, much like himself, residents from the Basic Training side of camp (since higher ranking people would theoretically have their own cars), and that ultimately, they too would be trying to cross back over.
He was wrong.
The person he was following did finally cut right, and crossed through the highway fence at a small gate that Griggs didn’t recognize. He’d just figured it was yet another way to get across that damned highway, and to that end, any way was as good as any other.
Wrong again.
After following the other guy’s boots for a while longer, this time through the grass on the road’s shoulder, they’d finally come to a parking lot. Griggs had crossed it, approaching the obscure building on the far side, only to discover that it was a 7-11! He hadn’t known there were any 7-11s on base! Well, fact is there aren’t. Now thoroughly lost—and still painfully blinded—he’d entered the store, and gone to the counter to ask for directions.
Apparently the proprietor—when confronted with a tired, sweating bald guy in a baggy unmarked Basic Training uniform, wincing and averting his eyes as he spoke—had presumed the worst, and taken it upon himself to call the Sock Puppets. They’d arrived in short order, and immediately arrested Griggs for being off-base without a pass. In other words, AWOL.
He’d been brought back to face a livid First Sergeant, who, after chewing him up one side and down the other, finally let him speak and heard his side of the story. The sergeant also checked his still-dilated pupils, and would later tell him that that was what ultimately convinced him that he wasn’t lying. Then they were off to see the Squadron Commander, who—in contrast to the First Sergeant—had first listened to Griggs’s story with a hardened professional calm, and then went ballistic. He had, in turn, called up the hospital’s commander, who had then brought Griggs’s examining doctors onto the carpet, who had then proceeded to go apeshit on the medics who had released him.
Another avalanche of shit snowballing all the way downhill.
And in the end, once all the dust and feathers and boiling lava had settled, the situation just suddenly “went away.” The error had been pinpointed—the medics shouldn’t have released Griggs until his eyes had relaxed back to normal—and Griggs got a mild lecture about not being more assertive with the medical staff (an utterly absurd notion in an environment like this). And everyone—but Griggs—had walked away satisfied that the world was still turning on its axis, the laws of nature had not been terminally violated, and everything was “fixed.”
Griggs is still shaking though when Sgt. Lawson calls him into his office to repeat his story all over again.

8
KITCHEN PATROL

It turns out that KP—the much maligned “Kitchen Patrol”—is also more than just a military urban legend. And, of course, Basic Training would not be complete without it.
Since each one of these monstrous barracks buildings can house up to 24 constantly rotating flights of recruits at a time, and since each one contains only one large cafeteria a piece, basically they can go for 24 straight days, shanghaiing a different flight each day for KP duty. And by then, I imagine, at least a dozen new flights will have been cycled in and out of the barracks to continue the wretched tradition, along with flights from the other smaller, older barracks that don’t have their own chow halls. So no one flight ever has to endure KP more than once before graduation.
And today is Flight 260’s turn in the proverbial barrel.
They only need a couple dozen bald-headed slaves at a time though, so the flight is split in two, one half covering the early-morning-through-noon KP shift, the other covering the early-afternoon-through-midnight patrol. In either case, the half not shackled to the cafeteria’s mops and dishrags is restricted to quarters, doing the entire flight’s laundry, marching drills, and—theoretically—studying. Either way, it’s a day without Lawson or Bell.
Mixed emotions, one way or the other.
Lucky me, I got the early shift. Up at 4:30, to be showered, pretend-shaved, dressed, and in place in the cafeteria downstairs by 5:00am. Like the rest of my “crew,” I make no extra effort at being quiet during my morning ablutions.
Surprisingly though, the duty is not bad. Unlike the KP chores depicted in Beetle Bailey and Sad Sack comic strips, only the paid cooking staff handles the actual food—which explains the unexpectedly high quality of the meals—as well as its display and serving. On the one hand, this is good news, since it leaves such tasks as egg breaking, veggie cutting, and potato peeling up to the professionals. On the other hand, it leaves everything else to us—the dishwashing, the table wiping, the floor mopping, the trash dumping, and the general errand running. The icky stuff.
As usual, through good timing and an astute use of invisibility tactics, I manage to avoid being assigned to the “hopper”—the dishwashing hole-in-the-wall where all the soiled and food-caked dishware is turned in—and instead find myself handling the napkin dispensers and the silverware. This is busy back-and-forth work during the meal hours—constantly making sure that the cutlery bins are never empty, dashing to and from the hopper and the serving line, and always under the baleful gaze of any and every T.I. that comes through—but at least it’s clean, involves no scrubbing, stooping or major lifting, and can be played up to make me look very industrious and dedicated just by striding everywhere with speed and purpose.
Consequently, unlike many others, I manage to get through the day without being yelled at even once, either by kitchen staff or transient T.I.s. In between meals, though, this catches up to me. And while the hopper crews and linen crews and what-the-hell-ever crews continue their own miserable messy work, I am pressed into service with the floor cleaning crew.
It is during this post-lunch lull, as I’m ambling between the tables with a mop—turning the nice attractive tile floor into a lethal skating rink—that I am introduced to the Hotel California. The one by the Eagles.
The cafeteria sound system—little more than a cheesy, crackly little scattering of ceiling-mounted intercom speakers—plays a local radio station only between meals. It is silent whenever the flights are being herded through—wouldn’t want anything pleasant to disturb the chaos, badgering, and high-speed force-feeding—but for now, at least, it’s playing “easy listening.” And though I tend to tune out anything that I cannot easily hear, a new song comes on that I’ve never heard before, but which catches my attention instantly.
It has an easy ramble to it, a loping, guitar-based rhythm that seems to fit right in with the rhythm of my mopping. The chord sequence is a masterpiece of simple changes that somehow sound both new and fundamentally familiar—unusual, yet just right. Almost “inevitable.” Then the vocal harmonies kick in at the chorus, and I have to stop what I’m doing to listen.
This is my perfect song. It follows a perfect path, one that somehow no other song has traveled before. I can sense right where it’s going to go next, as though the set up for each chord change is being transmitted to me by the chord before. I’ve never heard it before, yet I can hum it perfectly within only a few bars of the start of the second verse.
I don’t know what it is—could it possibly be that in the mere couple of weeks that I’ve been here in the artistic sinkhole of Lackland Air Force Base, I’ve come to miss music so much that the first strains to reach me have reached all the way into my soul? I don’t know, but this is definitely striking a resonant chord right in the middle of my chest, like a perfectly struck tuning fork. This just sounds… so… good to me. I almost want to weep.
I certainly don’t want it to end, but of course it does. The dueling lead guitars slowly fade out, then are pounced upon by some blathering local DJ, who shatters the moment with raucous words, forced laughter, and a fast side note about the name of the song and the artists who performed it. Hotel California, by the Eagles.
A screaming car dealer’s commercial kicks the last of the mood out from under me, like watching a perfect figure-skating performance abruptly end when the skater crashes through the ice and drowns. It’s just so rude. But, as I jump-start my mopping motions again, I realize just how much more than my freedom has been neutered here. Because this crappy little cafeteria sound system just leaked a little of it back in again.
What can I do with that though?

9
JUST A ROYAL PAIN-IN-THE-ASS

Morning PT—“Physical Training,” obviously—is oddly, well, “disappointing.” More inconvenient than difficult, more tiring than challenging. I guess it just boils down to being a really big pain-in-the-ass for me.
For one thing, we have to be bugled and bellowed out of bed at 5:00 every morning, just so that we can be skidding to a stop under the chilly outdoor pad lights by 5:05, most of us still buttoning and zipping and lacing as we do.
That comprises a fairly major pain-in-the-ass all by itself.
But the PT exercises themselves are basically nothing. Just stretching and limbering calisthenics mostly. You know; scissor kicks, windmills, and jumping jacks—that kind of thing. Maybe an occasional sit-up or two. But none of the real workout stuff, like push-ups, or log-lifts, or crawling through mine fields, or biting the heads off cobras. The kinds of things I’d expected from the military.
Then, weather permitting, we’re off to the marching pad, the large one-block-square asphalt quad on the neighboring block. There we typically join several other flights for our morning run—in formation—around the pad’s perimeter. And by “run in formation” here, I mean “gasp and wheeze and disintegrate as a formation” while Sgt. Renfro runs circles around us, sometimes skipping along backwards, dressed only in a crisp white T-shirt (regardless of the freezing temperatures), his razor-creased and starched fatigue pants, high-gloss jump boots, and of course those stupid-assed sunglasses. I swear, I think those things have been surgically implanted directly into the bone of his eye sockets. You can never see his eyes.
Funny: we never see big old jowly Sgt. Lawson or nasty little Hurricane Hannah out on the pad with us. Just wiry little ferret-faced Sgt. Renfro. I wonder why that is.
After that, we march back to the barracks, cycle through the cafeteria for another frenetic breakfast, then it’s back upstairs for half an hour’s worth of shitting, showering, shaving, dressing and bed-making. And that’s when the official day begins.
The early rise is always jarring, but it’s that very jolt that fends off any drowsiness. The exercises are not difficult, but it’s that very easiness that makes them seem like such a waste of time and effort. The hardest part for me then, is the damned running, not so much because we have to cover any real epic distances—thus far, we haven’t yet exceeded a half mile—but simply because I am a shitty runner. I can sprint like a rabbit for about the length of a, well… a rabbit. But if the run lasts for more than a hundred yards, I go breathless. At a half mile, I’ve got cramps that feel like a shaft of rebar through my lungs and under my shoulder blades. So it’s a real labor of misery for me to chug around this damned marching pad every morning. And in the end, I don’t feel one iota more fit for all my effort.
In other words, for me, morning PT is just a royal pain-in-the-ass.

Today’s classroom session is on the UCMJ—that’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the supplemental laws of the military, above and beyond those by which the average Joe Civilian must abide. Legal codes that apply exclusively to personnel in the United States military services.
In other words, we must abide by more constitutional laws than those we protect.
As with all our regular class days, our T.I.s and Assistant T.I.s are not in attendance. We spend our mornings under the sole supervision of the class instructors—usually a different one each day—and in the process, enjoy the unaccustomed luxuries of regular breaks, casual conversation, and even an occasional laugh or two. In that regard, moreso than the actual education received, the daily classes are a welcome respite from the whirlwind of life among the T.I.s.
Today’s instructor is a pretty cool one. He’s young, funny, and actually capable of conveying the mind-numbing complexities of the military legal system with some degree of interest and understanding, and he’s doing a good job of making the morning pass fairly pleasantly.
The first series of laws he covers are those associated with abandoning one’s post—in other words, going “AWOL.” And under combat conditions, “desertion.” It’s a hell of an icebreaker. But it’s quite clear going into the first ten-minute break, that there’s something else he’s been itching to tell us, for which the timing is half the point. And as he releases us—to go “smoke ‘em if we got ‘em”—he stops us in our tracks to add this one extra little tasty point of interest.
“Oh, and by the way, gentlemen, up until this moment, had you just gotten up, walked out the front gate of Lackland, and gone home, you would not have been charged with going AWOL by a court of law.” That gets our attention. “Because up until this moment, there was no evidence that you’d ever known it was illegal.”
He looks at our stunned faces and smiles. Yes, clearly this little tidbit has produced the effect he was going for.
“Yep. If you’d run home at any time before today, the Air Force wouldn’t have taken any legal action against you. You’d have just been discharged, and the whole episode forgotten. But as of now, you have been officially educated on the meaning and ramifications of going AWOL. So from here on out, if you leave your post without proper authorization, you will incur the full wrath of the United States government. Have a nice break.”
Griggs sighs.
Medina is inconsolable.

Story IV: TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

2011-12-16T10:27:00.000-08:00

IV
TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS

1
March, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
BUBBLE BATH

Sgt. Lawson storms in through the barracks door, and clomps to an angry stop at the head of our bay. We are all standing at attention in the aisle between our beds, facing each other. Around us, our quarters seem to be standing at attention as well—floors gleaming, glass and metal sparkling, boots polished, and every bed ready to bounce a quarter back into the air—the result of a surprise GI party that we just barely managed to pull off mere seconds before Lawson’s arrival. Some of us are still breathing hard from the last-second exertions.
“Get your shirts and caps on, and form up downstairs!” he bellows, “Now! Move!”
We bolt for our lockers, grab clean fatigue shirts, and thunder down the stairs, confused as hell. He’s never done this before—ordering us out while he does the inspection—but, if nothing else, we’ve at least learned that when The Man tells us to do something, we just fucking do it.
We pile out into the comfortably brisk afternoon air, and the four squad leaders—yours truly included—jostle the flight into four orderly columns. Then we take our own places at the heads of those columns. Hidalgo calls us all to attention, followed by parade rest, then spins to face the door himself.
And all goes silent. Nothing to do now but wait.
Since we know from experience that we’ll have plenty of forewarning before Sgt. Lawson comes down to get us—he never goes anywhere without a full cursing, blustering, stomping fanfare preceding him—the guys start to whisper and mumble amongst themselves, wondering what the hell is going on up there, and dreading the outcome no matter what it is.
At first, those of us at the fronts of the lines do nothing to quiet them—we’re kind of curious ourselves. Normally, we four squad leaders would have accompanied Sgt. Lawson as he tore through the rooms, ripping open drawers and lockers, running his fingers along door frames and ledges, and tugging at bed covers. We’d be carrying his clipboard, marking down the demerits as he called them off, and enforcing his edicts whenever he chose not to dump the contents of somebody’s drawers onto the floor himself. But for some reason, this time he’s tearing his way through our immaculate little world alone, with no one around to berate or chastise… or bear witness.
After a minute or two though, the shuffling and murmuring in the ranks becomes a little too obvious. We’re not so much worried about Lawson hearing us—we’ll hear him coming down the stairwell long before he even reaches the first landing—but at Lackland, as an Airman Basic, you are at the mercy of any T.I. that should happen past. Plus, the Squadron First Sergeant’s office is only about fifty feet away. So, when Hidalgo turns a smoldering eye over his shoulder, I and the other squad leaders twist in place, and hush our respective squads back to silence.
Then it’s back to waiting and stewing and trying not to fidget.
Time saunters along. Cars shoosh past. A light breeze capers around under the building’s elevated wings. Birds chirp. Life goes on around us. Around us.
Here under flight 261’s dorm wing, however, “life” has nothing to do with the moment. “Life” is just a myth, from the great Out There. Outside distractions are muted, and Time now seems to be hobbling along on crutches.
What is he doing up there?
Somewhere up inside that stairwell, a door finally booms, and heavy fast-moving boots begin the descent. Just one pair of boots… one angry pair of boots. Sgt. Lawson.
All four of the squad leaders stiffen and turn their heads, whispering from the corners of their mouths.
“Incoming!”
“Look sharp!”
“Eyes front!”
The door in front of us explodes open, and Sgt. Lawson barrels out. But without looking up or even breaking stride, he abruptly turns and marches toward the First Sergeant’s office, wiping fussily at the cuffs of his sleeves, and barking over his shoulder.
“That place looks like shit! Get up there and clean it up!”
For a moment we just stand there. It looks like shit? Nuh-UH!
When he doesn’t hear an immediate scuffle of activity though, Lawson skids to a halt, and wheels back toward us. Fortunately, Hidalgo is a little more coherent than the rest of us, and belts out a command before Lawson can say anything.
“Flight!”
By reflex, the four squad leaders instantly echo his call. “Squad!”
“Attench-HUT!”
All forty-seven of us (we’ve lost two more in the last week) crash to attention in unison. We’re definitely getting better at this shit.
“By squads! Fall out!”
From the far left side of the formation, Bemer shouts, “First squad, fall out!”
As a single organism, his Doofy Dozen breaks for the stairwell door. Lawson apparently decides that this is a sufficiently enthusiastic response, and continues his march on the First Sergeant’s office without further comment.
My squad is the fourth squad—the last squad—to fall out. So by the time we finally get upstairs, the rest of the flight has already had an opportunity to survey the damage. Surprisingly though, at first glance, there is none. The bunking bays appear pristine and still precisely laid out. No bed clothes have been heaved into a corner in a wad, no drawers have been emptied onto any beds, no boots have been kicked around the room. And Lawson has left no obvious indication as to just what it was that displeased him so. Then someone checks the latrine.
“Jesus Christ!” his voice echoes.
The whole herd stampedes for the latrine doorway and bottles up there, peering over the shoulder of the guy who made the discovery. As one, we all draw breath together. “Son of a bitch!”
“What the fuck happened in here?”
The main sink-and-stall chamber is filled, almost to knee-level, with soapsuds! It looks like a giant’s bubble bath—like a flood in a Palmolive factory. The bottoms of the stall doors disappear into the foamy froth. Each sink and urinal casts a little shadow, like that of a balloon passing over a cloud. And a mop handle sticks up out of the “undercast” like a flagpole. A tiny winding rivulet of lather is wending its way out into the corridor.
“What did that bastard do?”
Hidalgo sighs loudly. “He gave us something to do with our Sunday afternoon.” We all groan and deflate. “Let’s get started. This one’s for everybody.”
With buckets and sponges and mops and towels then, we wade into the cloud of bubbles and start cleaning it up, cursing the name—the evil name—of Sgt. Lawson.

2
A PLAGUE OF CHILDHOOD DISEASES

Here comes the doctor. At last. Good news, and bad news.
I am desperately anxious for the former, deathly afraid of the latter.
I’m lying here in this bed—one of several dozen lining both walls of this vast wing of the infirmary—cold compress draped over my forehead, thin white sheet pulled up to my throat. I’m fidgeting in the sunlight that’s streaming in through the high windows across the bay from me, and trying to think “cool” thoughts, thankful for the doctor’s fortuitous timing.
I’d just gotten back to my bed following my 10:00am cold shock treatment—another miserable frozen-ass shower—to find that my sweat-soaked sheets had been changed while I was gone. And I was guzzling down two paper cups full of chilled fruit juice when the doctor and his entourage entered the bay and started working their way down to me. So hopefully, with all these timely factors working in my favor, he will find my fever sufficiently reduced to release me back into the wild again.
I still can’t believe it—the measles! Of all things! At age nineteen, in the middle of Air Force Basic Training, I've caught the freakin’ measles! Just woke up one morning, wonked out, fat-headed, woozy, and nauseous. Lawson had given me a quick, bored look-over—the kind you give a really old wrung-out car when it’s been sitting on the side of the road too long—then ordered me off to the infirmary, a five block walk, with my head and my gut orbiting each other all out of synch.
“Measles,” they’d said, for Criminy’s sake! An epidemic sweeping through the base apparently!
The doctor had checked me in right then and there, bombed me with a shot and a fistful of pills, and sent me off to crash in this room, in the middle of this sunny promenade of beds.
I was rudely awoken only a couple of hours later, swaddled in my sodden sheets, to discuss my course of treatment with the relief doctor.
It seems that, here in Basic Training, you’re only allowed to miss up to three weekdays of scheduled classes and drills before being considered to have fallen too far behind to ever catch up again. Then you’re washed out of your current flight, and “set back” to the next flight behind yours that has an opening. Two out of the three guys who’ve vanished from Flight 260 already went just that way. Naturally, I had to fall ill on a Tuesday, so there’s no way I’ll be eligible for the weekend extension. My three days will be up by Friday morning, and if I’m not back in my barracks by then, I’ll be set back automatically.
Shit.
The doctor had recommended that I just accept that—take it easy for four or five days, get my wind back, then settle into another flight to finish out my time at Basic. He seemed somewhat surprised by my appalled reaction to that suggestion. “I’m a squad leader!,” I’d complained, “I’m doing well, getting along, found my niche.” All that happy bullsh. Plus I didn’t want to miss my scheduled entry date into Air Traffic Control School either. But most importantly, I just didn’t want to have to deal with even one more second of this Basic Training crap than I had to.
“What can you give me, Doc? Ain’t there a crash recovery course that I can take, or something?”
Amazingly, there was. He said that the pills and the shot would take care of the bug, so the biggest issue that needed to be dealt with then was the fever. If that could be brought down to within safe limits by Thursday afternoon—this afternoon—he’d release me back to my flight with a vial full of pills to keep taking on my own.
I said, “go for it.”
So blithely spoken.
The new “accelerated regimen” had consisted of an all-out blitzkrieg on my 106-degree fever—chilled fruit juice just as often as I could choke it down, cold compresses worn continuously, and worst of all, hourly cold showers! Hourly! Immersing my weak sweaty body under a frigid cascade every hour on the hour. Oy!
So that’s what I’ve been doing since late last Tuesday evening. All day long yesterday, and all morning long today. And Christ, is that miserable! It’s hard enough just plunging my head into that icy stream. But as soon as it spills over my shoulders and scampers down my back in frigid runnels, I can’t help but scream.
By noon yesterday—Wednesday—I was starting to get scared, because this all-out assault had hardly made a dent on my fever… down only to 104 degrees. At that rate, I’d still be in the triple digits by the end of the day today—Thursday. And if they kept me past sunset today, it’d all be over. Fortunately, by 5:00pm yesterday, I was measured at 101. And by this morning, after a long night of deep restful sleep (finally)—during which they left me alone, presumably on the principle that by this point, the bed rest was of greater value than the cold showers—I clocked in at 99.3 degrees at sunrise.
I’ve been guzzling chilled juice and shrieking in the showers ever since, desperate to melt away those last slivers of a degree before noon.
And now here comes the doc. The same one who first checked me in, I think… it’s hard to remember what was going on through the hazy, queasy swirls of last Tuesday.
The doctor—and his clipboard, and his white-clad pilot fish (corpsman)—moseys up to my bedside, parks one ass cheek on the railing, feels my forehead and checks my pulse, and asks me how I’m doing. Fine, fine. Just dandy. Put me in, coach. He snaps a thermometer to life, and pokes it into my mouth. Hell, I’m about to start sweating blood here just from the sheer terror of possibly failing this examination.
He scribbles furiously on his metal clipboard. He smiles patiently, perfunctorily. He converses with his corpsman, in sentences filled with “cc’s” and “milligrams” and a few other obscure references that I don’t catch. The late morning sun, high in the towering windows, roars through the room like a huge searchlight. How much longer will my sheets stay dry in the heat of that onslaught?
Goddammit, don’t set me back!
Then, as casually as a gardener plucking weeds, he snatches the thermometer from my lips and holds it up in the searing light.
“98.9. Good enough for me.” He goes back to scribbling again, while I lay there, trying desperately not to suck all the sheets up my ass. Then, “I’ll have your stuff brought over. They’ll have some paperwork for you to sign, a prescription you’ll need to pick up at the Dispensary, then you’ll be on your way.” He claps the clipboard shut, pauses to crinkle his face with a momentary half-assed smile, and adds, “You should be able to rejoin your own flight with no problems. Take it easy.” And with that, he pats my knee, and hoists himself off to continue his rounds.
Yippee! Back to my life of shit!

