Second Paper

“So, what brings you here today? What is it that you would like to do in the army?” the recruiter said. My mother had finally convinced me to go stop by the recruiting office after work that day. For many years she had been telling me about women that she knew who had joined the military and how it had changed their lives dramatically for the better, how it had made them confident and financially independent.

I didn’t know what to expect walking into the office that day. What I did know was this, I didn’t want to spend my entire life in the town that I grew up in. a place where everyone I knew was having children and working in dead end jobs. I wanted to travel, to see things outside of my comfortable existence in the Pacific Northwest. I guess that I wanted to have stories to tell to my children one day, should I decide to have any. What I would learn was that everything takes time in the military, and nothing is for certain until it is. It would be many months, filling out forms, documenting every move that I made as an adult, and getting myself physically prepared for the journey I was about to embark on.

It would have been very easy for me to stay in Spokane; my life had become very predictable. Going out to the local bar was like a mini high school reunion of sorts. I lived in a small cottage in the art district, close enough to downtown that I only drove to work or out of boredom. You could stand at the end of the driveway and watch the local musicians skateboard by. But I had always thought of my hometown a little like a black hole, no one got out for good. We had graduated less than ten years ago and yet very few of us were still kid-less, employed, and didn’t live with Mom and Dad. I knew I needed to get out before I ended up with five kids and a part-time job at Wal-Mart.

I had a strange approach to get ready for basic training. I wasn’t much of a runner and I knew that that was a big part of what would be a challenge for me, so I joined a running group. The Flying Irish meet every Thursday at five pm outside O’Doherty’s Irish Pub in Spokane. They take a three to four mile tour of downtown and then meet up at the pub for half price pints until closing. The fact that some of the guys from the Gonzaga soccer team were a part of the group was all the motivation I needed to show up every week and earn my shirt. Once you ran with the group six times you earned your shirt by climbing up onto the bar and telling an Irish joke. As for altering my diet, I just avoided all weekend movie marathons involving Johnny Depp and Tillamook Ice cream. Before I knew it the four months had passed and it was time to pack up my things and get the heck out.

I picked up Isabella at school and drove to Coeur d’Alene for my “Last Hurrah” lunch at The Beacon. I had to check into the hotel by five pm that afternoon; I was scheduled to leave on a plane in less than 48 hours for basic training at Ft Jackson, South Carolina. But for the next few hours, I was going to enjoy my Jamaican Jerk Salmon Sandwich and soak up all the fountain root beer and professional bull riding that bar had to offer, I was in Idaho after all.

I packed everything on the required list that my recruiter had given me, unaware that most of these items would be packed away for the duration of basic training because they didn’t want us getting too comfortable. Two full size towels, three sports bras, five pairs of travel underwear (made to be hand washed and air dried, even in super humid climates). The biggest bottle of shampoo and conditioner I could find, two bars of Irish Spring and a hand knit washcloth that I had made myself and one tube of lipgloss. I wrapped each item in a plastic bag and sadly had to check it at the airport due to the presence of shampoo. It was the one “luxury” I was allowing myself, and probably the only thing that saved me from having a q-tip for hair in the 100 percent humidity.

In a way, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t know what was in store for me. It would take fourteen hours and three planes zigzagging across the country before we would arrive in Columbia, South Carolina to board a charter bus that would drive us to post. Once we arrived at the gate, a large, blonde Hulk look-alike, with no neck, boarded our bus and ordered us to take out our military identification before we could enter. Most of us just looked at each other and wondered whether we really wanted to anymore, or if there was another option.

Unfortunately he allowed us to pass, and the charter bus drove us through the maze of windy roads in the dark, finally stopping at one of the many beige buildings that all looked alike. A tall drill sergeant boarded and ordered us off the bus immediately. I nearly fell getting down the steps, and struggling with my carry-on bag to join the others in formation. It was after eleven o’clock and it would be many hours before we would see the barracks. We had huge stacks of in processing paperwork to do and they would bring us to the chow hall to eat at two am, a sad introduction to the food