3
LIKE A PENGUIN RUNNING TO CATCH A BUS

Flight 260 gets its own pair of “set-backs” less than a week later. Two guys from a flight two weeks ahead of ours, both of them wash-outs due to failure to maintain standards. And though the two of them have distinctly different personalities, it quickly becomes clear why both of them were considered liabilities to their previous flights.
First is Airman Lyden. At first glance, his slinking posture, furtive glances, chinless overbite, and those godawful Air Force issue Clark Kent glasses make him look like a nervous computer hacker. But the minute he opens his mouth, he turns into a wormy little street hustler instead. He’s got all the scams, all the answers, and all the damned give-a-shit attitude you’d expect from your friendly neighborhood crack dealer.
I’ve decided to go ahead and take up a disliking to him right away.
Airman Slokum, on the other hand, is Lyden’s polar opposite. Silent to the point of seeming almost mute, his big, sleepy, dark-lidded eyes make him look perpetually cowed. And a little bit stupid, truth be told. He acts like he’s carrying around some unspeakable burden, as though he and he alone bears the guilt for some heinous crime not yet discovered, and is paying his penance here at Lackland. He’s also oddly “assembled” as well, physically, I mean—short, with even shorter legs, and a pair of absolutely massive feet. He looks like he’s wearing clown shoes. His walking gait resembles that of Tweety Bird… a floppy, bumbling chaos of oversized boots attacking each other.
His tall cylindrical head is crowned with a dense thatch of silky black hair, thicker than anyone else’s I’ve seen here at Lackland, including the T.I.s. In fact, judging by the thickness of his one long eyebrow alone, I’d say he grows hair at about the rate I’d squeeze toothpaste from a tube. He probably has to shave three times a day.
But he’s just such a mopey character. I was feeling sorry for him before he’d even finished unpacking his duffel bag.
So what was his problem at his previous flight? I discover the answer during our first marching drill with him.
By the “luck” of the draw, Slokum winds up in my squad. And throughout our maneuvers around the pad, Sgt. Lawson just relentlessly hounds the kid. Though I can’t see what he’s doing back there—he’s about eight people behind me—he must be kicking his way through a collection of Lawson Family heirlooms or something, judging by the tenor of the badgering.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
“Your left! Your LEFT! Your other goddamned left!”
“Jesus Christ! You’re stepping all over the man’s heels!”
For a while, Sgt. Lawson tries clapping to the beat—as if the martial rhythm of forty-eight boots striking the pavement isn’t obvious enough—then adds his own screaming cadence count as well.
“One, two, three, four! Your left! Your left! Your fucking left-right-LEFT!”
“What, are you deaf?”
At last, Sgt. Lawson brings us to a stormy halt, and yells at me.
“Airman Stipp! Get over here!”
I scamper back to his side with a purpose, almost screeching to attention.
“Airman Stipp, I want you to watch this! Airman Slokum, step out!”
The swarthy little schlub takes two self-conscious sidesteps, and wobbles there beside the formation like he’s standing on rockers.
“Amn. Slokum—and Amn. Slokum only—by the left foot! For’ARD! Harch!”
His first step alone is an embarrassment. He stutter-steps hesitantly, and winds up on his right foot instead. And even with Sgt. Lawson barking out a constant step-by-step cadence count, I am astonished to watch Slokum amble around the pad in a lazy rounded square, everything from the waist down squirming in a rubbery, arrhythmic choreography all its own, completely divorced from the meter being clearly and loudly sounded off by Sgt. Lawson.
It would seem that Airman Slokum has absolutely no sense of rhythm whatsoever.
I didn’t even know that was possible. I mean, it’s one thing to have no rhythm (like for dancing purposes), but no sense of rhythm? How can you not hear a beat?
“Halt, goddammit!” Lawson wheels on me, as if it’s all my fault. “I don’t know what the hell that was, but fix it quick!”
“Sir?”
“Take that little dipshit over there somewhere,” he snarls, pointing at a distant unoccupied corner of the marching pad, “and do something about that. Work with him. Teach him how to count. Teach him English, if that’s what it takes, but get that useless little shit up to speed. He’s your responsibility now! Got it?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
Apparently, Sgt. Lawson has heard that I have become the flight’s unofficial marching tutor, although I’m sure no one has specifically told him that.
I pop off a snappy about-face and run over to where Slokum is still wobbling at attention. Behind me, I can hear Lawson jostling the rest of my squad forward to fill our gaps. Then he cranks up the Mean Green Marching Machine again, and leads them off across the pad. I trot up to Slokum, and direct him toward the far corner. He moves off at a strange waddling canter—like a penguin running to catch a bus—but doesn’t say a word. Not even the usual diaper-load of excuses that most new guys are quick to offer up. He doesn’t even open his mouth to breathe. I feel like I’m watching a badly balanced first-generation android, one that hasn’t had its “facial expression” software uploaded yet.
We stop in the vacant corner. Again, Slokum just stands there, teetering as if the light breeze is buffeting him, his expressionless face staring blankly at me.
Damn, that is just so frickin’ weird.
“Okay guy,” I begin in my friendliest, most helpful voice, “What seems to be the problem here?”
“I don’t know,” he answers, utterly deadpan and without any apparent concern.
“Well,” I snort, all buddy-like, “you know you were out of step, right?”
“Sorry.”
Jesus, this guy really is an android.
“Okay, well, let’s see what we can do about that. Can you hear this beat?”
I start snapping my fingers. Slokum’s head nods and bobs like a toy dog in the rear window of a car, but in no time it has drifted off my rhythm.
“No, no. Focus on this beat.” His head continues to loll around at random. “Okay, okay. Try this. You snap your fingers in time with mine, all right?”
“I can’t snap my fingers.” To illustrate, he starts fiddling with his fingertips, a strange rustling movement that looks more like someone trying to rub something sticky off their fingers. And all with that same lobotomized deathmask expression on his face.
“Fine, then clap your hands, or slap your leg, or something. Just… keep up with my beat, okay?”
“Okay,” he sighs.
His right hand flops loosely to his side, and there begins a limp-wristed patting of his hip. And, of course, within seconds, he’s off on his own irregular rhythm again.
“Can’t you hear my beat?” I ask, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice.
“Yes.”
“Then why can’t you match it?”
“I don’t know.” No hesitation, no thought, no emotion. Just “I don’t know.”
“It’s right here—bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap—listen to it. It’s right here.”
I don’t know how else to describe the natural and obvious meter in a regular tap count. But Slokum is just not getting it. He ain’t even close. And he doesn’t even seem to know how far off he is. He either can’t hear our diverging beats, or just can’t figure out what it means or how to correct it. Or is the bastard just faking it, trying to get someone to heave him out of the Air Force?
We start marching, just him and me, side by side, squaring off our tiny corner of the busy marching pad. I’m calling off every step. I’m exaggerating the lift and fall of my knees. I’m calling off double-counts—two counts for every step: “ONE-two, THREE-four, FIVE-six, SEVEN-eight”—just to sort of “prepare” his feet for each step. At one point, I even grab a fistful of his upper pant leg, and physically move his damned leg for him. But nothing gets through. Nothing! I’ve never seen anything like it. And I have no way to relate to him what it feels or sounds like to me. Like trying to describe “blue” to someone who’s been blind from birth. How do you describe a color to someone who’s never known anything but black? And how do you describe a rhythm to someone who clearly does not possess the sensory apparatus to feel it?
Now, normally, this would just make Slokum an embarrassment to himself and his squad—in other words, my squad. And in the bigger picture, who really cares about that? But at Basic Training, with the constant push to achieve “Honor Flight”—the flag bearers in the big graduation parade—the T.I.s are simply unwilling to abide an apple so bad, an oafish eyesore so conspicuous as Airman Slokum. So apparently they’ve just kept fobbing him off on each other, passing him around like a hot potato until either someone can pin a large enough misdeed on him to get him booted out altogether, or until the endless harassment finally drives Slokum to voluntarily opt out on his own, I guess. Whichever. It’s easy to see how quickly his lifeless reactions could drive a T.I. crazy though. That vacuous gaze, and that feeling that nothing is really sinking in with him. Those meaningless one-word answers, that unwillingness to explain himself. You just want to shake him—hard—rattle his brain out of hibernation. Something!
I understand now why his previous T.I. found sufficient cause to set him back—to get him out of his flight. I want to feel bad for him—I used to feel bad for him—but that “awkward robot” demeanor of his is without an endearing up-side.
And now he’s in my squad.
Damn.

4
SOMETHING GLAMOROUS. PHYSICAL. HEROIC.

Well, with the exception of Airman Slokum, we seem to be getting this marching shit down of late. Now, when we march to our various and sundry appointments, we’re the ones that the more junior flights watch with awe.
Well, maybe not quite “awe,” but at least a little envy.
Our cornering is crisp. Our responses to seemingly unintelligible commands by our T.I.s look natural and automatic. A march between our barracks and any point on the map goes smoothly and without a break in stride, regardless of how many busy streets we have to cross along the way. Our road guards—with their bright orange elastic wrist cuffs, and yellow lighted marshaling batons—orbit the moving formation like satellites, sprinting into the crosswalks ahead of us and bringing the cars to a halt. And on several occasions, we’ve even been allowed to march ourselves to our destinations, without an accompanying T.I.
We’re looking and sounding sharp, and feeling good about our performance.
All except for Slokum, of course.
No matter what our cadence is, he just bobs along to his own chaotic sheet music, and there’s nothing we can do about it. For a while there, we thought we had us a clever solution when we made him a permanent road guard, the theory being that, if he was kept busy running ahead of the flight, or running to catch up to us from behind, his out-of-synch gait would not be noticeable. But, with those short legs and huge swollen “flippers” for feet, it instead came across as if we were torturing a dwarf by making him run circles around us. So now he’s back among the rank and file, standing out like Frankenstein among the Rockettes.
Today our mostly-sharp marching drill has brought us to the Career Guidance building. Yep; once again, another ugly-assed, whitewashed, tarpaper-and-warped-wood shanty of a structure—three depressing little rectangular segments jammed together at odd angles, with a narrow covered walkway leading up to its front door between two of its decrepit wings.
We are led in, and once more seated in high school desk-chairs. We’re a little more disciplined this time, so there’s not quite as much disorderly clamor in readying ourselves for this briefing—or whatever it is—but we still manage to create a sufficient commotion to make eyes pop up over the cubicle partitions at the far end of the room. A sheepish looking sergeant waits patiently for the racket to die down, a mincing smile on his face. And when at last it looks like the milling herd has come to rest, he draws a deep breath, and holds up a form in one hand, and a dog-eared reference booklet in the other.
They match the papers and booklets on each of our desks.
He proceeds to tell us about this Base Selection form—this “Dream Sheet”—on which we are now going to be writing down our preferences for ultimate base of assignment. Once we’ve completed Basic Training, as well as any Technical Schools required by our impending jobs, where would we like to be permanently stationed to do that job?
This so-called “Dream Sheet” has eight slots that all need to be filled—all of them—numbered one through eight, in order of preference. Our first choice needs to go in number one, our second in number two, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Cool!
Now, the mere fact that we’ve requested these bases doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to get them. But the sergeant assures us that the Air Force does do its level best to accommodate our wishes. It all depends on available manning and any anticipated openings at those bases for personnel at our skill level (or complete lack thereof).
The booklet is a reference guide—sort of like an international telephone book of Air Force bases around the world—that we can use to help us select from the installations located nearest the places we’d like to live. It also lists the specialty codes of the jobs available at each base, so that we don’t waste our choices on sites that don’t even have our job specialties there. Like in my case: as a future air traffic controller, I would need a base that at least has a runway, and thereby some air traffic. Many Air Force installations are just command centers, weather sites, administrative hubs, or research stations.
Mui cool! I didn’t know I’d actually get to choose where I went!
I start off focusing in the southeastern United States—near home, in Miami—then spread out northeasterly from there. Homestead Air Force Base (AFB) near Miami, then MacDill AFB in Tampa… Eglin and Tyndall AFB’s up in the Florida panhandle (I ignore the smaller Hurlburt AFB, which looks like little more than a ‘suburb’ of Eglin, and uses Eglin’s runways)… and Patrick AFB right next to the Kennedy Space Center. That’s it for Florida bases with airfields though, and I’ve still got three choices left to go.
So, after much rummaging through the booklet, I tack on Charleston AFB in South Carolina, Pope AFB, near Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dobbins in Atlanta.
All close enough to home to make me feel comfortable. Excellent.
I finish quickly, and I sit there, looking around, constantly fighting the urge to click my pen, or drum my fingers, or start humming. Then the sergeant comes back in and announces that, for anyone who’s interested, they’ll be running a short film over in the next room about a possible career option that we might want to consider as an alternative—that of “Paramedic.”
Most of the room just shivers and makes “blech” noises. But I am curious, and, along with about a half dozen others, I follow the pointing finger across the hallway.
Because, truth be told, now that I’ve found my niche here, and settled into Lackland’s “perform-or-else” rhythm of life, I’ve actually become a little disappointed with the relatively low “challenge level” of Air Force Basic Training. Not to say that there aren’t some difficult hurdles to clear here—that’s pretty much all there is, really—but so far, they’ve each been conquerable with just a little positive attitude and a smidgen of self-motivation. Nothing physical—at all—which was one of the main challenges I’d expected to find in the military. A little running and jumping and shooting and climbing, you know? A lot more dirt and sweat and heavy breathing. More cool toys—guns and grenades and helicopters—and a lot more noise. That’s what I’d expected.
Basically, I’d come here expecting to “play army” a lot more than we have. So it’s tough to feel like I’ve accomplished a whole lot—or at least overcome a whole lot—when my daily physical routine consists of little more than fifteen minutes of stretcher exercises, a half mile (or less) of chugging around an asphalt square, and of course the endless physical trials of floor buffing, boot polishing, trash collecting, and marching back and forth to class. At the end of each day then, I feel less like a proud defender of democracy than a freshman in college—only without all the epic partying.
I want to come out of this with a feeling of accomplishment—with a sense that I’ve become a real “military man”—not just an ace “marcher” and a wiz at military history. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll be glad to have this place behind me, and proud to have it on my resume. But that’s not the same thing as feeling like I’ve risen to a major challenge, bested an opponent, or fought my way through to victory. Completing the course at Lackland is just a matter of endurance, and not even a very long one at that—only the Coast Guard has a shorter Basic than the Air Force.
So I sit down in this mini-theater of sorts, with the faint idea in my head that being an Air Force paramedic—a “parajumper,” or “PJ”—might just be the answer to my disappointment here. I mean, air traffic control should be cool and all—I’ll get to play with airplanes, talk in a cool lingo, and sit up in a control tower like a park ranger, wearing aviator sunglasses and telling officers where to go, and that could be fun and all—but being a PJ… now that would be exciting! Glamorous. Physical. Heroic.
A clattering film projector cranks up at the back of the room, and the film begins.
Helicopters swoop and hover over pitching seas and rolling jungles. Men in flight suits and bug-eyed helmets, wet suits and survival gear, ride cables into and out of harm’s way. They splint the broken legs of downed pilots, give CPR to drowning victims, pluck terrified rock climbers off of cliff faces and out of narrow gorges. They do it all, and I am loving this shit. I’m ready to go change my career choice right now.
Then the camera zooms in on the close-up detail of a PJ doing emergency field surgery. Suturing up a ghastly bloody wound, injecting morphine into some guy’s mangled arm, and finally, the ultimate gross-out for me, the cutting and reassembly of a human eye! Right there on the floor of a jungle! An eye, for Christ’s sake!
I avert my own.
No, it looks like air traffic control is going to be just fine for me.

5
“IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYWAY”

Inspection day. Again. GI Party #238 (approximately).
And this time, I’m not doing real well.
Not me personally. My bed—and locker, and drawers, and boots—all passed with flying colors. But my squad—now that’s another story. As a group, they are getting their collective asses kicked today, cumulative demerits that I, as their “leader,” get to share. Each man may only be getting a demerit or three a piece, but for me, enjoying a demerit for every one amassed by my squad, well… I’m about to hit twenty demerits for the day.
Shit.
Demerits may not mean a damned thing beyond the gates of Lackland AFB, but inside those gates, they can make life a menial nightmare. And we’re only just now coming to Slokum’s personal area.
As usual, when approaching a different bunk, the squad leader responsible for that airman gets handed Sgt. Lawson’s clipboard. And while Lawson furrows through their drawers, swipes at the dust lining the tops of their lockers, and sniffs at their razors, their squad leader gets to write each infraction down on the sheet. That way they’re painfully—and usually angrily—involved in every ding and demerit being received by both of them.
Bemer passes the dreaded clipboard to me, and I wince at the thought of the avalanche that’s about to come crashing down. Because, of late, it seems that Sad Sack Slokum has consumed the last of Sgt. Lawson’s fictional patience. He’s been almost solely responsible for all the bad points on our marching reviews, his squashed and rumpled appearance has gone uncorrected despite all the harassment and berating, and his maddeningly expressionless face just makes you want to slap him. And today will apparently be no exception.
Sgt. Lawson doesn’t even get past his bed before discovering an absolutely apocalyptic deficiency in its appearance.
“What the hell do you call this?” Lawson points at the tightly bound sheet and blankets covering the mattress. They look perfectly fine to me. Slokum, standing at attention at the head of the bed, says nothing. As usual. “You’ve been here, what, six, seven weeks now? And this is the closest you can come to an inspection-ready bunk?” He seizes the collar of the sheet, and rips the top layers off with a flourish.
And God help us all, there’s a wrinkle along one edge of the ground sheet.
Lawson whirls on Slokum, raw fury crackling from his eyes. Slokum looks back as dispassionately as ever.
“Flip this bed!” he barks. The order is directed at the squad leaders, but his gaze stays locked on Slokum. “And scatter the covers!”
We hesitate for a moment—he’s never ordered us to flip a bed for him before—until he whirls on us. “Now!”
I can’t bring myself to do it. However frustrating Slokum’s impassivity may be, he doesn’t deserve this blatant abuse. I manage to look too busy with the clipboard, and they start without me. Thankfully.
Now, as the bed is stripped and heaved over, crashing onto its side and scuffing our freshly buffed floor, Lawson storms through the carnage and snatches open Slokum’s locker. His dress blue and fatigue uniforms hang there in just as disciplined and precise an order as anybody else’s. But Lawson steps back, aghast at the appalling vision before him. “You call this even spacing?”
With both hands, he claps all the hanging clothes together into a wad, then spins around and flings them over the upturned bed frame. “You’re going to have to try that again!”
Jesus Christ! Lawson has obviously made an illustrious career out of being a full-blown head-gnawing asshole, but I’ve never seen him this out of control before.
He pauses for a moment as the uniforms flutter to rest, staring at Slokum, looking for some sign of dawning recognition.
Nothing. Not a blink, not a sigh, not a furrowed brow. Nada. And this only seems to throw more fuel on the fire.
Lawson wheels back around, and yanks open the top drawer—the one with all of Slokum’s toiletries, socks and undies. Blessedly, there’s nothing there that could possibly spark any more outrage. Unfortunately, today that doesn’t mean anything.
One of Lawson’s favorite no-win tactics has to do with our cans of shaving cream. Many of us—myself preeminently included—have years to go yet before we’ll ever even need to shave. But we’re still required to. Every morning, every man must use a cheap plastic safety razor and a fistful of shaving cream, and at least go through the motions of scraping his face clean, whether he needs to or not. This is intended, I’m sure, to level the playing field, so that everyone in the flight is equally inconvenienced—not just the guys who’ve been shaving since kindergarten.
And to make sure that these seemingly absurd rules are adhered to, during inspections, the T.I.s closely examine our razors and cans of shaving cream for evidence of use.
The catch-22 here is that evidence of use is also evidence of an insufficient effort to clean up afterwards. In other words, if they can see bits of facial hair or flecks of shaving cream on our razors or towels or cans or whatever, it may be proof that you did in fact shave, but it also shows that you didn’t do a very good job of tidying up your mess and making your stuff inspection-ready afterwards. By the same token, if they can’t find any such evidence, then they question—in their own delicate and tactful way—whether or not you ever shaved in the first place. Either way, if they’re in the mood to make your life miserable, you’re going to lose.
For a while, I’d tried to skirt the issue by simply never shaving. I had no need to anyway. But by making a point of avoiding it altogether, I never even had to clean my immaculate shaving gear. And for a week or so, I thought I had ‘em fooled. But after that week, I discovered that they had other ways of determining your compliance to procedure. Because after a week, everyone’s shaving cream cans weighed less than mine. They’d actually been using their cream, and I hadn’t.
I, and my heavier can, got bagged big time—a whole shitpot full of demerits.
Not that that made me start shaving, of course. Ever since then, I’ve just squirted a bunch of shaving cream down the drain every few days or so, and called it even.
The point to all this is that we’ve all learned to thoroughly rinse out the nozzles of our cans before an inspection, to erase any of that damning evidence of actual use beforehand.
You can see the logic in this, I’m sure.
Well, Slokum, being the one guy in the flight for whom there could be no doubt as to whether or not he regularly shaves, has to put just that much more effort into cleaning up afterwards. But today I do believe—even if Slokum had put a fresh unopened can in that drawer—Lawson would have found that damning evidence anyway.
And he does.
He snatches up the can, eyes it as if through a magnifying glass, and sniffs at it. Whether or not he actually finds any residual shaving cream, well, who knows.
Who cares?
“So, I see you use your shaving cream,” he says. Slokum doesn’t even blink, as usual. “And apparently you use it so much that you don’t have time enough to clean the nozzle. Well,” and he pauses to shake the can, “let’s not slow up for anything as trivial as an inspection. Let’s just keep right on using it.”
He stuns everyone in the room then, when he pops the cap and fires off a salvo of shaving cream into Slokum’s top drawer. A long salvo. A continuous spiraling jet, artistically and generously applied to everything in the drawer, like whipped cream topping a strawberry shortcake. He covers the crisply folded pile of underwear, slathers the socks and T-shirts, and completely buries the rest of the toiletries, until the pressurized contents of the can begin to sputter and cut out. Only then does he finish with a stylish flick of the wrist, and toss the emptied can into the white foam lake he’s just created. The stuff splatters all over the front of the locker and the floor.
Slokum is, of course, completely unfazed. The rest of us are stupefied. In a room full of gaping mouths, Lawson ambles up to Airman Slokum—the only person with a deadpan expression—and snarls at him through clenched teeth.
“You got half an hour to clean that up.” Then he turns to the rest of us. “And nobody helps him! Is that clear?”
Our obligatory “sir, yes sir” is hushed and subdued. Lawson doesn’t seem to care this time though, and bullies his way past the circle of squad leaders, storming out of the barracks without even finishing the inspection.
“Jesus,” somebody whispers.
We all look at each other for a moment—hell, I’m still holding Lawson’s clipboard—and, at first, we’re just too stymied to move. All except Slokum, of course, who immediately does his little robot penguin waddle over to the capsized bed, and starts hauling it upright.
Damn. Does nothing get through to this guy?
We may not be able to help him clean up his stuff, but we can at least pluck his scattered crap off of the surrounding floor and beds—essentially cleaning up our own areas—and thereby help hustle him along at least a little bit. But that takes only a minute. It gets his tossed uniforms hung back up, his jumbled shoes realigned, and his bedclothes heaped back on his bed, but that’s all.
As he tugs at his sheets, a couple of his bunk-neighbors—showing uncommon compassion for the little android—quietly join him in rigging the bed for re-inspection. Another fishes daintily through the foam filling his top drawer, plucking out a lathered toothbrush.
“Thanks,” says Slokum, “but you don’t need to do that.”
I’d almost forgotten what his voice sounded like.
“It’s okay, man,” says the toothbrush-plucker.
“No, seriously. Don’t worry about it. You’ll just get yourselves in trouble.”
Wow. Three whole sentences in a row. That matches the total number of words he’s spoken to date. Probably in his life. But his three “assistants” stop what they’re doing and look him in the eyes. Slokum doesn’t hold their gaze though. He just tucks in his blanket, brushes out a persistent wrinkle, sighs, then straightens to his full height of about 5’4”.
“It doesn’t matter anyway.”

Airman Slokum does not attend lunch with us the next day. And when we return to the barracks afterward, we find his bunk stripped clean and his locker emptied. He is gone. Whether as a second-time setback to yet another flight even further back in the curriculum, or as a total washout from Basic Training altogether, I don‘t know. But he no longer lives with us.
And, surprisingly, I have mixed emotions about that.
I’m not quite sure I understand the dynamics here. I mean, on the one hand, I didn’t think that just “deciding to quit” was really an option any more. By this point, the Air Force has already invested a fair amount of time, effort, and money into each and every one of us. And after all, we did sign actual legally binding contracts back at our respective Indoctrination Centers. So just how much influence could Slokum’s choices have now anyway? I mean, what difference would his “wanting to stay” or “wanting to leave” really make? I would have thought that by now, such decisions would be out of his—and our—hands.
Conversely, if such decisions were entirely up to the T.I.s, the First Sergeants, or the Squadron Commanders to make, then what was the point in taunting Slokum so pitilessly? Why put so much effort into driving him out—making him want to quit—when all they had to do was just tell him he wasn’t cutting it, and simply throw him out? Or could this really have just boiled down to a simple case of one angry man’s persecution? I mean, what if there isn’t any hidden agenda here? What if it’s just Sgt. Lawson losing control of some deeply ingrained cruel streak?
It’s one thing to feel vulnerable and at the mercy of these thugs all the time. It’s quite another to realize that, on nothing more than a whim, you could be tortured and tormented like a mouse cornered by a couple of bored cats—until they decide to bite your head off.

Story V: THE FUN STUFF

2011-12-13T12:51:00.000-08:00

V
THE FUN STUFF

1
April, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
THE CONFIDENCE COURSE

Well, it’s about damned time!
Here we are, wrapping up our fifth week at Lackland, and only now are we finally getting to play some of the games I’d once presumed made up the entire Basic Training syllabus. Stuff like running and shooting, crawling under barbed wire, rappelling down cliff faces, scaling towers, and crossing rope bridges.
Today, at long last, it’s the so-called “Confidence Course,” the military version of an obstacle course. And tomorrow it’s the shooting range. Hot damn!
It still stuns me that, out of all the time we’re forced to spend here at Basic, we only get one day each at these two particularly pertinent venues. I mean, you would think that the skills nurtured on these two courses would be somewhat fundamental to any member of the military fraternity, be they Army, Air Force, or otherwise. You’d think they’d have us practically living on these courses until we’d mastered their every nuance.
You’d think.
Well, I’d hoped, anyway.
But regardless, we’re going today—finally—and I am admittedly and shamelessly excited at the prospect.
Since we’re going to be spending over half the day at the Confidence Course, and because the course is several miles from our barracks—some distance beyond even Wilford Hall—we are actually issued two canteens and a web belt from which to hang them. We’ve never seen these things before. Barely a week shy of graduation, and we’re only just now being introduced to such high tech military equipment as canteens.
I’m surprised though, to discover that the modern canteen is made of molded plastic—colored a mouth-watering OD (“Olive Drab”) green—not metal, like my Dad’s. I cleverly fill one of mine up with Dr. Pepper—for lunch—the other with water.
What a schemer am I.
And since we’ll be a long way from our building’s cafeteria when lunch time rolls around, today we’ll be experiencing, for the first time, “field rations,” better known as “Combat Rations,” or “C-Rations” for short. “C-Rats” for shorter. Sometimes just “Cs.” Canned holdovers from the Second World War, I’m sure.
Our regular morning flagellations behind us then, we set off on our cross-base march just after sunrise. Flight 261 is tromping along right behind us. And I have to admit, at times like these—when you need to move a hundred guys through dozens of neighborhoods, across scores of streets and intersections, all during morning rush hour—it surely does help to have your marching skills thoroughly drilled and up to speed. I mean, despite all these obstacles, the torrents of traffic, and the badly timed lights, for nearly three zigzagging miles we parade along without breaking stride even once. And we eat up most of an hour in the process.

We arrive at a set of battered metal bleachers, arced around a large hand-painted map of the course in a clearing lost in the rolling woods behind the hospital grounds. Asphalt paths wander off into the piney forests in four different directions, like nature trails in a scenic park, looping in and out of the obstacle runs in tangled ribbons. But, with the exception of a dark pyramid of welded steel drums looming in the distance, I can see nothing of the actual constructs that await us.
Lawson and Renfro settle their two flights onto the bleachers, while a course instructor steps up onto the low stage in front of the map and waits for the commotion to die down. And when at last it does, he raps the big wooden diagram with the back of his knuckles, introduces himself, and proceeds to describe the sixteen challenge pits arrayed along the winding paths, out of sight among the trees and low rolling hills behind him.
This is going to be fun. Finally, something interesting. Physical. Military.

Well, the problem isn’t going to be with the obstacles themselves, apparently. I’ve still got all the scampering little spider-monkey moves of my youth. I’ve got all the requisite coordination, balance and strength needed to conquer every barricade, hurdle and climbing wall along the route—easily, and with pleasure. In fact, most of the obstacles are embarrassingly unchallenging.
No, what I lack is the stamina—the old “staying power,” baby.
It ain’t the obstacles themselves that’re killing me. It’s the sustained tempo of the obstacles, combined with the running in between that’s just kicking my ass.
I clamber up the underside of an angled, fifteen-foot tall, extra wide ladder, for instance, lever myself over the top, and hop down the other side, rung by thick wooden rung, all virtually without effort. But the subsequent slog through the sandpit at the bottom steals my wind almost instantly, and the fifty-yard sprint up the path to the next obstacle just about kills me dead.
And that’s just the first station.
There’s a really cool structure waiting around the next bend from it, and it turns out to be every bit as fun as it looks—and as exhausting. It starts with a four-story-tall rectangular frame built from what looks like telephone poles, with a grid of thick ropes—a cargo net—suspended between them. From the top of the frame then, another pair of ropes swoops out and downward across a small pond to a lower frame, in front of which is another cargo net, this one horizontal (for catching falling airmen, I guess). And already there’s more than a dozen baggily clad Basic Trainees swarming over the rig like ants on an animal’s skeleton, most of them pretty breathtakingly uncoordinated.
There are guys dangling from the vertical cargo net by one hand, their legs kicking, twisting in the breeze. One guy’s leg has gone through the net, and now he’s half-upside-down trying to untangle himself. And another guy’s frozen at the top of the net, unable to bring himself to squirm over the cross-bar and climb aboard one of the paired ropes for the pond crossing. The rest are scrambling around these fumblers and doing generally okay with the rest of the obstacle—until one guy slips off his descending rope, and lands with a loud slap in the pond beneath. Now everybody’s laughing too.
I hit the vertical net running, and am instantly amazed at just how hard it really is to scale a limp web of ropes like this. Then I notice, over all the yammering chaos, that one of the course instructors is standing right there at the base of the framework, screaming for everyone to grab onto the vertical ropes only, and leave the horizontal ones for our boots. I don’t know why that works, but it surely does.
The rest of my ascent goes easily, and though it is a little intimidating bear-hugging a log forty feet in the air as I transition over it from the vertical net to the descending ropes on the other side, I just keep my momentum going, and it all works out.
They want me to go down the pond-crossing rope head-down though, and that too proves to be a little intimidating this high off the ground. But I do it. I hand-over-hand my way out from the top log, swinging beneath the rope, then cross my ankles over the rope above me, and off I go.
Again—none too surprisingly, I suppose—it turns out they’re right: it is easier this way, especially once I’ve worked my way down to the halfway point, where my weight has stretched the rope down to within only a couple of feet of the water’s surface. Because now I have to pull my way uphill the rest of the way up to the “catch net.” And that almost does me in. Thank God for the catch-net—I drop into it, limp as a bean-bag, and have to be yelled at to get my ass moving again.
Unfortunately, it’s another fifty-yard dash up to the next obstacle.
At first, I was at the front of the hundred-man pack, just because I was clearing the barriers so quickly. But now, as the long gaps and uphill inclines take their toll, I’m starting to fall further and further behind. Back into the thick of the stampede.
A simple seven-foot freestanding wall, for instance, nearly wipes me out.
In theory, there’s nothing difficult about it. A running jump, using your momentum to carry you high enough to catch the top of the wall in the armpits—one strong heave to hike a leg over, then an acrobatic little flip over the other side, into yet another sandpit, and you’re done. But I arrive at the wall already gasping for air, weak-kneed, and slowed to a mosey by the bottleneck of people who’ve passed me along the way. It takes much more work—and a helluva’ lot more noise—to wrestle my way over without that running headstart, and without the strength left to compensate for the missing momentum. But with only one fall back to the approach side, I manage to grunt and heave and struggle my way over on the second try.
On the one hand, I’m getting pissed about the ground I’m losing and the crowd I’m now forced to jostle through. On the other hand, at least I have the excuse of the slower moving traffic now to justify my own slower, more winded speed.
Perhaps the toughest obstacle in the course for me—and by that, I mean “the most physically draining”—fortunately comes early, while I’m not quite so breathless that I can hardly stand, and while I’m still far enough up near the front of the pack that the T.I.s hardly notice.
It’s another wide wooden ladder, angled at about thirty degrees, so that it’s more like a flight of stairs than a ladder. They call it ‘The Bitch.’ The rungs are painted alternately OD green and mustard yellow, and we’re supposed to go over the green, and squirm under the yellow—six of each—wrestling our way steadily uphill to the top, where we drop off into the sandpit below. Simple in concept, no great coordination required, but utterly exhausting in terms of the sheer raw muscle and lungs needed to fight my way through it quickly. And by the time I tumble off the top rung into the sand, I am done. Too wiped out to even vomit. I look and sound absolutely pathetic.
Now I’m wheezing up the trail, with a steady stream of other airmen—from both flights—thundering past me on both sides. Even the T.I.s have trotted ahead, to guide the leading elements through the next hurdle.
I’m getting angry with myself now. These obstacles, for the most part, are a joke, ludicrously easy—like the low ramp with the five-foot drop-off at the end (tah-dah!)—“tests” so simple as to be no test at all. Taken individually, I could scamper all over these things upside-down, backward, and one-handed without a second thought. But taken all together like this—as a long sustained sprint, studded with these little diversions—I am reduced to a chugging, wheezing, slow motion limp. I look like a ninety-year-old man trying to play Tag with a bunch of eight-year-olds.
They’ve suspended three tires at the beginning, middle, and end of a regular set of horizontal ladder bars. We have to swing through the tires, and do the rung-by-rung thing in between. What little momentum I carry forward though, dies quickly in the hand-to-hand portion, and a line of grunting airmen backs up behind me while I struggle along, one bar at a time.
A pair of simple balance beams—painted logs, mounted horizontally barely a foot-and-a-half above another sandpit—are next. All we have to do is run the length of one of them without falling off. That’s it! Normally a breeze for me. I can walk for miles atop the single rail of a train track, without effort or even much concentration. I do it all the time. But today I wobble the length of the beam on liquid knees, with arms flailing, chest heaving, and sweat pouring into my eyes. The last eight feet or so are a mad toppling dash, spent running almost down the side of the log.
A pretty little man-made stream meanders through the middle of the course property, looping back and forth across the path in four places. And at each juncture, they’ve created a fairly interesting little crossing obstacle. The first is a rope bridge. And I use the terms “rope” and “bridge” here loosely.
Two “ropes”—actually steel cables—strung in parallel, one six feet above the other, span the twenty-foot-wide concrete canal filled with stagnant green water. And there are two of these “bridges” running taut to the far side, like paired high-tension lines. A backlog of heavily breathing recruits has formed in the lanes leading up to them, and I come loping and gasping up to the rear of one of those lines, finally getting a chance to catch my breath.
The crossing looks like it would be difficult enough for one person, stretched between the two independently twitching cables as he shuffled sideways toward the far anchorage. But the T.I.s are feeding a steady current of people onto the cables, continuously—I count eight guys on the left bridge alone, right now—whose individual lurches and jerks and yanks have a cumulative rippling effect throughout the rest of the guys onboard with them. One guy goes into spasms, wobbling and thrashing in place for several seconds, and his paroxysms are transmitted down the lines to everybody else, in both directions, which, naturally, only magnifies the problem. Until somebody—or several somebodies—finally get thrown off.
It’s got to be annoying as hell to deal with, but it is admittedly funny as hell to watch. The mood lightens. Laughter swells in the ranks, though the first taunts and jeers are slapped down by the T.I.s. Apparently, this will not be allowed to become too casual of a lark.
Amazingly, five guys actually make it to the far side before the first victims are wrenched from the cables by their contradictory shuddering. Two airmen, both flung forward by the bridge’s thrashing motion, smack the water in tandem belly flops, leaving the rest of the guys, still hanging on to the lines for dear life, wobbling and bouncing and quivering there, desperately fighting to dampen out the residual oscillations. The crowd on shore goes wild, laughing and cheering.
Sgt. Lawson—a malicious little smirk skewing his big old jowly face—prowls around the edge of the group, easing us back to silence. “All right, all right, gentlemen. Calm down.” On the far side of the stream though, Sgt. Renfro is barking like a junkyard dog, nagging the two guys over to the ladder beside him, trying to keep them moving on to the next obstacle. Another guy falls off the bridge while he’s yelling.
As the laughter fades around me, I hear someone in the crowd mutter “I think I’m going to fall off on purpose.” Someone else replies, “Yeh, me too.”
I have to admit, as hot and sweaty as I am right now, there is a certain appeal to the idea of taking a quick dunking. The guys climbing out of the canal don’t look too upset about their dripping uniforms and squishy boots. It probably feels pretty damned good, truth be told. By the same token though, they each probably weigh about ten pounds more now.
My tired legs vote for making the crossing dry, if at all possible.
When I finally get up to the mounting platform, there are six people already on the cords ahead of me. And by all visual accounts, it looks like the bridge is having an epileptic fit. The paired lines are flailing all over the place, completely out of synch with each other, with the guys caught out in the middle flexing and rolling and whipcracking back and forth between them. I’d be laughing a lot harder if I weren’t about to step onto that bucking bronco myself.
On a whim—in an improvised attempt to stabilize the rig here at its anchor point—I drive one foot against the lower cable, and seize the upper one with my hand, while my other hand braces against the mounting post. And for several seconds, I strain to hold everything in place, forcing the vibrations to die out. I don’t know if it does any good, but Sgt. Renfro barks at me from across the stream, telling me to get my ass in gear, so I’m compelled to let the ropes go.
When I do, I hear a splash, and feel a twitch in the upper rope as if it has just been plucked by a giant guitarist. I look, to find a guy from 261 struggling to stand in the waist-deep water. Did I cause that? But above him, the five guys still on the bridge are slowly steadying, bouncing to a gentler rhythm. They remind me of a picture I once saw of a raccoon, caught with two feet on the edge of a rowboat, and two feet still on the pier beside it, with the boat slowly drifting away. The guys out on the ropes in front of me have that same frozen posture and wide-eyed look of helplessness about them. Time to join them, I guess.
I hook my boot heels over the lower rope and hand-over-hand my way out over the water. So far so good. In my head, I silently vow to never let go of the cables, no matter what—even if they flip me upside-down. No doubt everyone before me thought exactly the same thing as they climbed aboard. Yet four guys still wound up in the river.
Splash!
Make that five.
By the time I’ve shuffled and wobbled my way out to the middle, two more guys have stepped onto the line behind me. And one of them is Airman Keyes. Short, stubby, little Airman Keyes—built like a fire hydrant, with arms so short I’ve often wondered how he reaches his fly to piss. Now he’s stretched between the cables like a heretic on a rack, his toes barely grazing the lower cord. And every now and then, as the suspension lines flex and strain to their opposite extremes, I catch sight of his feet flying loose, kicking at the air, then fluttering beneath him in search of the lower line again.
There’s no way he’s going to be able to finish this crossing dry.
And he doesn’t.
I, on the other hand—despite two or three fairly desperate moments of being pitched and tugged in every unnatural direction there is—manage to get across without incident. And with breath restored, I take off at a more frugal trot through the woods this time, following the paved trail downhill to the next obstacle.
This one is just a simple chest-high log that we have to vault. No gridlock here. The rope bridge that preceded it has spread the troops out too much. And the fact that you hardly even have to break stride to clear this thing prevents a backlog from building up here. Which means that, after only a short hop onto my tummy, and a pivot over the log, I’m back to running again. Damn it.
Then there’s the low-crawl. Oh Lordy, laying facedown in the dirt sounds so good right about now. It looks like hell, though—four ruts furrowed out of the hard-packed dirt with a loose mesh of barbed wire suspended maybe a foot, foot-and-a-half above them, like a ridiculously low snaggle-toothed ceiling. And pressed flat into those four ruts and squirming forward beneath the barbed wire like conga lines of salamanders, are my brother recruits, egged on by the instructors and badgered ceaselessly by the T.I.s.
I join the leftmost line, hoping to wrestle my breathing under control again while I wait. But the queue files forward too quickly, and before I’m even ready, the guy in front of me nosedives under the barbed wire. And I’m right behind him.
I’ve got to tell you, though: as low as that barbed wire looked standing back from it, it’s a whole lot lower once you’re under it. I mean, I can’t seem to get low enough to pass cleanly beneath it. It snags my collar, it snags my belt, it catches my ass many times—it even rakes my scalp once—but it surely does teach me what they mean when they say, “Get yer ass DOWN, dumbass!”
I claw my way out the other end, sweating in sheets, my front side caked in dirt, and once again gasping like a first-time marathoner. Damn! I feel so friggin’ pathetic! No time for swooning though. I’ve barely dropped my hands to my hips, when the instructor barks at me to keep moving… and I’m off to the flaccid races again.
Fortunately, there’s another traffic jam at the next river crossing. And here the “fording device” is another damned horizontal ladder. Nothing tricky or unique. Just the usual monkey-swoops from rung to rung, except that there’s an eight-foot drop into green water under your swooping ass. Pathetically easy on its own, virtually impossible when you’re weak from exhaustion, or slippery with sweat (or wet from a previous dunking). This crossing is practically raining airmen. I’m hearing a splash almost every thirty seconds. From where I’m standing at the back of the line, it looks like we’re losing about every fifth guy to the river.
I wonder just how many of them are doing it on purpose.
When I finally get up to the bars, the line of people waiting to climb the ladder out of the water is almost as long as the line waiting for the obstacle itself. And since some of them have gotten out on the approach side, gotten back in line, and tried the obstacle again, the rungs are now dripping wet. I dry my hands off on my shirt one more time, then swing onto the rungs.
I get two swoops down the ladder before my momentum dies, and I’m left dangling by one hand, groping for the next rung with the other. Dammit! I haven’t got the energy for this.
The rest of my crossing is a slow rung-by-rung struggle then, with the guys behind me breathing down my neck, and a course instructor bellowing at me to get my ass moving. I make it though, my arms dead and hanging limp at my sides. And fortunately, I don’t have to run again right away. The line of students waiting for the next obstacle is backed up to within twenty feet of the dismount from this one.
The path bends left, and immediately crosses the stream again, this time at a rope swing, or “Tarzan Swing,” as I prefer to think of it. Two ropes, hanging side by side from a high rig, are kept swinging back and forth by the T.I.s on both sides of the stream. And as each student moves up to the number one position, he has to leap for the rope as it swings into range, then hang on for the ride to the other side. Simple enough in concept—and in the movies—but, based on the frequency of splashes I’m hearing up there, apparently quite difficult in practice.
As the queue shuffles forward, and I near the edge of the water, I can see the errors being made by those before me, as well as the techniques used by those who manage to make it cleanly to the other side. And I have just enough time, waiting in line, to steady my breathing, muster my remaining strength, and watch my predecessors for the best methods.
Then I’m up.
The guy before me—some weenie I don’t know from flight 261—scuffs the surface with his ass, but otherwise clears the water all right. Unfortunately, he releases so late on the other side that he almost swings back out over the water again. Instead, he barely lands with the toes of his boots slipping and groping for purchase at the edge of the concrete. While one arm pinwheels for balance, he hangs on to the rope with the other, which threatens to pull him back out over the brink… until 261’s Assistant T.I. saunters over and relieves him of the rope, pinching it delicately between two fingers like a pair of tweezers. The T.I. watches the kid’s flailings stabilize over the next couple of seconds, then flings the rope back towards me. And I am ready.
I am in the zone. I’m focused like a cheetah, quivering, ready for the pounce. Before the rope has even passed the low point of its arc, I’ve already got the entire parabolic curve of its inertial depletion graph plotted in my head. I know precisely where, above my head, its swing will peak, and then precisely where my leap will intercept it on its back-swing. I can see it all in pristine slow-mo 3D perfection too. And the rope is behaving exactly as predicted.
Its motion stalls overhead—the end of the rope flicks once in a low-energy whipcrack—then it begins its dive past me again. And I spring!
Perfect! Airborne, high over the water, my own flightpath coincides with that of the rope for just an instant, and that’s when I snag it. I latch on, my arms at full extension, and swoop across the stream with all the height, power and alacrity of Spiderman himself. Perfect!
Except for the damned landing.
I paid all that excruciating attention to the launch sequence—which is admittedly the most crucial aspect of a successful Tarzan Swing—but completely ignored the dismount. I mean, how hard could “letting go” be?
Well, letting go isn’t hard, but its timing is critical. Case in point, the guy who went just before me. And now, Exhibit B… me.
Not wanting to release too close to the embankment, as my predecessor had, I over-compensate, and hang on till the virtual apex of the back-swing. And by the time I finally let go, I’m at least fifty-two feet in the air! Well, maybe eight.
Okay, five.
But far worse, my body position is all wrong (i.e.; horizontal to the ground). Had I been ready for this high-flying release, I could have easily pulled off a stylish little back-flip and a dismount that would have made an Olympic judge proud. Instead, I find myself backpedaling through the air, right over the T.I.’s head (practically), and I barely get one foot under me before my ass hits the ground with a jarring little bounce.
Well, say what you will, but I’m the only member of either flight that gets a round of applause from the course instructors—however sarcastic it might be.

The rest of the course is a comparative breeze. With the exception of a couple of thirty-foot scaling walls, and that strange heap of welded steel drums that I’d first seen from the bleachers, the obstacles remaining are hardly more challenging than the handicapped ramp back at my old high school. And for the most part, it’s all downhill to the assembly area.
That doesn’t make me any less winded when I get there, of course. Whatever lung capacity I might have reclaimed I instantly blow again on that scaling wall. And whatever grace I might have redeemed after my highly acclaimed dismount from the Tarzan Swing, goes stumbling right out the window again on that pyramid of steel drums.
The running path approaches a low—maybe twenty feet high—hummock in the woods, and I jog toward it with dread, knowing how little steam I have left for any more steep ascents. But as I round the turn leading up to it, the paved trail does not rise to follow the incline. Instead, it burrows straight into the side of the mound, cutting through the rising earth like a ramp leading down into a basement. This ramp ends at a wall—vertical concrete, banded with horizontal strips of wood, spaced about three feet apart—crowded in snugly between two towering shoulders of dirt and rock. Four parallel ropes hang from the top, lying against the face of the wall, and ending about eight feet above the ground, each with a struggling airman on it, squirreling his way to the top.
Again, nothing requiring any exceptional adroitness or coordination. Just a little running start to vault yourself up to the tail of the rope, then a hand-over-hand march up the wall. Like Batman scaling the side of a building. All it requires is a little stamina and some muscle. Unfortunately, my complete lack of the one has sorely depleted the other. And though I make it cleanly and expeditiously enough, I am once again a gasping, wheezing, bald-headed old man when I finally roll over the top.
And just thirty or forty feet away from there are the anchoring posts for four more ropes that drop down into an identical cut on the opposite side of the hill.
This one though, is much easier than the first, predictably enough—being a descent rather than a climb—requiring little exertion and only minimal attention paid to the placement of my feet. But the damage has already been done. I lope away from that hill as rubbery and flaccid as a de-boned chicken.
Which is probably the determining factor in the quality of my assault on the steel drums.
Oh, going up the pile isn’t so bad. The triangular stack of welded drums, laid on their sides, is only seven drums deep, which means it’s only about fifteen feet tall. But after slithering over the top, I guess I carry a little too much breathless momentum with me, and my descent becomes somewhat... well, let’s just say “hurried.”
I pivot on my belly, swinging my feet over the topmost drums so that I might back my way down the opposite side. But there are no handholds anywhere; just the rounded flanks of the drums. So when I straighten up to begin my stepping down, my center of gravity just keeps going, and I suddenly find myself backpedaling (again) down the steep, rounded “steps” of the pyramid.
Fortunately, before I land flat on my back in the sandpit at its base, I am able to pull off a desperate little stumbling pirouette that spins me face-down at the last second, and I land on my hands and knees instead. I quickly scramble back to my feet—preferring to look “wildly zealous” and “hard-driven,” rather than the more appropriate “spastic” and “uncoordinated”—and I wobble off down the trail towards the finish line.
No applause this time.
Of course, Sgt. Lawson has to stroll past the steel drum pile just then, his arms clasped behind his back, and he growls at me to “Take it easy! You’re almost finished!”
Good. He bought the “overzealous” act.
I plod around the next bend in the trail, hurl my limp body over the last low wall, and topple across the finish line a moment later.

I find my canteen and belt where I left them on the bleachers, and chug down a huge draught of the tepid, plastic-tasting water before I’ve even caught my breath. More than half of the two flights are already milling around the cleared area in front of the big course map, hands on hips or massaging their lower backs, many still gasping, a few exchanging high-fives, but almost all of them laughing, either with relief at having finished the course in good standing, or just razzing those among them that are still dripping wet.
Me? I’ve got mixed emotions. But mostly, I’m just disappointed. Disappointed first that this is all the Air Force could come up with to challenge me physically—not only a mere sixteen simplistic little obstacles (one measly cargo net, no assault towers, no elevated log post stepping stones, no simulated mine fields or wild rides down a zip-line), but also only one day out of our entire curriculum dedicated to testing ourselves on them.
And secondly—and far more profoundly—I am deeply disappointed in myself.
Not because I wasn’t coordinated enough, or strong enough, or smart enough to overcome each hurdle—hell, I’m one of the “elite” minority here who isn’t soaked to the bone—but because I had so little frickin’ stamina that I had to wheeze and limp and hobble my way through the course, almost hysterically breathless and bound up with cramps the whole way, starting before I’d even toppled off the second obstacle. I might have finished just a little “aft” of the middle of the pack—which you’d think would mean that I’d done better than almost half the runners—but the fact is that just about all of these people trotting across the finish line right now started at the back of the field, and were simply “pinned” there by all the traffic gridlocks along the way. I, on the other hand, had started at the front, and faded back to the middle.
What a limp dick.
Sgt. Lawson saunters into the assembly area, hands still clasped behind his back, watching as the last of the two flights trickles past him in varying degrees of dampness. I am loitering at the edge of the trees, behind the bleachers, keeping the stands between the bubbling crowd and myself, while I sip at my “refreshingly” warm water. And I watch as Lawson prowls the perimeter like a bulldog sniffing for meat.
I just don’t know what to make of the guy any more. Not since the “Slokum Incident” anyway. I mean, just when I thought I was beginning to see a method to his madness—a purpose behind his every rant and raving—he had to go and poison it all with that convulsion of sheer unbridled sadism. And I haven’t been able to look at him the same ever since. Instead of looking like a grizzled old hard-ass in a Smoky Bear hat, pummeling his troops into shape the same way hard-bitten sergeants have been doing since the dawn of organized warfare, now he just looks like a playground bully to me, trolling for lunch money.
Yet another disappointment here at Lackland Air Force Base.

Then there’s the C-Rats.
We were told the term was short for “Combat Rations,” but I think it’s derived from some Latin phrase like “Si rattis,” meaning “canned everything” (yes, I made that up). I mean, there’s canned meat, canned vegetables—hell, I think somebody even found some canned bread!
We’re all squatting on logs, or stumps, or boulders—a couple just sitting cross-legged in the grass—in a clearing barely a hundred yards from the Confidence Course bleachers, everyone picking through their first case of C-Rats with equal parts fascination and revulsion.
Flimsy little boxes are scattered everywhere, their contents littering the ground at each man’s feet—plastic sporks, Wet Naps, matches, packets of coffee, hot chocolate and powdered creamer, a clever little field-expedient can opener called a P-38, and of course, cans. Cans, cans, cans, and more cans. Cans of all shapes and sizes, but all only one color—dark OD green.
Talk about appetizing.
Mine have date stamps on them from 1952 (I’m not making that up).
Sgt. Lawson had announced that we would not be making a fire, so heating up our food is out. On that premise then, I’d selected a “meal” that didn’t sound like it would be too revolting served cold (which ruled out such options as “Ham and Eggs” and “Meat Loaf”). I chose the “Ham Loaf” instead. Much better.
Inside the box, among the debris of condiments and accessories, I find two large cans, each the size of a normal can of peaches, containing my “entrée” (the ham loaf) and my dessert (in this case, fruit cocktail). A couple of medium-sized cans—a little taller than a typical can of tuna—contain some round crackers, and something called “sterno,” which is apparently used to create and sustain a low flame for heating the food in the field. And finally, the smallest cans, looking like OD green hockey pucks, supposedly contain peanut butter (for the crackers, I guess), and some kind of chocolate-covered energy bar (disk-shaped, apparently).
To get into these cans, Sgt. Lawson introduces us to the P-38. Basically just two tiny plates of metal, each roughly the size and shape of half a stick of gum, hinged together on one side, with some odd holes and barbs punched out of them in several places. It “opens up” like a little metal book, but only far enough to form a right angle. The smaller notch on one side hooks on to the lip of the can just like a normal manual can opener, and the larger fang-shaped half punches right through the lid like an eagle’s talon. Then it’s just a matter of wrenching it all the way around the rim of the can, one tug at a time, and voila!, you have…
Dog food packed in congealed axle grease? What the hell is this?
Surprisingly though, it doesn’t taste half bad (the key word being “half”). In fact, once the nasty amber “gelatin” has been scraped off the top and flipped into the weeds, the compressed can-shaped stack of shredded meat inside actually does taste a lot like a big wad of sandwich meat… after it’s been squeezed in a sweaty fist. Mostly.
The round crackers are unsalted and virtually flavorless—like biting into dried out cardboard. The peanut butter helps, but it’s about the consistency of tree sap. If you can get it onto the cracker without snapping your Spork, the odds are it’ll mortar your mouth permanently shut before you can swallow it.
As for the “candy disk,” that’s just way too rich for me to choke down. I’m not a big chocolate fan to begin with, but this thing is dark, dense, rock hard, and filled with some kind of firm, grainy, peanut-buttery paste that just makes me want to gag. It might be useful for bartering purposes though. Or maybe as a door chock.
I also discover just how incredibly stupid it is to fill your canteen with Dr. Pepper, as I’d done this morning, particularly before a long forced march, and on a warm day such as this. All the hip and stomping motion that got us here to this remote corner of the base also snuffed out the soda’s effervescence. And now that I’m at my most thirsty—particularly after the crackers and peanut-butter-glue, and then the chocolate-turd-hockey-puck of a candy bar—now what I’ve got is one canteen full of warm, flat soda syrup, and the other with barely a mouthful of tepid water left over from a day’s worth of constant hits. Shit.
Thank God for the fruit cocktail. It’s both a dessert and a drink! At least it is now. Hell, I could trade off an entire boxed lunch for just one more can of that fruit cocktail.
Maybe next time I will.

2
GUNS AND LOSERS

“You will notice, gentlemen, that every Range Officer here is wearing a sidearm!”
The towering black sergeant struts in circles, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his fatigue shirt straining to contain his massive pecs, and his right hand patting the pistol holstered in polished black leather on his hip. He, like the rest of us, also has an M-16 cradled in the crook of his arm, pointed skyward, its clip and chamber empty.
“And the reason the five of us are wearing sidearms is so that we can stop you from shooting us! Or each other!” He smiles. “Yes, that’s right, gentlemen! We are legally authorized, by the United States government, to shoot you, if needs be, in order to protect your fellow airmen and/or ourselves from you, should you decide to turn your weapon on any of us! And make no mistake, we will shoot you, without hesitation. Is that understood?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
Well, isn’t that inspiring… not to mention reassuring.
“For that reason, gentlemen, you will not—I repeat—you will not EVER point your weapon in any direction other than downrange! Let me repeat that—you will not ever, as in ‘never-ever-EVER,’ point your weapon in any direction other than downrange. And by that, I mean pointed in the general direction of those targets!” He waves at the little paper head-and-shoulder targets, with their little black bullseyes at chest and forehead, stapled to their wooden backdrops just thirty yards away, at the far ends of their sun bleached firing lanes. “It doesn’t matter if you’re out of ammunition and your magazine has been removed! It doesn’t matter if you’re clearing a jam! It doesn’t matter if you’re just turning to ask a question! It doesn’t matter! While you are here, unless specifically ordered to do otherwise, the barrel of your weapon will always be pointed downrange! Always! At all times! Without exception! Period! Does everyone here understand that?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
I’m sorry. Understand what?

It’s a perfect day for shooting at shit. I guess.
It’s early April in central Texas—technically Spring now, I suppose. The sun’s out and beaming, the clouds are elsewhere, and we’ve just completed our second long hike in two days, marching once again across the entire length and breadth of this base to this shooting range. Canteens on hips again—water in both of mine this time, no Dr. Pepper—and another half day in the great outdoors, with no classes, no T.I.s (except as marching chaperones), and nothing else to do but play with guns. Throw in the added bonus that there’s only five days left in this poopy chute, and I’m a pretty damned chipper little airman right about now.
In front of every man on the firing line is an odd little lash-up of cheap lumber—props for the various shooting positions we’ll soon be assuming. There’s a simple six-by-six block of wood lying on the concrete—a ground-level support for when we’re firing from the prone position. And nailed to the back of that—using the block as a sort of foot-stand—is a six-foot-tall “crucifix” of sorts, a cross of wood intended to simulate the corner of either a right- or left-handed window frame, depending on the shooter. For our “standing braced” position, presumably. But other than that, it’s just us, the polished cement floor of this big open firing shelter, and a warm, comfy little breeze combing through the I-beams, turning this whole thing into a downright pleasant—albeit somewhat loud—kind of a “holiday.” A sort of “picnic with gunfire.”
And our “picnic lunch?” Why, it’s another heapin’ helpin’ of good old C-rats, of course.
Basic Training would have been a lot more fun if we’d had a few more days like this.

“FIRE!”
The air is ripped by the spatter-pop of fifty M-16s jumping, simultaneously, in the hands of fifty rookie shooters. The firecracker rattle reminds me of a sound I once heard in a warehouse when a forklift drove over a sheet of bubble-plastic. Behind the targets, the entire length of the denuded berm erupts in geysers of sand, and the trees beyond explode with fleeing birds. Spent cartridges jingle off the concrete in a steady rain. And above it all, the prowling Range Officers bark and bellow, correcting and rebuking and inciting us on to greater glory.
Four or five stations down from mine, one of them is being especially vociferous, loudly “congratulating” a shooter for at least managing to contain his shots to the western hemisphere this time. This, of course, is hilarious to the other instructors, and funny enough to be a distraction to the rest of us.
When we’d first begun firing almost half an hour ago—expending a full 20-round magazine a piece just “zeroing in” our weapons for precision and consistency—Airman Seldon had confused himself and his instructors by squeezing off all twenty shots without even once so much as nicking his target. In fact, his misses had even failed to kick up any dust from the levee behind his target. What the hell was he doing? Firing into space? Coincidentally, at the next station to his right, Airman Corson had somehow managed to place forty rounds within a one-foot circle in the center of his target. Forty rounds! From a twenty-round clip!
Impressive, huh?
Yep, you got it. Seldon had fired at the wrong target. He’d riddled Corson’s bullseye right next door—and with sufficient accuracy to pronounce his own sights “zeroed in.” But it was the wrong target nonetheless. You’d have thought the well-worn paths connecting the shelter’s firing stations to the individual targets downrange would have at least pointed him in the right direction. But, well… his glasses are Air Force issue, after all.
In the meantime though, I am in the freakin’ Zone. Hunkered now in the “crouch” position, my weight perched atop one sharp knee bone and one wadded-up boot jammed under my ass. I’m potting them all within about a two-and-a-half inch diameter, in both the head and the chest bullseyes. With the exception of a single bullet hole less than half an inch outside the central cluster, every shot has gone into that one golfball-sized crater in the middle. I could be completely missing altogether now, and they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, since no new bullet holes are being created by each subsequent shot. I’ve got an almost Zen-like “sight-exhale-squeeze” rhythm going here, mystically attuned to my weapon like a jockey to the rise and fall of his mount.
They’ve got us shooting forty rounds apiece from each of the five firing positions—free-standing, standing-braced (with the M-16 notched against the crucifix), crouched, sitting, and prone—for a total of two-hundred rounds. We staple a fresh target to its board between each change of position. We fire ten “orientation” rounds from each new position, followed by a check to see how the shift has affected our groupings. Ten more “adjustment” rounds follow that, correcting for the affect, and finishing off one full magazine in the process. Again the targets are checked for improvement, and to make any last-second fine-tuning. Then new mags are inserted, and we’re off to the races for twenty more uninterrupted shots, firing for effect. It’s a slow, uncomfortable routine—stooping, or squatting, or kneeling on the hard concrete, while forcing your breathing into an unnatural stillness—any unsteady portion of which could easily unseat your focus and concentration. For whatever reason though, my focus is just unassailable today.
I am locked and loaded and lethal.
Our T.I.s and Range Officers saunter among us, helping us to clear jams, adjusting our postures, and calling off results when they can see them. These training rounds we’re firing are of a smaller caliber than the M-16’s normal combat loads—which, I guess, makes them cheaper to buy in bulk, and easier to throw away in these massive daily fusillades. It also lessens the deafening bang and the kick of the weapon, which is a good thing for me, since it makes it easier for me to hold my form and focus. But the weapon has had to be adapted to accommodate the smaller round—in some way that I do not fully grasp—and that has made it more prone to jamming. So the instructors are kept plenty busy.
It’s a relief though, when the last shots finally trickle away to silence, and I can lift myself—and my aching ribs—up from the final prone position. The instructors have us pop our last empty mags, clear our chambers, flick our safeties on, walk down and gather up our last tattered target sheets, turn them in to the chief Range Officer, then head to the cleaning table. We won’t know our final results until after we’ve finished disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling our weapons.
Fine. Whatever.
For a while then, it’s kind of like a big old family barbecue. Four large picnic tables, buried under mounds of cleaning equipment—rags and rods and brushes and solvents—and a veritable landfill of scattered gun parts, surrounded on all sides by dozens of studiously busy airmen, all engrossed in scraping and scrubbing and wiping down every last microscopic fragment of their M-16s, right down to the individual screws and springs. Again the instructors meander among us, pointing things out, talking us through each step, sometimes manhandling the components themselves.
This is not hard work. For some in our group, it’s almost meditative, therapeutic. But for me, it’s just a royal pain in the ass. Every little hinge, bolt, firing pin and charging handle requires the most excruciatingly thorough breakdown and cleaning, right down to the faintest streak of grease or oil, the tiniest fleck of dust. I don’t know how many times I—or an instructor—has held my barrel up to the sun, only to find some lonely mote of grit still casting a long shadow, right in the middle of the tube. Over and over and over again. So I grab another small square of cloth off the pile, feed it through the hole at the end of the cleaning rod—just like threading an oversized knitting needle—and ram it down the length of the barrel again. And again. And again and again and again. Sometimes with a dab of oil on the rag, but usually dry. And always, on next inspection, I’ll find there’s still something in there—a single grain of ash, a wisp of lint, a smudge of something that wasn’t there on the last pass. On one occasion, I try just putting the barrel to my lips and blowing the dust away. But that only substitutes a fine spatter of my own spittle for the dust, and I’m back to running a rag through it again.
Eventually, of course, everything winds up sufficiently immaculate to pass an instructor’s appraisal, and I can join the others in slapping all these scattered parts back together again. I do a couple of quick dry fires for a Range Officer—snapping the charging handle, popping the ejector port door, flicking the safety, and listening for the click when I squeeze the trigger. Then I get the nod, and return the thing to the rolling rack from whence it first came. Done.
Now I can finally go get the results of my shooting from the tabulator guy, where he sits, hunched over his little table—buried under reams of shredded target paper—at the far end of the firing shelter.
He goes over each sheet with me, marking each bullet hole with a red X, and counting out loud as he does. And when he gets to the large ragged hole in the center of each bullseye, he casually ascribes the remainder of the forty shots to that hole. He apparently presumes, based on the tightness of the grouping, that there are no total misses. And you gotta’ like that in a Range Officer.
In the end, after totaling up all two-hundred shots and subtracting the handful of individual rounds that somehow flew a little wide of the center dot, I am credited with 195 strikes (out of 200 total shots) placed squarely in the inner rings. Technical bullseyes, one and all. And for the record, a one-eighty-five qualifies you for the “Expert” ribbon.
Bemer somehow walks away with a 198 though, the lousy mountain-dwellin’ bastard—just two shots shy of perfect—leaving me with second place. But still…
A good day indeed!

Even the damned C-rats taste better today.
Sitting around those same picnic tables that just a little while ago were buried under all those dismembered M-16s and cleaning kits, we dig in for the second—and final—field lunch of our entire Lackland experience.
This time I manage to snatch up the spaghetti and meatballs box, and trade off all my coffee, hot chocolate, crackers, peanut butter, and that godawful chocolate hockey puck for a second can of fruit cocktail. Oh yeh, I’m doing just fine.
Eating the spaghetti unheated is no worse than digging into a cold can of Chef Boyardee. It ain’t exactly optimal, but it tastes okay, and fills the void. And the double-helping of fruit cocktail makes up for the rest.
So, when at last we begin the long march back to the salt mines and cell blocks on the other side of the base, I’m strutting! Proud of my shooting, proud of my marching, but mostly just damned glad to be down to the last four days of Basic Training.

Story VI: TIME TRIALS

2011-12-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

VI
TIME TRIALS

1
April, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
DAY PASS

FREEDOM!
Well, sorta’ freedom… a Day Pass, anyway.
Today—our last Sunday in Texas—is the only time out of Basic’s entire forty-two day prison term that is ours to do with as we please. Mostly. They’ve been dangling it before our eyes, teasing and tantalizing us with it practically since Day One, like a carrot on a stick or a ten-spot on a string. They’ve also snatched it away, repeatedly and fairly regularly, whenever our motivation needed a little jump-start. But now here it is.
We waited for it, we earned it, and today we finally get it.
Apparently the standard way to spend one’s only day off though, is to jump one of the buses going into town, and “do” San Antonio—the malls, the restaurants, the River Walk, and of course, the ever-popular Alamo. Me? All I’ve wanted to do from the beginning was stroll off in the exact opposite direction from everybody else. I just want to be alone with my thoughts. With my future. With this day.
I’ve spent 40 straight days, 24/7—morning, noon and night—with these same forty-six guys (not counting our various and transitory drop-outs and set-backs). Every hour, every frappin’ minute of these last forty cursing, sweating days, and forty snoring, farting nights, we’ve been within spitting range of each other. And if today’s my only chance to slip away from them all, to be responsible to no one but myself, then you know I’m going to take it just that way.
So, while the rest of the guys are waiting in their spiffy tailored blues for the bus to pull up, I wave toodle-oo and amble off down the sidewalk, headed for any place on this mammoth installation where I won’t recognize anyone. I have no deadlines, no appointments, no obligations, and no plans. And most importantly, I am blessedly alone. For once. Alone. Alone, alone, alone!
What bliss. What pure paradise.
Even without going off-base though, I too have to wear my blues, just like every other Basic Trainee on a Day Pass. But that’s just fine by me. A small price to pay for this unaccustomed independence. Besides, my blues are the only clothes in my entire locker (besides my underwear) that actually fit well—I’m actually capable of looking good in my blues—so they would have been my attire of choice anyway.
Truth be told though, I really have no idea what to do with myself or my time. So I figure I’ll just walk until inspiration—or a car—hits me. The weather is perfect, sunny, and early-Texas-Spring warm. I’ve got a handful of small bills in my pocket—no wallet though—and hours of almost unlimited potential stretching out before me.
My aimless roaming soon carries me far enough down the main drag that I come to the highway that bisects the base. I cross at the light—noting where, further down the road, the steel walkover bridge arches over the traffic—then press on toward where I can see several World War II vintage aircraft sitting on display along the edge of a huge field. As I near the field, a large set of bleachers appears along the far periphery, backed up against the fence. Beside them is a smaller, lower, covered grandstand of sorts—a “reviewing stand,” apparently. And passing before them both is a broad strip of asphalt, liberally slathered in strange painted markings. Maneuver cue lines, I’m guessing.
This is the Parade Ground. The day after tomorrow, it’s where I’m going to be—me, my fellow inmates from 260 and 261, and a few hundred other fresh-faced graduates, all gussied up in our best-pressed showcase finery. No one with any stripes yet, but all exalted in our achievement, and joyous with the approach of our last night at Lackland Air Force Base. I can’t wait.
For the moment, though, I am more interested in the vintage aircraft.
So I take a slow, leisurely stroll—a completely alien concept over the past six weeks—among the ancient warbirds and half-assed gardens. There’s a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-24 Liberator, a couple of variants of the vaunted P-51 Mustang (including the bizarre F-82 twin-hulled mutation), and a lonely orange-painted P-39 Airecobra, all fading under the Texas sun. Guns and turrets are sealed, engine intakes capped, and all glass but their canopies and cockpit windows are painted over in black. And who repaints a classic fighter orange anyway?
In the end it proves to be more depressing than inspiring. They aren’t displayed or maintained with any sense of honor. Just abandonment. Uninspired aluminum taxidermy.
So I leave.
Eventually, my meanderings lead me to a bowling alley, and thence to lunch in its snack bar. And, as racy and delectable as all that is, still I linger, just watching—people, bowling scores, and the carefree passage of time. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s early afternoon then by the time I begin my ambling trek back to “my” side of the base.
Along the way, I concentrate on all the happy “normal” people I pass in the street—folks who’ve clearly been in the Air Force for a while—men and women wearing uniforms with multiple stripes, multiple tiers of ribbons, and Basic Training long gone in their rearview mirrors. I take some solace from the apparent ease of life that comes from having all this shit behind you. And that is, in its own not-entirely-unforeseen way, very comforting.
I check the marquee at the Thunderbird Theater as I pass, but see nothing that would be worth the cost of the popcorn. I mosey past the church where, every Sunday prior to this one, I’d been compelled to attend services, simply because it was what the rest of the flight was doing. And what the flight does, you do. Well, the flight didn’t go to church this Sunday, so for once neither did I. Thank God!
My little “walkabout” carries me past the Shoppette and its outdoor line-up of vending machines. I step inside only long enough to scan their paperback shelves before moving on. And then I’m back at the barracks again. My barracks.
Damn. “Home” again so soon.
It’s coming up on three in the afternoon now, and I’m still loitering outside the building. It just feels too good having this freedom to move at will again. I’ve already circled the building once, just a little while ago, just to “see it,” as if for the first time, from all its exterior angles. I felt kind of like a freed convict sauntering out the front gate of his prison, then hanging a left instead, and walking a long, slow orbit all the way around the building and the grounds where he’d been incarcerated for so long.
It’s actually a perverse sort of a “farewell,” I guess, but it felt good.
Damned good.
Right now though, I’m on the opposite side of the street, standing in the shade of yet another sun-blasted static display aircraft—I think this one is a Korean War vintage fighter called a “Thunderjet”—wondering what to do with these last dwindling hours of my Day Pass. I could go back upstairs to our barracks room, I suppose, and maybe just enjoy lying alone in that big empty bay for a while. But that just seems like an almost criminal waste of this coveted time. Besides, I’m enjoying strutting around base in my blues too much to want to give it up right away. Instead, I wander toward the parking lot on the far side of the other street, the lot for the Chaparral movie theater. I could tell, even from where I’d been standing next to that old stovepipe jet, that this marquee offered nothing of interest either. But just beyond the theater, I could see another sign, this one for the Chaparral Recreation Center.
I’ve never noticed this building before, despite all the mileage my flight has put on these streets. And now, as the last of the sand in my Day Pass hourglass runs out, I’m heading toward the Center’s front door, hoping to find… I don’t know… a piano, maybe?
Yeh. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to round off this day?

I can’t honestly claim that, during my tenure here at Lackland, I’ve had no access to a musical instrument before this moment. Every Sunday morning, for the last six weeks, I’ve been allowed to play the church’s little spinet during the post-service lulls, while waiting for our T.I.(s) to rejoin us and take us back to the barracks. It wasn’t much—rarely more than ten minutes—and it was hamstrung by the fact that the piano was at the front of that great echo chamber of a room, and came with its own captive audience. As a result, I never felt open to any wild flights of whimsy or experimentation on the keyboard. “Just the hits,” so to speak.
Well, standing in this tiny cubbyhole of a backroom now, in this seedy little Rec Center, staring at this battered old piano with its back against a painted concrete block wall, I feel as though I’ve been completely deprived of music for the entire eighth-of-a-year that I’ve been here, and that here, at last, is my salvation. Here is my first drink of water after all this time in the desert.
I know it’s overblown and melodramatic, but that’s really how I’m feeling at this moment. Cheated for so long, rewarded with so little, but rewarded now nonetheless.
I close the door behind me, snuffing out the distant clacking and laughing coming from the Pool Room, and muffling the Sunday afternoon sports squawking from the TV room. The rickety piano bench creaks and groans as I settle my weight onto it. The keyboard cover sticks when I try to slide it back out of the way, then it suddenly releases, disappearing into its recess with a BAM! Whew! Almost got some fingers!
But there they are—all eighty-eight of my little black-and-white buddies—some coffee- or coke-stained, a couple with melted cigarette burns (real ivory, huh?), but all ready to do my bidding. I start with a simple C-chord—just dipping my toe in the water. It sounds like an old Wild West saloon’s piano—out of tune, with spongy, sticky keys. But who cares?
I kick off with some classic Elton John (as it would have sounded had it been played on a banjo and kazoo, with a nasal deaf-person singing lead), and instantly, the looming deadweight of Basic Training just melts away. I am released into the ether of music, freed to drift wherever the currents take me. I am, at last, severed from my ties to my fellow flightmates, and from the domination of Sgt. Lawson. I am truly…
All right, so I’m actually just wailing away on the keys like a kid taking out his frustrations on a model airplane that just won’t build right! No, I’m not “working through any anger,” or venting a month-and-a-half’s worth of impotence and victimization, or anything like that. But this up-tempo, foot-stompin’, head-flingin’ assault on this poor old piano is cathartic in much the same vein. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s busy, and it wrenches me out of the muck of Lackland by the roots.
For a little over half an hour then, it just plain FEELS GOOD.
Then, in the middle of a Billy Joel medley, the Piano Room door opens behind me, and in walks a shy, swarthy, Middle-Eastern-looking guy, wearing an oddly marked uniform, and clenching his cap—in a wad—in his hand. Instantly, my natural self-consciousness about my wretched singing voice swoops in and slaps me down to a much quieter, more timid volume. And the wide-open pitch of my free-flying afternoon downshifts into cautiousness and circumspection again.
In other words, he puckers me right up.
I finish with a soulless whimper, petering out politely, gutlessly, and dusting my hands off on my pant legs. Now, what to do until he leaves?
“You play veddy well,” he says with the polished diction of a Saudi prince, “I was hearing you out in the hallway.”
“Oh, well, thank-you.” I shrug, and go all shucky-dern modest on him.
Uncomfortable and uncertain about what to do next, I ratchet my spine into a gloriously exaggerated stretch, and cap it off with a big theatrical yawn. And in the process, I get my first whiff of a strange new odeur that’s seeped into the room. Sort of a moldering laundry kinda’ smell, with just a hint of flatulent locker room laced through it.
What the hell?
“Please, continue playing,” my one-man audience adds as he searches the small room for a chair that doesn’t exist.
“Well…”
Naturally, at times like this, I can never think of a single song ever done by anybody in the history of the world. I also sense that the “locker room” has just moved past me, in perfect conjunction with the passage of my guest. Is it possible that it’s him that smells that bad?
“Is it all right if I stay here and listen to you?” he asks.
Once again, my powerful lack of assertiveness takes charge of the situation.
“Oh… yeh, sure… I guess… if you want.”
“Thank-you.”
I kick in with the intro chords from Elton John’s Your Song—although it sounds more like the theme from Deliverance on this piano. But before I can reach the beginning of the lyrics, this walking talking human armpit—having apparently determined that this tiny unfurnished room has no furniture in it after all—sits down right beside me! Right on the end of the friggin’ piano bench! And that stench of his storms right up my nose on a hundred stinky feet.
Oh my Lord!
Not only is his pungency almost brutally distracting, but his close proximity is impeding the movement of my left hand. I can’t reach some of the bass notes. I shuffle over until one butt cheek is half-hanging off the end of the bench, but still it makes no difference. He taps his toe and nods his head with the beat, but, sitting right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, I feel like I’m about to lose consciousness. I’ve long since forgotten the words, forging ahead with the song as an instrumental now. But even that’s starting to derail. And after a few more disintegrating bars, I put the poor song out of its misery, and cut it off with an intentionally mangled chord.
“Oh! Damn,” I chuckle, ‘embarrassed’ by my clumsiness, “Guess I’m a little rusty on that one.” He chuckles along with me, flashing a perfect set of dazzling white teeth. We nod and grin for a few more seconds—I lace my fingers together, and try unsuccessfully to crack my knuckles—but, try as I might, my nose is just not adapting to that bouquet of his. I can’t decide if he’s a member of the crack Air Force Sewage Squad, or is just a couple of months delinquent on his bathing. But either way, if I don’t do something quick, my eyes are going to stop burning and go completely blind instead. I’ve already lost all my nose hairs as it is.
“So, where are you from?” I ask, with the last of the breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“Iran,” he answers. And my eyebrows pop up.
I’d heard that Uncle Sam was training prospective Iranian fighter pilots for the Shah’s newly upgraded Air Force. And the local rumors held that even their best and brightest had to first slog their way through Basic Training along with the rest of us low-lifes. And now… well… how do you like that? Here’s one now! And apparently that other rumor—the one about their infrequent bathing habits—is also true.
Well.
So…
Ummm…
Nothing to do but start playing again, I guess.
After one more “instrumental” though—since singing requires the inhalation of too much of this richly perfumed air, and besides, my voice was bad enough before I started choking—I tell him that I need to go get a cup of water, and would he like me to bring him anything. He says no, and thanks me. And I leave.
And, cowardly asshole that I am, I never go back.

2
LOOK OUT, CAPTAIN! SHE’S GONNA’ BLOW!

“On your mark! Get set! GO!”
And we’re off. Fifty guys in T-shirts, fatigue pants, and boots, stampeding toward the first bend in the quarter-mile oval track. Six laps to go—a mile and a half—in fourteen minutes or less.
It’s our first of what should be a careerful of annual fitness runs—theoretically—although this one has the added weight of being a prerequisite to graduating from Basic Training. Sure, each subsequent run we’ll do over the years ahead will come with the risk of being washed out of the Air Force altogether should we fail to achieve their absurdly generous maximum time limits (which vary depending on your age bracket). But this one is far worse, simply because the sword dangling over our heads here is the threat of being set back, and having to spend another week or two here at the Lackland Hilton.
Ugh. I think I’d rather donate my liver to the zoo.
I’ve been dreading this day almost since they first told us about it. And it’s only gotten worse as the days and weeks have crawled past without any improvement in my running stamina.
As we round the first turn, the pack thins and spreads out. The lunatics that are going for all-time land speed records power off ahead of the rest of us, on the first of what I’m sure will be many second-winds. The guys that are just working on a good showing without killing themselves settle into comfortable niches along the inside track, adjusting to pace themselves for the long haul. And the guys who just don’t give a damn—who know that fourteen minutes is enough time to stop and grab a hot dog along the way, and still have time to slug down a strawberry shake—fade away to the rear and assume a lazy jog.
I’m somewhere in the middle—and sputtering already—determined to run myself to death if that’s what it takes, going for the best time possible, yet trying to pace myself to last six laps, when I know I don’t have even half that many in me.
Fortunately, the Air Force, as if acknowledging that it is the least “physical” of all the branches of service—and therefore expects most of its recruits to have to finish this run in an ambulance—not only allows for a huge amount of time to complete the run, but also doesn’t care how you do it, as long as it’s on foot and unassisted. You can sprint, jog, walk, crawl, even stop for a smoke, just as long as you cross that finish line in less than fourteen minutes.
I lean into the second turn—not even one full lap into the run yet—already feeling like I’m plowing through thigh-deep water here. My boots are heavy, and my knees are already turning to rubber. With fierce concentration, however, my breathing is at least still on rhythm. By the time I pass Sgt. Renfro though—standing at the start/finish line, brandishing a stopwatch and calling off times as each man passes—the first of the middle-of-the-pack guys has started to pass me. Damn.
More power to the warp drives, Scotty!
I go churning into the next turn, already pumping way too much energy into my weakening legs, and starting to slip out of my shaky breathing rhythm. Oh yeh, this is definitely more fun than I deserve.
I manage to hold my own with the middle-of-the-pack frontrunners all the way down the backstretch of this second lap, foolishly pushing myself harder than I can possibly sustain, until, somewhere in the middle of the turn, my breathing slips out of control, and the gasping begins. My pace sputters, the sweat starts to run into my eyes, and by the time I pass Sgt. Renfro again, I can feel a stitch burrowing in under my ribcage.
Two laps down, four to go, and I’m already on the verge of collapse.
On the backstretch again, wheezing badly but forging ahead as if the finish line was just around the next bend, I catch up to the first of the stragglers—the guys who are already walking. Man, that does look a whole lot better than what I’m doing. Old Man Griggs is among them—his age bracket allows him even more time than the rest of us—along with stumpy-legged Airman Keyes (who is running, but at a walker’s pace), and Airman Lyden, the weasely set-back who came into our flight along with the late-great Airman Slokum. Lyden’s at a lazy stroll, just keeping up with the back of the pack, and constantly checking his watch. He’s probably going to make a point of ambling over the finish line at precisely thirteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, just to show his contempt for the whole process.
I manage to eke out just a little more energy, so that I can lap them all with what looks like grace and elan. Inside though, I think my spleen has just caved in, and taken my colon with it.
That extra little push is, not too surprisingly, a big mistake. For, as I slog through the back-turn again, a whole new kind of pain starts to seep in where it really doesn’t belong—or help. Namely, in my lungs. A cramp, hot and sharp, has found its way under my right shoulder blade, and is now “lengthening,” deepening toward the center of my chest like a crowbar being shoved slowly through to my heart. I’ve gotten this kind of a cramp before, and it’s just about the worst thing that could develop at this juncture. I’m running on borrowed time now, and I know it.
Once the growing knot has reached the back of my lungs, the countdown is about over. The beginning of the end. Now every breath inflates my lungs “into contact” with that sharp “point,” like the tip of a bayonet embedded in my back, and those jabs make it impossible to breathe. Regardless of what my brain says it’s willing to endure, my body instinctively flinches away from the pain. And as a result, my inhalations get shorter and shorter and shorter, retreating further and further away from that knife blade. A reflexive grunt caps off each snort, then whatever small amount of air was drawn in is immediately expelled again in a burst.
So I’m snatching air in ever-shortening little hitches, and blowing it out again in grimacing little chuffs, with a grunt of pain in the middle. And that’s what I’m doing when I next limp past Sgt. Renfro and his stopwatch at the end of my fourth lap—hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff. I don’t even hear my time. And George Griggs, who I just passed not half a lap ago, trots past me now, looking rested and breathing through his nose. Show-off.
By the time I stagger into the first turn of my fifth lap, I’ve slowed to a flaccid hobble. My feet don’t even clear the ground any more. I’m just shuffling along, scuffing up a dust wake, with my elbows nearly touching behind my back, trying to accommodate the great roaring cramp that’s now throbbing between my shoulder blades. And my breathing has finally shallowed to the point of uselessness, a rapid-fire strain of little spits and hisses that sounds like “ishik, ishik, ishik, ishik!” I must look and sound ridiculous to the ranks of my fellow airmen that now stream past me.
Finally, halfway through the turn, I surrender to the inevitable, and slump into a stooped walk—because I just plain cannot breathe anymore! I can’t suck in enough air in any one breath to fend off this hysterical rhythm. And the charley horse in the middle of my back is now a deep and constant fist of pain.
This pisses me off! I could’ve lived with the stitch in my side. I could’ve kept running on rubbery knees and concrete feet. But I can’t do anything when I can’t even breathe! Damn it!
I wrench my shoulder blades apart, grabbing both elbows across my chest, trying to stretch out the knot. I yank in the deepest little breath of air I can, and force myself to hold it, while my brain orders my legs to pick up the pace again. And between all these efforts and the bowing I’m doing at the waist—trying to stretch out the cramp vertically—I must look absolutely deranged. But it’s working. By the time I’m halfway down the backstretch, that hot grip on my lungs has subsided enough to allow a more normal gasping, and I'm able to push myself back up to a faster marching stride again.
In the distance, across the parched grass infield, I can hear Sgt. Renfro calling off times in the upper ten-minute range. Damn. In a few more seconds, we’ll be into the eleventh minute. I’m not so much worried about making the maximum qualifying time—there is a growing number of walkers on the track now, including Airman Lyden, who still seems to be enjoying a leisurely stroll on the far side—but it does bother me to think of barely squeaking across that line, marginally ahead of a cut-off that should have been so easily achieved, and having killed myself to do it.
It would just be, well… embarrassing.
I’m still smearing sweat out of my eyes and panting ferociously as I tramp into the back-turn for the second-to-the-last time. But I make a promise to myself—I will not pass Sgt. Renfro walking, either now or at the grand finale. So I’ve got about fifty yards left in which to muster whatever wind, strength, and resolve I’m going to carry to the end, and then it’s back to running.
I suck in deep, DEEEEP stabbing lungfuls of air, then growl them slowly back out again. I spin my arms and swivel my shoulders, working out the knots. And I push my stride up, faster and faster, until I have to break into a run. Then I’m up on my toes and jogging towards Sgt. Renfro once more.
“Eleven fifteen!” he yells as I pass.
“Shit,” I mumble, and push towards the next turn.
Last lap. It’s okay to strain everything beyond repair now.
My breathing never stands a chance though. I cling desperately to a two-step rhythm for as long as I can—“breathe-IN-breathe-OUT-breathe-IN-breathe-OUT”—all synched to the heavy clomping of my boots. But before I’m even halfway out of turn one, an extra gasp slips into the count, then two more, then the floodgates burst open, and I’m heaving and wheezing and gulping in helpless paroxysms once more. The knot between my shoulder blades wakes right back up, and I can feel that damned bayonet jerking toward my lungs in tiny increments all over again.
No! It doesn’t matter! I will run anyway. I will not stop. I will run with my lungs dragging on the track behind me, if I have to. It’s all or nothing, do or die, now or never! All the best clichés.
I churn down the backstretch for the last time, disintegrating like an old jalopy, nothing working in harmony with anything else anymore. Nothing smooth, nothing coordinated. Just total limping, gasping chaos—sweat flying, legs tripping themselves up and weaving between lanes.
“Ishik, iskik, ishik, ishik!,” I huff, no longer even interested in trying to save face. I just gotta’ stay upright and plodding, at all costs.
As I flail my way into the last turn, last lap, head lolling, arms flopping, lungs seizing, Airman Keyes gradually catches up, and begins to pass me—on those stubby little legs of his!
No! No, no, no! That’s too much! It’s like being passed by a crawling infant. No!
With no reserves of any kind left anywhere in my body then, I still somehow coerce an extra erg or two of energy into my stomping legs, and lurch up to a matching pace with Keyes. He looks over at the beet-red rictus of my face, bobbing and grimacing and gushing sweat in sheets right beside him. And the little bastard speeds up. Probably nothing to do with “winning” or “besting me,” so much as just escaping from me. And I don’t blame him. I must look like an old steam engine, chuffing steam and glowing orange, its seams bulging and its hinges and joints all threatening to rattle and shake themselves to pieces.
Look out, Captain! She’s gonna’ blow!
I throw everything I’ve got into this one last titanic effort, anything to keep up with Airman Keyes. But there’s simply nothing left to give. Every log is on the fire, every flue is wide open.
I’m now whimpering aloud, and doing more thrashing than running. But the track is straightening out ahead of me. And there’s the Finish Line. Just a few dozen more yards to go. If my chest exploded right now, I could still lurch across that all-important stripe of paint on momentum alone, and that’s incentive enough to shut down everything but the legs for this one final push.
The world is rolling right and left before my eyes, as my head tugs and pulls and drags the rest of my convulsing body towards the end. Sgt. Renfro is standing off to the right, his gaze focused on his stopwatch, his mouth barking something in silent slow motion. Behind him, milling about the perimeter field in celebratory little circles, are all the guys who’ve already finished and are enjoying the end of a job well done. And just a few steps ahead of Airman Keyes and myself is none other than Airman Lyden again, actually running for the first time since this thing started.
And I’m gaining on him! For all my trials and tribulations and agonies here, I’m still going to lap somebody… TWICE!
It’s almost over! It’s almost over! It’s almost…
Then, as Sgt. Renfro yells out Lyden’s passing time, the little shit suddenly drops out of his run, throws his head back, parks his hands on his hips, and strolls off the track! He actually strolls off the fucking track! As if he’s finished! As if that passing time that Renfro just called out was actually his finish time!
I flog my way across the finish line mere seconds later, and topple off the side of the course in an avalanche of failing bodily functions. My legs turn liquid, and I have to clutch my knees with both hands just to keep from falling over. My lungs are in desperate spasm, a swarm of fireflies fills my vision, my blood is roaring in my ears…
But all I can think about is killing Airman Lyden!
The son-of-a-bitch! Not only did he walk most of the run—not only did he cheat, and get away with completing only five of the requisite six laps—but the weasely little shit wound up with a better time than me! It’s not that I’m in competition with the bastard, but I bloody well killed myself for that pathetic time! I think I blew out every organ in my body, just to wind up with a finish time that’s five seconds slower than the one his sorry ass received at a stroll!
I’m gonna’ kill him!
As soon as they’re done giving me CPR.
Gawd, I cannot pry the bayonet out of my back this time. It feels like it’s gone all the way through, and is sticking out of my chest. It’s preventing me from standing up straight, and is keeping my breathing hopelessly out of control. Yet, right now, most of my concentration is still on Airman Lyden, watching his smug, arrogant, cheatin’ ass work the crowd, as he ambles from group to clique to cluster like he owns the place.
Oh, oh, OOOHHH! I just have to go beat him to death! I have to! I can’t stand it!
Yet I’m forced to sway and totter over here for a while longer, gasping and grunting around this massive harpoon sticking out of my back. I’m teetering on boneless legs, and stooped like a pitcher that’s just taken a line drive to the nuts. This is killing me.
Airman Mutterman, a funny guy from my squad that I like to call “Skippy”—an intense kid with strange aspirations for an officer’s commission—saunters over and claps me on the back, driving the bayonet even deeper. He congratulates me on my Herculean effort. I have to ask him if he heard what my final time was, because I missed it. I guess I was a little distracted.
“Twelve fifty-eight,” he replies, and strolls away.
Twelve fifty-eight. I made it in less than thirteen minutes! A time to be proud of. Woo-hoo!
Except that fucking Lyden walked the whole damned thing, and came away with a twelve fifty-three! I am going to KILL him!
With the cramp still deeply entrenched under my shoulder blade, and my breathing only barely under control, I force myself to stand erect, propping myself up with my hands on my hips, and angle drunkenly towards him. He’s still circulating between groups, and is currently orbiting back toward trackside, where the last stragglers are now chugging down the home stretch.
I intercept him just before he reaches another coalescing cluster of people.
“Hey, Lyden!” I shout, making sure I’m loud enough for the T.I.s get in on this too, “You better hurry up and get back on the track if you want to finish in time!”
He looks mildly bemused, and answers with a wary smile still on his face. “What are you talking about, man?”
I close the distance between us, still breathing like a Clydesdale, hands still on my hips. I’ve got no rank on this punk, but I am a Squad Leader, which will hopefully be enough to compel him to at least listen to me. “It’s a six lap run, ‘man.’ And you only walked five! You’ve still got one more to go.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Renfro straighten and turn to watch us.
“No I don’t,” Lyden replies, his smile suddenly gone, his tone conspiratorial, “I ran six…”
“Bullshit! You did five! And I know, because I lapped you! TWICE!”
He rears back, genuinely defensive now. “No you didn’t. You only passed me once. And that was…”
Sure enough; he was counting the other runners’ laps.
“I was right behind you when you crossed the finish line, asshole! For the second time! You finished five seconds ahead of me, after walking five laps! The only times you ran at all were at the very beginning and the very end, while…!”
“Look, I counted six laps. So if I somehow miscounted…”
Outrage washes over me again in a physical rocking wave, and my last vestige of self-control slips away. I lunge right up to him, still puffing and panting, and scream into his face.
“You lyin’ sack of shit! You cheatin’ lazy-assed son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you’re bullshitting here?! You fuckin’ moseyed around the track for four laps, staring at your watch and counting the heads running past you, until you figured the timing was right! Then you kicked it up to a light trot, did a little heavy breathing just for show, and called it a day at five laps! Well, you’re not getting away with it! I busted my ass out there, and you just…!”
Oh God, it’s all coming out now. Every frustration I’ve ever had in my life, I think. Every minute of bottled emotion from walking on eggshells here at Lackland, every one of my squad’s demerits that I had to eat as well… all of it! My volume—and my octave—are both rising into the shrill and shrieking. Peripherally, I sense all eyes zeroing in on the two of us, just like I’d hoped. But for some reason, none of the T.I.s are making a move toward us. I’d imagined that once my tirade had broken wide open on the little turd, at least one of the damned T.I.s would charge over and break it up, allowing me to end it proudly—with my chin still out and my fightin’ feathers still ruffled. Then, theoretically, one of the “professionals” would take up where I left off, and ream the bastard a new asshole. Maybe even fail him on the run, and set him back to yet another flight, a couple more weeks behind us. That might almost be a sufficient balm for my scandalized soul.
But… nothing.
In the distance, Sgt. Renfro has gone back to calling out times to the last of the runners. Surrounding the two of us, a gathering circle of my fellow flightmates is just staring at us—at me, I now realize—stunned more by my hysterical outburst than by Lyden’s shameless cheating. And Airman Lyden, having apparently been down this road before—and perhaps having sensed the shift in the crowd’s sentiment—is no longer bothering to say anything. He’s just looking bored and, worst of all, patiently sane. Because, compared to me, he is.
If anybody ever gave a shit about my little cause here, they’ve forgotten about it by now. Now the spectacle is all about Airman Stipp standing in the middle of a crowd of tired runners, screaming like a little girl that really doesn’t want to wear that pinafore to church today.
Shit.
Nobody is backing me up on this. Nobody. Is no one else here bothered by this guy? By the kind of cheesy scamming crap he’s always pulling? Lyden’s the kind of weasel you’d pay to get the answers to your midterm test. Hell, he probably paid someone to take his military Qualification Test for him, just to get into the Air Force. And now he’s cheated on this.
Granted, I’m probably the most offended here, first of all because this pathetic little mile-and-a-half run almost stroked me out, and secondly, because this dipshit had to pull off his little scheme right in front of me. But still, he’s ripped everybody off by letting everyone else do the work for him. You’d think just one voice in the crowd would sound off with a righteous “Yeh!” or a “You go girl!” Something that would at least give me a way to end this with some dignity. But no. Nothing. I am the lone voice of moral outrage here, and I am shrieking my guts out.
Now what? How do I wrap this up without making it obvious to everyone that even I know what a dork I look like now?
“Son of a bitch!” I spit one last time, a clear indication that I still mean business, even though my voice has dropped and lost all conviction. I take a quick look around at all my rubbernecking “friends,” then swing back into Lyden’s face. “Just stay the hell away from me! You got that?” Then I wheel away, and start my dramatic storming departure for the barracks.
“Sir, yes sir,” he mutters behind my back.
I whip back around, and march right back toward him. “What did you just say?”
He’s all wide-eyed and baby-faced as I approach. Just a picture of no-chinned innocence. “Not a damned thing,” he replies with almost breathtaking sincerity.
God, I just want to strangle this weasely little shitheel. Instead, I squint my eyes, shake my head, and growl at him. “Jesus, you are such a screamin’ asshole, Lyden.”
Guess I told him!

Story VII: PARTING SHOTS

2011-12-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

VII
PARTING SHOTS

1
April, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
AIN’T HARDLY NOTHIN’ AT ALL

So this is what this “big scary room” felt like the day before I arrived, six weeks and one day ago, fresh off the turnip truck and scared almost diarrheic. This chamber—this barracks bay—which had seemed like such a dark and foreboding prison block that first night, had actually, at one point, been filled with laughter and celebration only days (or however long it was) before I’d gotten there, when it was the previous flight’s turn to “police up and vacate.”
As I stand here now—cinching the top of my overstuffed duffel bag closed, and wrestling a padlock through the overlapping grommet holes—I pause to drink in some more of this exultant ambience. And I picture how the next few days will be in this room, once the shouting and congratulatory energy has rung itself out and faded away again… once the halls have gone silent and a hot Texas sun has had a chance to sweep its cleansing beams through the high narrow windows… as the dust tries, once again, to reassert itself in the absence of a perpetually cleaning flight of trainees… as a calming, cooling night or two steadies the pulse of the building, and braces it for the next onslaught… until the next T.I. to use it makes a lonely sweep through the room, ensuring its readiness… and then the fall of the next night, with all the freshly renewed screaming and profanity and panic and thundering feet of a whole new wave of rookies.
And, of course, the quiet weeping, as the new flight settles in for their first night.
Don’t worry, kids. It ain’t that bad. Hell, it ain’t hardly nothin’ at all.
A steady stream of my fellow graduates, dressed in their “casual blues” (short sleeved shirts open at the collar), pass me in the aisle and clap me on the shoulder. Benez—“The Nose.” Spradlin, Bemer, goggle-eyed Seldon, with those huge coke-bottle Air Force issue glasses perched on his face like a pair of magnifying glasses. Little Medina. Big bullet-headed four-eyed Griggs, and skinny little Grzeszak—“Mouse.”
My family.
Our “dad” is already outside, pacing back and forth with a strange ferociously bored energy.
I take one last look around the spit-polished room—embedding it in my memory—then hoist my duffel bag over my shoulder, and march out the door for the last time.

Outside, arranged in six steadily lengthening double-rows, our two ex-flights—260 and 261—are slowly queuing up at the same curbside where the buses had first dropped us off all those many nights ago. I toss my duffel, end-to-end, behind the last duffel in the “Keesler line,” then sit on it, like everybody else, straddling it like the low saddle of a clown’s mini-bike.
It’s interesting to look around and see everyone grouped according to their impending job specialties. For each pair of lines represents a different busload, going to a different training base, or “Tech School.” Guys going into various supply and distribution jobs, for instance, are waiting for the bus to Shepard Air Force Base, somewhere up in northern Texas. Wichita Falls, I believe. Those entering one of the many medical professions are all bound for Lowry Air Force Base, up in Colorado Springs... real close to the Air Force Academy itself. Mechanics and other heavy maintenance types are headed for Chanute Air Force Base, somewhere up near Chicago, I think. And electronic maintenance guys, weathermen, and air traffic controllers—including, of course, yours truly—are all on their way to Biloxi, Mississippi, to fabulous Keesler Air Force Base.
Out of all the guys in my line, I’m the only one from my flight that’s slated for Air Traffic Control School. There are two other future ATCers up ahead of me there, but they’re both from 261. Well, I guess we’ll be getting to know each other soon enough.
Some of the guys are still passing around their Basic Training “yearbooks,” collecting signatures and best wishes. I got all the signatures I wanted yesterday. Now my book is packed away, along with every other worldly possession the Air Force has allowed me to keep.
But what a beautiful day it is. Not a cloud in the sky, temperature somewhere in the lower 70s. And nothing else to do with this great day except to spend it getting the hell away from this place!
Even Sgt. Lawson is clearly “eager” for us to be on our way. He and Sgt. Renfro are both prowling back and forth along the edge of the road, alternating between various modes of fidgeting hands and lazily shuffling boots. And, more uncharacteristic still, they’re laughing. And not their usual evil chortles either, but actual lighthearted human joviality. They’re actually talking to us too—not yelling, or berating, not ordering, instructing, or belittling, but talking—almost as if they were human themselves. We all know better, of course, but still…
I mean, we’re talking about Sgt. Lawson here, the same soulless tyrant that screamed us to sleep every night, bellowed at us through a hundred-and-twenty-five of our hundred-and-twenty-six meals (this morning being the one exception), and turned over more beds than the San Andreas Fault. The same ornery bulldog that called me an idiot more often, in just a month-and-a-half, than all my friends combined over an entire lifetime. That same raging madman is now joking around with the former serfs of his former fiefdom, answering questions, explaining some of the stranger situations that came about during our tenure here, and even pontificating on the higher meaning and grander purpose of Air Force Basic Training.
Yes, that’s right. There apparently is a point to all this.
It seems that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the general abuse endured by each new recruit here is actually more than just an elaborate hazing ritual. And it’s more than just a harsh, profane, often humiliating assault on the sensibilities, intended solely to let you know 'who’s the boss,' or that 'you’re in the military now.' Because the military itself is not that way… supposedly… he says.
No, Basic Training is the Great Leveler, says Sgt. Lawson (yes, I’m paraphrasing here, even using multi-syllable words in some cases). It razes to the ground all the peaks and valleys of the American social caste system—the high-rises and the shanty towns, the lifestyles of privilege and poverty, both sides of the proverbial tracks—and starts everyone from the same state of debasement and indenture. Everyone, rich or poor, worldly or clueless, big or small, educated or un-, availed of opportunity or not, gets treated just as badly here. Sucking up gets you nowhere. Family connections do not exist. And since everyone pays for anyone’s mistakes or oversights, teamwork pays off for everyone from any background. Reward is not the objective here—hell, you’re never treated well—so you learn to work merely for the “betterment of all,” for the “sake of the mission,” for the peace that comes from Sgt. Lawson having nothing to rant or rave about. Expensive hairstyles are laid waste just as brusquely as greasy locks cut at home with a kitchen knife. Designer clothes are replaced by ugly, anonymous, ill-fitting uniforms just as callously as tattered jeans and ten-year-old hand-me-downs. And a person born into wealth and power and lordship over servants is reduced to the same powerless end of the food chain as one who’s been living under a bridge all his life.
Everyone… everyone starts from scratch at Basic Training, which allows “natural leadership” to flourish in anyone, regardless of any prior social standing, or lack thereof.
In theory.
So sayeth the very man who regularly yelled at me to tamp my food down my neck as fast as my fork would fly, then had me throw out the rest and run to join the other badgered members of my flight forming up outside. The same man who declared me too sick to remain with the flight, then had me march myself to a building I’d never been to before, while my head was swimming and my gorge was rising. The same man who treated Airman Slokum like an inmate at a Nazi concentration camp just because he had no sense of rhythm.
Yessir. Words o’ wisdom indeed.
And speaking of malevolent shittiness above and beyond the call: just what the hell was the deal with that soapsud flood he inflicted on us back around the middle of the course, during what should have been an otherwise “Immaculate Inspection?” I’ve always wanted to understand that. Well, believe it or not, when he pauses for breath in his windy little discourse about the nobility and higher calling of Basic Training, I ask him just that (although significantly rephrased).
“Yeh, about that,” he chuckles, blushing slightly and tugging at his belt line, “I feel like I ought to apologize for that one.”
What? An apology? From Sgt. Lawson? I surely wasn’t expecting that when I asked the question. I was just looking for an explanation. Every man, astride every duffel bag, has an open-mouthed, dumbstruck expression, their eyes darting back and forth between Sgt. Lawson, themselves, and me. Members of both flights, even the 261 guys who can’t possibly have any clue as to what we’re talking about. But Lawson scuffs the concrete, clears his throat, and continues.
“That was an accident, gentlemen. I didn’t mean for that to happen.” Wow! This is better than candy, as farewell gifts go. “The fuckin’ soap box just fell apart in my hands.”
As one, both flights erupt into nervous—hell, stunned—laughter. No one can believe this.
“Actually, that particular GI party was one of the best I’d ever seen. Definitely the best work you clowns ever did, anyway.” More chuckling all round. “I just needed something to write you up on, something minor that wouldn’t affect your overall score, but would still keep your sorry asses humble. I figured just a light dusting of cleanser under the sinks somewhere ought to do it. Give you something minor to clean up without completely demoralizing you. But as soon as I popped the top, the goddamned box just disintegrated in my hand—dumped the whole fucking load right in the middle of the floor.”
Everybody’s laughing now, even Sgt. Renfro, who’s looking at Lawson as if he’s never met this man before.
“I didn’t want to sweep it up—I mean, I’m talking about a mountain of powder here—so I tried to just wash it down that drain hole in the middle of the floor. Grabbed a bucket, filled it with water, and sloshed it over that pile of powder in one big splash.” He looks at his boots, and sighs. “And son of a bitch, if that pile didn’t just boil right up into a big ol’ heap of foam. I tried to wash that down the drain too, but—obviously—more water just made it worse. Hell, in no time there was this huge dome of suds, almost hip-deep, right in the middle of the room. That’s when I said fuck this, and just drowned the whole thing. You were gonna’ have to clean it up anyway. Might as well make it look like it was all part of some evil plan or something.”
The 261 guys seem to be getting an inordinate amount of pleasure from all this. Even Sgt. Renfro is in on it, adding applause to his laughter, as if in awe of Lawson’s solution to such an awkward situation. Something in me can’t help but feel, though, that they don’t have the right to yuck this up too much. After all, it was our little drama, not theirs. But then they’re just laughing off six weeks of tension here, just like we are, adapting to the idea that these two guys in Smoky Bear hats are no longer their lords and masters, and that it’s okay now to laugh openly, even at their expense.
Lawson ignores them though, showing a surprising strength of character, I think, and looks around at each of us with an insider’s nod. “Sorry about that, guys. You didn’t deserve that.”
Whoa!
Man, even two days ago, I would not have believed that anyone from Flight 260—myself most definitely included—would ever be able to look at Sgt. Lawson again with anything short of loathing. Yet here we all sit, watching him, enrapt, listening to his self-effacing growl as if he were at an AA meeting, proclaiming himself an alcoholic. It is interesting, though, to see the other side of the coin for once—to see how even a natural-born sociopath like Sgt. Marshall Lawson might occasionally have to work at being such a sublime asshole… at maintaining the image of a heartless, callous machine tasked with battering Discipline into his troops.
While we’re at it, someone else asks him about what happened to Slokum. This darkens his mood somewhat, but after a second’s thought, he shrugs and says, “He quit.”
A mild shock ripples through the ranks of seated airmen. We’d kind of figured that, but still, hearing it directly from Sgt. Lawson makes it so… “official.”
The first bus appears and swings toward the curb as Sgt. Lawson explains.
“260 was his third flight—his second set-back. We were his last chance to get it right before being washed out anyway. He knew he wasn’t getting it. And after seven, eight weeks of falling behind one flight after the next without any sign of improvement, he discussed it with us, and we agreed that there was no reason why he should have to wait to be failed again.” Lawson looks at us as if he detects a little skepticism in his audience, while the bus—labeled SHEPARD—squishes, hisses, and sighs to a stop behind him. “He got an Honorable Discharge, and went home,” he adds as a final afterthought.
Yeh. And I’m sure having his bed flipped and his underwear drowned in shaving cream had nothing to do with his “choice.”
The bus door opens, and the driver steps out to open the cargo doors.
“Everyone going to Shepard Air Force Base, this is your ride!”

The Keesler bus is the second one to pull up to the curb, and it does so before the Shepard bus has left. So we have to wait for the first one to get out of the way before we can start our own boarding. We spend the time standing, gathering up our junk, and passing before the two T.I.s for a token handshake. Lawson is smiling and congratulatory as I shuffle through the motions, his Smoky Bear hat cutting off half of his expression, my two-ton duffel dangling heavily off my shoulder. Then I’m through the gauntlet.
I wave at my friends leaving on the Shepard bus, pop a cartoonish left-handed salute (blasphemy in the presence of these Lords of Lackland) to my buds still squatting on their duffels behind me, then sling my own load under the Keesler bus’s open cargo doors, and step up into the cool, dark, urinal-scented interior of the bus.
I’ll probably be carsick before we’re out of sight of this building.

2
FREED PRISONERS

We roll out the gates and onto that base-dividing highway, with the driver waving his hand in a lazy Godfatherly way that seems to say Go ahead, get it over with. And when the inevitable cheer goes up from the rows of freed prisoners on his bus, he nods and smiles knowingly. Apparently we’re not the first busload of escapees to express their pleasure at seeing the prison gates closing behind us.
As the bus labors up to speed, I keep my eyes out the windows, drinking in every last sun-faded feature of this place. Not much that is recognizable is visible from the highway, but my eye is caught by a couple of the static display aircraft that are parked on the Parade Ground off to the left. And I am reminded of our graduation parade, which was only yesterday, around one o’clock.

The first thing that had surprised me about that Parade was the sheer number of graduates on the field. Not that I hadn’t expected a high percentage of each flight to graduate, but that there were so many flights sharing the same graduation day! Because that meant that that many flights had to have started on or about the same first day as us: March 2nd. I’d always just assumed that 260 and 261 were it for that day. I mean, there were a hundred of us—and a hundred new recruits a day had seemed like a reasonable induction rate to me. And we’d all been at it since eight that morning, without much wasted time along the way. So where had those ten extra flights come from? When or where had they in-processed that I’d never even seen or known about them?
They must have arrived before us—earlier, during that afternoon and early evening perhaps. And, all other circumstances being equal, that meant they must have been flown in from closer points of origin than ours. And that made sense, now that I thought about it. I mean, everyone that had been bussed in from the airport with me that night had been gathered from flights that had arrived from places like Seattle, New York, and of course, Miami. The most far-flung corners of the country. So it figured then that newbies winging it in from cities and towns nearer to Lackland would have arrived earlier in the day! Huh! I don’t know why, but that had simply never occurred to me before this moment.
Anyway, the Parade Ground had been surprisingly crowded: at least a dozen freshly “blued” flights assembling in the hot, haze-magnified afternoon sun. The bleachers had been filled as well: families and friends of some of the graduates, who were able to travel to Lackland and bear witness in person. The reviewing stand too had been packed full of medal-bedecked uniforms, not all of them American. There was a microphone and a powerful sound system for the inevitable speechifying that would turn it into an officially “august occasion,” a small platoon of photographers, a live military marching band to provide us with the authentic martial cadence we’d need for the pass-in-review. And of course, an ambulance.
Always gotta’ have an ambulance.
It had turned out to be a much bigger production than I’d ever suspected. And they staged this thing how many times a frickin’ week? Lordy, the local commanders must have to draw straws to see who gets the odious duty, just to keep all the repetitious tedium from befalling the same poor badgered soul each time, day after day after sweltering day. Or is it more of a weekly thing?
But we went through the stiff routine by the numbers, each pair of flights squared off and shouldered up against each other in roughly eight-by-twelve-man box grids. However, because military parade formations are created with the tallest men up front and right, with the rest of the assemblage tapering off in height towards the “runtiest” dude back in the extreme left and rear (poor little Airman Keyes)—and because I am hopelessly average in height—for the first time since my permanent assignment as Squad Leader of Fourth Squad, I was shunted out of my accustomed front-right corner position, and absorbed into the anonymous middle of the double-flight. And it was actually surprisingly tough to march in there, constantly having to adapt to the accordion-like compacting and stretching of the formation as it moved.
We did “eyes right,” and “present arms,” and “eyes front” again, as we passed the reviewing stand, every man in uniform up there saluting us. Then it was a crisp tromp back into our static assembly positions, a pop into parade rest, and twenty minutes of standing there, listening to the pompous wind-breaking, and dull, starchy speechifying of the “Dignitaries du jour.” And it was during that, that all the guys who hadn’t paid attention to the warnings about not locking their knees back, started dropping like flies. They’d just fainted away, as their blood, settling under the weight of gravity and pooling in their lower extremities, got trapped there by their locked knees, and deprived their tiny brains of oxygen. And one after the other, individual airmen, scattered throughout the surrounding flights—including one from Flight 260, apparently—would topple into the men in front of them, their hands still clasped behind their backs, and crumple to the ground. And we had to leave them that way.
Actually, that was the best part of the whole damned thing for me. Or at least the funniest.
That, and getting to throw my wheel cap into the air. I lost track of which one was mine when all the hats started raining back down on us again, but found it quickly enough when someone rummaging through the fall-out nearby picked a hat up and shouted, “Jesus Christ! Who the hell wears a seven-and-seven-eighths?” When I turned to face him, he was holding it before him with both hands, looking at it like it was a trashcan lid.
“That would be mine,” I’d huffed, and snatched it away from him.

3
HOME SWEET HOME

But now the flat Texas countryside is sliding by outside my bus window, baked brown, faded green, and blasted almost white by the near-noon sun. The joyous hubbub among the passengers has run its course and receded into light snoring and a few whispered conversations in scattered corners of the bus. My own introductory exchange with the guy sitting next to me—an Airman Podulka, another Air Traffic Controller-to-be, although from a completely different barracks than 260 and 261—has also long since lapsed into silence. He seems a decent sort—sleepy-eyed, calm of tone, not the type that would be easily rattled, if first impressions hold true—but he’s apparently as awkward with perfunctory dialogue as I am. By the end of our howdy-dos, I’ve already forgotten most of what we’d talked about, with the exception of his excitement over picking up his beloved fifty-something T-Bird and bringing it to Keesler. And even then, it was really only notable to me because of the reverent tone of his voice, which, as he’d been expounding to me on the deified virtues of his charcoal-blue baby, was overheard by another future ATC’er sitting nearby, named Larry Connors. For he too was looking forward to joining up with his own ’63 Chevy Camaro, and reveling in his newfound and well-earned freedom from behind his favorite steering wheel.
I let them rattle on between themselves about classic muscle cars until even the endless scroll of parched earth trundling past the bus outside began to look interesting. Eventually they petered out though, and a pleasant little dome of silence settled over the seats in closest proximity to me. Just the way I like it.
I’ve been examining my future—and my recent past—ever since then, with the backdrop of my own face reflecting off the tinted window beside me. Of course I’m excited about what lies ahead—five months (twenty weeks) of ATC School, playing with simulated airplanes, spouting that cool aviation lingo, and working my way up through the ranks of a respectable high-tech career, with even more high-paying opportunities waiting for me on “the outside” at the end of my four-year tour—but I still find my mind being drawn back to the crucible of Basic Training, and the rigorous Higher Road it supposedly shoved me onto.
I mean, on the one hand, I did it! I completed military Basic Training! Woo-hoo!
On the other hand, I remind myself, what I completed was Air Force Basic Training—which is about the equivalent of summer football camp, only a whole lot less physical, and with a whole lot less money involved. Lot’s of shouting and screaming, lots of threatening and badgering and intimidating, but in the end, more an ordeal to be endured than a foe to be conquered. So, again, mixed emotions—the pride and the disappointment, the realization, once in the pool, that that high dive wasn’t so frickin’ high after all. And that no one but me ever thought it was.
A big step, to be sure, but still… just a step. You know? And, as it turned out, a pretty easy one at that.
Both my Dad and my Mom’s older brother, Uncle Jack, had been in the Marines. The Marines, for Criminy’s sake! All that physicality, the rigid discipline, the ferocious pride, and of course, their renowned esprit de corps. I’d like to be able to stand toe-to-toe with them, to say that I’ve been there, and to count myself a worthy member of their rather elite club. But, well, truth be told, even if they do accept me (in that way)—and as family, there’s little doubt they will, even if only a tolerant, patronizing acceptance—I don’t feel “worthy.” Hell, I barely even feel military, right now. I may be in uniform, but how much does that really mean? Bored kids working behind the counter at McDonalds wear uniforms, but that doesn’t make them “elite.”
I really wish I felt more like a Defender of the Nation than just a uniformed government employee.
But it’s lunchtime, apparently. We’re pulling into a sun-blasted truck stop diner, in the middle of nowhere. The downshift in the bus’s droning tempo stirs the sleepers awake, derails the handful of hushed conversations, and straightens me up from my introspections.
Yeh, I’ll feel better once I’ve got something in me that’s covered in dog hair, floor dirt, and slathered with enough ketchup to hide them both.

Night, on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi—at least as viewed through the tinted windows of a bus that has most of its interior lighting on—is about as dark as it comes. It feels like we’ve been barreling through a cave for over an hour now.
We crossed the Texas-Louisiana border in the late afternoon, stopped to desecrate our intestinal tracts once more while still in Louisiana, and finally lumbered into Mississippi as the last of the twilight pink was being smothered behind us.
Surprisingly, conversation kicked into high gear again as soon as the sun set. I guess everyone had slept off their exhaustion earlier in the day, and now needed to pass the time rather than bypass it. Either way, my motion sensitive stomach has mandated that I keep my eyes out the window, and that’s just what I’ve been doing. Even now.
We’ve left the multi-laned raceway of I-10, and are now chugging down narrow two-lane backwater roads, burrowing through clots of moss-shrouded cypress and scrub oak like a huge diesel-powered mole. And in this darkness, that doesn’t give me much to look at out the window. I’m forced then, for the sake of my confused inner ear (which is insisting that we’re moving, when my eyes can see no evidence to support that claim), to close my eyes and pretend there’s something to see out there.
Conversation chatters on without me, but not without me hearing it.
I learn that there are only five air traffic controllers among the occupied seats of this bus—some weasely chinless guy, sitting up front, named Wexler (no one knows what Basic flight he came from), Airman Podulka (sitting beside me), myself, from flight 260, and the two guys from 261. The loudest, and most gregarious of those two is the same Larry Connors who was so looking forward to bringing his ’63 Camaro to Keesler. The other—his buddy—he introduces as Mike Dumbass.
“That’s ‘Dumas,’” Mike corrects him, pronouncing it like the author, Du-MAH.
They babble on in Basic Training anecdotes—stories about Mike intentionally falling into the canal at the Confidence Course, just because it was fun… the Playboy playmate that stopped into our barracks building one day on a PR jag, and sat on a couple of laps for the photogs before moving on, Larry’s lap being one of them (I only managed to sneak a peek at her, through 261’s open door)… and 261’s favorite insider greeting of “rrrrrrra-PING!,” which is supposedly the sound an Airman Basic’s hair makes when he runs his hand over it. In fact, when Larry makes the sound, half the bus sounds off in automatic mimicry. “Rrrrrrra-PING!” A lot of guys from 261 here, I guess.
Then someone says, “Hey, look over there,” and I open my eyes.
Bright lights are splintering through the trees up ahead, backlighting the drapes of moss, and washing over the road in a tattered fan. The bus starts to slow, and its blinker begins a rhythmic plink, tick-plink, tick-plink.
We’re here. We’re finally here.
The bus swings around a tall wooden sign that says Welcome to Keesler Air Force Base. The driver stops beside the guard shack, haggles with the SP for a moment, and then is waved through. And we’re in! We’re at Keesler. Fabulous Biloxi, Mississippi.
Home. For the next five months anyway.

Story VIII: THE FORK IN THE ROAD

2011-12-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

VIII
THE FORK IN THE ROAD

1
April, 1977
Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi
NOW THIS I CAN LIVE WITH

Last night, when we checked into billeting here at Keesler, they issued us each a Xeroxed set of instructions, including a simplistic little map that showed us how to get from the BAQ (“Bachelor Airman’s Quarters") to the In-Processing Building (a short three-block walk). It also included the dress code (fatigues, with shirts untucked), along with the time we’d need to actually be there, and the paperwork and utensils we’d need to bring with us. All of it formal, polite, welcoming and professional. Not a swear word or a denigrating comment or even a command in it.
Wow.
So this is what it’s like.
This morning, I am a whole new man. This morning, not a single vestige of Basic Training remains in my life, and that feels good.
Right now, I’m an Airman in the United States Air Force. My fatigues might still need a little tailoring (so that I can quit looking like I’m wearing a green tent), but they’re broken in, and they’ve got actual markings on them—USAF over my left breast pocket, and STIPP over the right.
I’m strolling around a military base—not marching, or storming, or directing a squad under my command. I’ve got orders for Air Traffic Control School in hand. I’m bullshitting with my buddies, not a formation in sight, nobody bullying us or yelling at us or giving us work details. And my hair’s even starting to come back in, looking more like a short crew cut now rather than just a dark stain on my naked scalp.
Now this I can live with.

Again, the Grand Anti-Climax… the Welcome to Keesler paperwork.
I give them copies of my orders and records, telling them who I am, what I’ve done, and where I’ve come from. And they give me forms and packets telling me what I’m about to become, what I’ll be doing, and where I’ll be going to do it. Seems like a fair enough trade.
Everyone that’s in the room with me right now was on the bus yesterday. But, unlike the red-tape shuffle of in-processing at Lackland, here we’re all excited about our looming prospects. Hell, most of us can hardly contain ourselves. We giggle and chuckle, play a little grab-ass, and practically rupture a spleen laughing at even the slightest attempts at humor by the head Paper Wrangler at the front of the room.
Then, with all the T’s dotted and the I’s crossed, another guy takes the podium—an officer this time—who proceeds to enlighten us on the mission and the history of Keesler Air Force Base. Naturally, according to his rendition, Keesler is the golden nugget in the jewel case of the United States Air Force. Its presence here outside Biloxi has apparently done everything from revitalizing the Mississippi Gulf Coast economy to perfecting a cure for cancer. He mentions the ongoing clean-up (in which we might soon very well find ourselves involved, he says) of the post-Hurricane Camille devastation. It hit a summer or two ago, trashing a couple hundred miles of waterfront—demolishing docks and bridges, tossing boats far inland, and flattening seaside homes and buildings. Most of the work’s been done already, he says, but Keesler, as the largest governmental presence in the area, is committed to the ongoing effort.
Oh goody.
We find out that the majority of us—the only exceptions being a couple of guys slated for the Weather School—will still have a couple of weeks to kill before our classes begin. And during that time, we will be on what they call “Casual Status” (which, in English, means that we will become the resident slave labor pool). So now might be a good time to take our first leaves. Granted, in the mere month-and-a-half that we’ve been in the Air Force, we’ve barely accrued about three days of leave time, but it is possible to take some in advance. It’s our choice. But once our classes begin, we won’t be able to take leave until after graduation. I opt not to take advantage of the offer. The three-day Memorial Day weekend (my 20th birthday) is only a month-and-a-half away, and spending those three days in Miami with friends and family ought to be enough to tide me over.

The briefings and presentations drone on through the morning, with ten minute breaks at the top of every hour. And after a couple of these breaks, it becomes apparent that we are all of like mind on at least one issue—we may be excited and proud to be here, but by now we’re also pretty uniformly sick to death of tired, timeworn recitations and familiarization briefs. This stuff is slated to wrap in time for lunch, then the rest of the day is ours to do with as we please. And for that, I think I can endure what remains of the process. At the eleven o’clock intermission though, they throw in a new wrinkle.
“Okay, gentlemen,” says the skinny Tech Sergeant, fiddling with his watch to the tune of a roomful of stretching and yawning and desk-chairs sliding on faded linoleum, “let’s take ten… no, make that twenty.” Then he looks back up at us. “Radio maintenance and air traffic control trainees only, I’ll need you to hang around for a couple of minutes here first. We’ve got a short supplemental briefing for you in the next room. Then you can join the others.”
That raises a few eyebrows, but… what the hell. Myself, and Airmen Wexler, Podulka, Dumas, and Connors, plus about a half dozen other guys that I presume are future radio maintenance types, shuffle through the proffered doorway, while the rest of the room empties out into the hallway and thence to the break area.
Damn. I could have used a twenty-minute stroll in the sunshine too.

2
AN ALTERNATIVE CAREER OPTION

Waiting for us in the small side room is a slide projector, a cheap free-standing screen on a tripod, and a Master Sergeant, braced in a bold stance of parade rest. His skin is tanned and creased like worn saddle leather. His jump boots are polished to a mirror gloss, and he’s wearing camouflaged fatigues—the first I’ve seen since joining the Air Force—which are covered in large pockets, tailored to fit his cast-iron physique like a glove, and pressed and starched into rigid origami. He’s also wearing sunglasses—indoors. What is it with these guys?
We shuffle warily into the room, wading through the desk-chairs in a slowly dispersing pattern that avoids the front-and-center seats which seem to fall within the almost visible force-field this guy is radiating.
“Gentlemen!” he suddenly barks without moving a muscle outside of his lips and lungs, “Please, take a seat, somewhere where you can see this screen. I’ve got a short presentation for you—less than ten minutes in length—then you can go join your buddies outside on break.”
We drop into the nearest chairs, and sit up quickly, ramrod straight. It seems to come naturally in the presence of a guy like this.
“My name is Master Sergeant Beaudry,” he announces proudly, “And I am here today to offer you an alternative career option.” Oh, here we go again. “This option is available only to radio maintenance personnel and air traffic controllers, which is why you’re the only ones in this room right now. It’s called Combat Control. Please watch the screen.” Then he breaks out of his parade rest with a crackle of starch and a creak of boot leather, and marches to the back of the room. There he snatches up the projector’s remote and kills the lights.
Cheesy disco “action music” minces from the tiny speaker on the side of the projector, tinny and vapid and embarrassingly rinky-tink, followed by the clatter-snick of the slide tray dropping its first slide into the light. Gawd.
But that first slide comes out a-swingin’.
Suddenly, filling the screen to all four corners, a dark image appears—a near silhouette—of a military skydiver suspended against a twilit sky. Straps and baggy sleeves are frozen in mid-flutter, torn by the one hundred mile an hour slipstream. Bags and weapons and web gear are attached seemingly helter-skelter all over his body. He’s wearing a helmet, goggles, and even a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask, and staring straight at the photographer. Above and behind him, the ass-end of a C-130 transport aircraft, distorted by the wide-angle lens of the camera, is open and dribbling more skydivers across the sky.
“COMBAT CONTROL” is printed in bold white letters across the bottom, and a round emblem full of parachutes and lightning bolts is in the corner, declaring First In, Last Out.
Whoa! Cool.
Why have I never heard of these guys?
As it turns out, Combat Control is the Air Force’s very own elite “commando” unit (my choice of words, not theirs). Every major branch of the military apparently has at least one: the Army’s got their Rangers and Green Berets, the Marines have their Force Recon guys, and the Navy’s got their SEALs. Well, the Air Force has Combat Controllers, their very own running, jumping, shooting, sneaking, sniping, throat-slitting, judo-chopping, hostage-rescuing, scuba diving “men-o-machismo.” And before you can even think about signing up, you have to first be either an air traffic controller (since their primary mission has to do with controlling aircraft on drops, air strikes, or running resupply ships in and out of their own improvised air strips), or as a radio maintenance man (qualified to maintain any and all of their varied communications gear, thereby making a CC team self-sufficient in the field). Recruiting potential candidates here at the Air Traffic Control School, before they’re qualified to even look out a tower window, is just a matter of breeding their heroes right from the military cradle.
So to speak.
And yes, I am intrigued. It’s not exactly “me”—it’s certainly not what I signed up to do—but this seems to offer all the cool stuff that that paramedics movie first offered back at Lackland, only without all that grody “medical stuff” that gave me the shivers and turned my stomach over.
Tell me more.
The slides go on to show these Special Ops guys in all the various and sundry manifestations of their job… faces painted like Indian warriors (who only have two shades of green to play with), lying in wait in tall grass, sighted sniper rifles draped in camouflage and pointed downhill… two of them, wearing dark blue berets, in the middle of an open field, both looking boldly skyward, one releasing a weather balloon, the other on one knee, talking into the handset of a portable radio… a guy up to his neck in swamp water, rigging a brick of plastique to a bridge piling… two guys flipping and kicking the shit out of each other in some martial arts display… a whole conga line of these crazy bastards, all bundled up in white, weapons and packs on their backs, shooshing down a powdered slope on skis… a six-man team rising out of the surf in the middle of the night, weapons drawn and dripping, dragging an inflatable Zodiac power-boat up onto the beach… and, of course, the obligatory shot, taken from inside a C-141’s cargo hold, with the ramp down and open, as a half dozen of these guys hurl themselves out into the blinding white abyss at thirty-thousand feet.
Now that’s the kind of military I'm interested in.
To someone—like me—looking to get an actual military experience out of the Air Force, this is heady stuff. This is the physical, rigidly disciplined, expertly trained, worldly, heroic stuff that I’ve been looking for. And I still get to be a cool air traffic controller at the same time! What’s not to like?
As the lights come up, and Sgt. Beaudry strides—and I do mean STRIDES—back to the front of the room, I look around to see who else is sharing my intrigue. And the answer is a big fat “nobody.” Not one of the ten others in attendance shows even the tiniest trace of interest. In fact, most of them are swapping nervous glances, or even overt chuckles, as if to say is he crazy? Do I look that stupid?
“Here at Keesler Air Force Base,” Sgt. Beaudry resumes, oblivious to the expressions of disbelief around him, “you’ll start at the most basic level, called Phase I. This is strictly an exercise and work-out regime, intended to prepare you for the more difficult schools that will follow, and will run in conjunction with your Tech School schedule, either before or after each day’s classes, depending on whether you have a morning or afternoon school shift. We work out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you can begin as soon as you sign up. Which means,” he adds conspiratorially, “if you start right away, you’ll be exempt from Casual Status duties on those days we work out.” Oo, I like that! “Any questions?”
None. Just a room full of people avoiding his gaze.
I am stunned. Sgt. Beaudry doesn’t seem to be.
“All right, gentlemen, that’s it. Have a nice day.” And he turns around to square away the little pile of brochures he’s brought along. Just giving his audience a chance to bolt while his back is turned, I guess.
And they do. The room is empty before I’ve even fully risen to my feet.
I continue to putter and delay though... curious, but unsure what to ask, interested, but unsure how to begin, and wondering if I’m not completely out of my mind just for thinking about it.
Sgt. Beaudry busies himself for the requisite number of seconds, then turns to find me standing there, alone among the empty rows of desk-chairs. He seems pleasantly surprised—in much the same way I imagine a shark would react if it turned to find that it was being followed by a curious snorkeler.
And he smiles.

3
CASUAL STATUS

Sweeping a parking lot.
That’s what they’ve got me doing now—sweeping a goddamned parking lot.
All by myself. Just me and one ratty old straw whiskbroom!
Are you friggin’ kidding me here?
It’s barely 10:30 in the morning, and I’ve already worked up a couple of fairly impressive blisters on both hands, right there in the webbing of each thumb. And for all that, all I’ve really been able to finish so far is one long row, sidling between the cars, brushing the grit and detritus out into the open lane, then systematically herding it all down to the curb at the end. The same end that the wind has been blowing it towards all day anyway (I had to learn that one the hard way—no Master Parking Lot Sweeper am I).
So this is what “Casual Status” means—menial busywork, of a disinterested and improvised nature (on the part of those who have to concoct these stupid time-consuming details), back-breaking, blister-raising, sweat-wringing labor for those of us too dense to take advantage of the many offers to go on leave instead. I mean, come on! Sweeping a public parking lot?

But I guess that’s what I get. I had two ways out of this, and I opted out of both of them.
I could have been in Miami right now, burning up a little advance leave, showing off the five o’clock shadow on my head, and telling my first war stories to any and all who would listen. But no. I decided to save my accrued leave for later, banking it away for an even bigger, better vacation nearer the end of the year. Or something like that. Besides, I knew I’d be in Miami over the three-day Memorial Day weekend anyway, just a little over a month away.
I also could have signed up for that Combat Control program that Sgt. Beaudry sold so convincingly, which would have superceded this slave labor and given me something else to do with my empty hours. But no, I had to go and call my Mom with the exciting news about this bold new career change I was considering—“I’ll get to jump out of airplanes, scuba dive at night, in cold, polluted, enemy waters, skulk through the jungle in camouflaged fatigues, learn the martial arts, and get to know all the ninety-eight different ways to eviscerate an enemy sentry with a plastic Spork!” (all those things a genteel mother loves to contemplate for her firstborn son). Needless to say, this was a sales pitch wasted on an unappreciative audience. Rather than expressing any curious enthusiasm, or even a little pseudo-encouragement for my adventurous scheme, she had instead listed the far greater number of perfectly logical reasons why such an idea was crazy, at least for the likes of me. I’d hung up the phone, disappointed with the surprisingly negative direction the conversation had veered, but, at her insistence, having vowed to postpone my decision for a few more days—or weeks—just to give myself a little time to think it all through.
Well, I gotta’ tell ya’—one more day of this parking lot detail, and I suspect my capacity for circumspection will be rather severely curtailed. I mean, at this rate, I’ll never play the violin again.
I stop and mop the sweat out of my eye sockets—Jeezy Pete, it’s like sponging out a couple of bird baths—and stare grimly at the next row of parking spaces that awaits me. Hmmm.
Joining a bunch of rowdy lunatics for a few hundred sit-ups and a couple miles of running in this soggy heat every other day is starting to sound pretty damned good right about now. Combat Controllers probably don’t care as much about which direction the dust is being blown by the wind.
Yeh, screw it. It’s time to take this to the next level.

Story IX: LET THE GAMES BEGIN

2011-12-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

IX
LET THE GAMES BEGIN

1
April, 1977
Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi
THOSE OLD SECOND THOUGHTS

Monday, April 25th, 1977—just twelve days after first being inspired to a more challenging lifestyle by Sgt. Beaudry, then un-inspired by my mother’s catalogue of concerns, then re-inspired by the joys of Casual Status—I am, at last, a Combat Controller. Enrolled, active, and participating.
I can’t believe it. I’m a member of the Special Forces… in training. Sort of.
Well, I’m standing here in this field, anyway.
My first Air Traffic Control School class was also just this morning. Up at 5:00am (again), formed up on the quad behind the barracks by 5:30, then marching in a big class formation, in the dark, following the squadron’s banners, out across the old runway (now closed and used as a parade ground) to the other side of the unused flightline, where its renovated hangars awaited us, bathed in a crossfire of floodlights. This schedule drops us off outside the ATC School hangar with about ten or fifteen minutes left to spare before the start of classes at 6:00. Then it’s flat-out nose-to-the-grindstone for the next six hours—with a ten-minute break every hour, on the hour—until noon. And at that point, the academic part of the day is done. For us morning guys anyway. The afternoon classes march in just as we’re forming up to march out.
On our way back to the barracks, we pass in review before a small cabal of colonels and majors (the commanders of the various schools and barracks squadrons) who are waiting for us at a jury-rigged set of aluminum bleachers, halfway out in the middle of that abandoned flightline. We never break stride though—just an “eyes left” or two as we pass beneath their watchful gaze—then we’re off the flightline and clomping to a stop outside our respective barracks, all within fifteen minutes of being released from school. And that’s our day! That’s everything.
The rest of the afternoon and evening are ours to do with as we please—five days a week, Saturdays and Sundays off, just like every other job in the world—for the next five months.
For everybody in my class, that is, except me.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon now, starting at 2:00 (giving me just enough time to shuck my uniform, throw some food down my neck, then walk it off), I get to spend the hottest two or three hours of the day after school trying to keep up with these macho CCW (that’s “Combat Control Wannabe”) animals, while they kill themselves just trying to be such macho CCW animals.
And boy, it sure doesn’t take long for those old second thoughts to kick in.

There’s not a whole lot of “instruction” involved with this program. It’s all just sort of listen up and DO! Sgt. Beaudry stands before us, in the same white running/swimming shorts that the rest of us are wearing—along with the same OD green T-shirt, emblazoned with the same Combat Control “flash” right in the middle of the chest, and of course, the lovely (and matching) black combat boots—calling out the names of the different exercises (few of which I actually recognize), then leading us through them, rep by hard-driving rep. And despite his age, he seems to possess the stamina of a Clydesdale.
Obviously, as recent history has proven, that is not my strongest suit.
It only takes a rep or two, each time, to catch on to the choreography of the exercises. But the group’s pace is brutal, they seldom do less than fifty reps of anything, and I haven’t done anything this strenuously physical in, well, my life. So I’m constantly behind and stumbling to catch up, as well as making an awful lot of gasping, wheezing sounds, dumping enough sweat to blind myself, shower my neighbors, and kill the grass, and frequently having to sway to a stop and brace my hands on my knees, just to keep from toppling over.
We’re in the middle of the old flightline’s grassy infield, the same abandoned flightline that we all marched across to school this morning. So there’s a fairly regular flow of foot traffic passing by us as we work out, occasionally pausing to watch, but always enjoying a chuckle or two at our expense. And against the backdrop of this team’s well-drilled energy and discipline, I stand out like an open fly on an orchestra conductor’s tuxedo.
Surprisingly though, the rest of the guys in the formation are very supportive, constantly reassuring me that they all had a First Day too. For it is the nature of this Phase I program to just keep roaring along at full speed, regardless of who filters in or filters out along the way. It’s up to the individual to hit the ground running and do his best just to keep up.
Apparently though, Phase I Combat Control training does not actually have anything to do with Combat Control itself, except in name. It is merely an extreme physical improvement program, a ferocious “buffing-up” course designed to prepare each candidate for the far greater rigors that they’ll have to face in each of the “real” Combat Control schools to follow. And, while I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not—straining and beating myself up this much, just to ready myself for an even more punishing regime in the months and years to come—there’s still something kinda’ cool about the idea of being counted among the ranks of people who can do this sort of thing.
Fortunately, the atmosphere is unexpectedly casual and light. For though the group responds to Sgt. Beaudry’s every spoken word with an energetic zeal and a military precision that would make a grown T.I. weep for the sheer joy of it, the rest of the time these guys are just a bunch of grab-ass clowns. And though I am obviously the newest kid on the block here, I am not the only one having a hard time keeping up. Those that have been at this for a while, yet are still having to toil so hard just to fall further and further behind, are constantly hounded—in a lighthearted way—about their more feminine physical attributes, or their geriatric tempo, or their endearingly childlike coordination. But invariably, as the last most grueling reps of each exercise are counted off, the harassment turns to encouragement, the laughter to shouted motivation.
“Come on! One more, ya’ big wuss! ONE MORE! You can do it! Push it! PUSH IT! That’s it! Come on! There it is! You got it! YOU GOT IT! Come on! YEHHH! Now, ONE MORE, ya’ big screamin’ fairy!”
And I like that.
I find that I respond well to that. I find that, astonishingly enough, I really do have one more, two more, sometimes three, four and five more left in me, even after I’ve already been reduced to a sweat-drenched bag of boneless, breathless meat, without the strength to even hang on to the chin-up bar any more, much less pull myself back up to it. And that is strangely exciting to me.
Today also marks the first time I’ve ever done sit-ups with a telephone pole on my chest. Well, mine, and the chests of seven or eight other guys as well. And, as it turns out, it ain’t as bad as it looks. Individually, you’re only supporting about an eighth of its weight—and there’s always someone in the line with a bigger chest than you, whose massive pecs have mostly lifted the pole off you anyway—and if you’re sneaky about it, you can roll that weight down your chest with each rep, and it’ll actually pull you up into a sitting position. Still, this dramatic display of sheer strength, willpower, teamwork, and of course, penis size, really sets the female heart aflutter. I can tell from all the laughing and pointing coming from the nearby parade route.
Apparently, based on the way my fellow CCWs respond to all the hooting and heckling, here in the South, the phrase “what a bunch of assholes” is actually an indication of hero worship.
Once again though, the terminal effort for me is the damned running.
After forty-five minutes to an hour of furious pushing and pulling and pumping, twisting and bending and squatting, they cap off the festivities with a three-mile run! I almost blew out a spleen and three kidneys back at Lackland just trying to trot off a mile-and-a-half! And that was during the last of a Texas winter. This is the beginning of a Gulf Coast summer!
Clearly, to keep up with these guys, I’m going to need to invest in a golf cart or something.
Granted, this run isn’t for time—it’s for endurance—which means a more even pace, somewhat smaller steps than my desperate run for the roses back at Lackland, and a greater concentration on rhythm over speed. To that end, the run is in formation, in step, and propelled by all the lewd chants and lascivious song lyrics that Sgt. Beaudry can recite—which is quite a vast treasure trove, by the way—a running singalong in which we all must participate.
Oh yeah… singing. That’ll help me control my rampant breathing.
Our route begins with a nearly mile-long straightaway, chugging down the sidewalk that edges the base’s perimeter road—a tall, concertina-topped fenceline separating us from a two-laned highway and the deep jungles of the bayou to our left, with the back side of the barracks compound on our right—until it breaks out of the populated areas, and meanders around the end of the active runway, still hugging that perimeter fence. The mile-and-a-half mark—the halfway-point turnaround for a three mile run—is the parking lot of a lonely little building, nestled in its own little oasis of trees, out in the vast empty grassland that flanks the runway. Longer runs involve turnarounds on the other side of the runway apparently, at points, which, from here, look like dots on the Canadian border.
I am instantly depressed. My inaugural run with the group is along their shortest roundtrip course—their shortest—and I’m folding up like Benny Hill’s deckchair before we’ve even tromped past the Airman’s Club annex. I coughed up both lungs within only three blocks of the exercise field, and now I’ve got a stitch the size of a TV remote embedded in my ribcage, my knees have turned to chewing gum, and my ass just decided it’s nappy time.
I weave and totter out of the pack, allowing the rest of the guys to storm up the sidewalk without me. I still follow them, exhibiting my dedication and willpower by lurching along in their wake like a bad actor dragging out his big death scene. Only I’m not acting.
Jesus! I volunteered to do this to myself THREE AFTERNOONS A WEEK?!! What the hell was I thinking?
And this is just Phase I, just the prep course for the rougher shit that will follow… and the even rougher shit that will follow that… and the downright brutal ass-kicking that’ll follow that.
I’m staggering along on liquid legs, lungs spasming in my chest, leaving a sweat-slick behind me that looks like a huge wet snake has been following me down the sidewalk all the way from the pool, and I’m wondering where’s the up-side here? Even looking for the long-term benefits, what could the pot of gold possibly look like at the end of this bloody rainbow? How—when—will this backbreaking uphill climb ever level out? Based on what Sgt. Beaudry’s been saying, it sounds like the reward for all this superhuman effort is just more of the same! Or worse!
I saunter weakly past the last of the buildings in the barracks compound, hands on hips, chest still heaving. In the distance, probably a quarter of a mile ahead of me, I can see Beaudry leading his merry band of lunatics into that little oasis parking lot—the halfway point—then trotting them through a tight turnaround, and getting them churning back towards me again.
Here we go.
I shake my legs out. I do some shoulder rotations. I roll my head around its gimbals, making sure that every last vibe I’m giving off fairly screams I’m ready! Put me in, coach! And as the narrow two-line column tramps past me again, I swing in behind them, synchronize my steps with theirs, and join them for the last mile or so of the run.
Well, most of it, anyway. Within only a few blocks, my breathing has flown out of control again, and somehow my boots have quadrupled in weight. I’m trying my best not to sound as utterly obliterated as I feel, but I have a feeling that all the gasping and whimpering, combined with the melodramatic clutching of my chest—or at least the white-hot stitch that’s swelling under my ribs—is giving me away.
I’m just starting to fade back from the pack again, when the old flightline hoves into view and manages to inspire a couple dozen more slogging steps out of me. This is just enough to keep me at pace with the others until Sgt. Beaudry finally reins us all in at the edge of the field, and allows everyone to walk off the remaining distance to the exercise area.
Breathless conversation kicks right in, followed, in short order, by the usual insults and humorous deprecations, and then the inevitable grab-ass. For obvious reasons, I do not feel a part of this. I’m not only the New Guy here, but I’m the Weak Link as well, the weenie that can’t keep up with the Rest of the Guys on a mere three-mile run.
As a disheveled group though, we amble back into the infield, and reform into our original exercise ranks. There, Sgt. Beaudry—who’s hardly darkened the armpits of his T-shirt for all his exertions—looks over his motley crew from behind those dark lenses, nods his head approvingly, dispenses a token admonition of “good job, everybody,” then releases us for the day.
I couldn’t see his eyes, but clearly he wasn’t looking at me when he said that.
And that’s it—just the first of sixty such ball-busting afternoons that will befall me over the next twenty weeks while I’m attending ATC School here at Keesler. Fifty-nine more days just like this one, where I’ll finish up feeling like I barely escaped being beaten to death in a riot, only to be creamed by a bus as I limp away from the scene. Because I gotta’ tell you, right now I am wasted. I am one wrung-out, strung-out, sorry-assed bastard. I look like a big wet dog that just got stuffed through the cat door—the hard way. And this is what I get to look forward to every other weekday for the next five months?!
What the hell is wrong with me? What’s the freakin’ point? All this, just to get a little more bang for my martial buck? Just to feel more like I joined the “real” military instead of a costumed day job? Or is it just some kind of “guy thing?” A need to feel like I can run with the big dogs, commune with the heroic elite, and be the envy of all my friends back home.
Or maybe it’s just one of those penis-size things again.
No, I wrote that one off a long time ago.
Well, whatever it is, it ain’t enough. This was about as fun as “First Shower Day” in prison. And I don’t need to do it twice to know that I ought to just leave the soap where I dropped it.
I’m limping off the field, mulling over alternative ways to slither out of this little impulse-commitment of mine, when a couple of the guys—a big burly bow-legged bastard named Rogers, and a squirrelly little foul-mouthed hotshot named Mark Horn—trot up to me as blithe and winded as if they’d just made a dash from the car in the rain.
“Hey, you looked pretty good out there today, Airman Stipp,” says Rogers.
I throw all my remaining energy into the nearly overwhelming task of turning my dripping head toward him. Then I squint at him “real suspicious-like,” as if he’d just suggested that we share a bed tonight.
“What?”
“Fuckin’-A, man,” says Horn, “Not a bad first day at all.”
I shake my head, and smear about a gallon-and-a-half of sweat off my brow and out of my eye sockets. “You must not have been paying attention, guys. I was the one you had to bring back in a bucket. Remember?”
They both chuckle at that.
“Nah, man. The first day kicks everybody’s ass. This is a bitch of a routine to step into cold. You actually did better than most.”
I burn my last erg of energy just lifting a single eyebrow in disbelief.
Horn keeps talking. “Hell, you did better than a couple of those guys out there are still doing after being at this for a couple of months now.”
Funny, I didn’t see anybody else expiring on the roadside back there with me. I snort, and mop some more sweat off my face with my saturated T-shirt.
“No, man, really,” Horn insists, “You kept up pretty good. But the main thing now is to keep on going. Just stick with it. It’ll get better.”
I stifle the urge to ask “why,” and instead ask, “How?”
“Well, you gotta’ give it at least a couple of weeks. I mean, this first week’s going to be hell, not only ‘cause everything’s new, and strange, and tough as a cast iron bitch, but because, starting tomorrow, just about every muscle in your body is going to be so damned soooooooore.”
They both erupt with malevolent laughter.
“You gonna’ be one big walkin’ cramp, bud,” adds Rogers. And the laughter escalates.
Oh, wonderful. I hadn’t thought about the after-effects.
“Yeh, you may wanna’ come out here tomorrow, on your own, and do a few stretchers or something, man. Maybe run a little.”
“Do a couple laps in the pool.”
“Yeh, something like that.”
“‘Cause, you think you feel like shit now—wait’ll you try starting that routine with your whole body in knots and locked up solid.”
“Yeh. Like this…” And Horn curls his fingers into claws, hunches his back, shrinks his stride into a limping, pigeon-toed scuffle, and twists his head to the side, looking like Quasimodo at an arthritic eighty years of age. Rogers is tossed helplessly into fits of laughter again, and this time, I am carried along with him.
The three of us stagger off the field then, giggling like loons.
All right. I’ll give it two more weeks.

2
SECOND COMING

First big road trip in Larry Connors’ much-ballyhooed ’63 Camaro.
He was smart enough to take some of that advance leave they were trying so hard to sell us back on our first day of in-processing. Took it and ran home, he did. Soaked up three days of normalcy, then drove his beloved “ride” back here to Keesler.
I’m not sure what all the hoopla was about though. It’s pretty much just an old “plain brown wrapper” Camaro, painted basic white, with blackwall tires and an old-smelling cracked leather interior, garnished with a typical male’s quota of floor trash. It’s also sans air conditioning, which means we get to cruise through the warm wet air of Biloxi with the windows rolled down.
No, we haven’t quite captured the freewheeling spirit of a “gad about town with the top down,” but before we’ve even gotten off base, I’m feeling just as jet-blasted as I would have in a real convertible.
It’s only our second Saturday since the school schedule kicked into gear, and we’re spending it by taking off to catch the opening day matinee of this new movie called “Star Wars.” Time magazine had a big cover story article on it in last week’s issue. Made it sound like the Second Coming itself, like some kind of once-in-a-lifetime historical event. Well, how do you not go see something like that?
So the four of us—Larry Connors, Mike “Dumbass,” Gene Podulka and myself—are all packed into this old car of Larry’s, chasing the roar of its four-barrel carb out onto the coastal highway and down the shore to Gulfport, where the movie’s showing at the Edgewater Mall theater.

As both Sergeants Horn and Rogers had predicted after my first day of Phase I PT though, every muscle in my body was in full seizure by the next morning. I looked like I still had all the hangers in my clothes, along with a couple of broom handles shoved down my pant legs as I “marched” to school that following day. And I was the only one in the formation making “ah, oo, eech, ouch, urf” noises as we crossed the old flightline. I tried their suggestion about doing some kind of stretchers during my interim off-hours, but by that next PT afternoon, I was still a very stiff and very tender little rookie.
Fortunately, about halfway through the opening calisthenics, I noticed that I was no longer mincing and grunting like a woman in labor. The punishing regimen had actually loosened me up again. I was actually feeling pretty danged good, truth be told. I still couldn’t finish the run, but it was good to feel the pain retreat under the renewed onslaught. And, if for no other reason than that, I was beginning to see some value in continuing the program.
Yesterday—our second Friday since the school started—marked the end of the two-week period I’d mentally agreed to stick with it. And, well… I got through it, alive, upright, and with my sense of humor intact. And I’m not sore today. Every arm, leg, and ass muscle in my body feels, what? Tired? Weak? No, more like “tested.” The same sort of wiped-out—but rewarding—exhaustion that a quarterback must feel after a particularly trying game. But I’m not sore.
I guess that means I’ve gotten over the program’s first little hurdle then. I can get through an entire day’s work-out now, without stopping or falling too far behind the others—except on those damned runs—and that makes me feel good. Even proud. But most importantly, I’m seeing progress. I can feel the improvement every day. I’m slowly but surely catching up with some pretty bad-assed dudes, physically speaking, and that’s something worth pursuing. Worth continuing.
So let’s just call this movie a reward—a little “present” to myself.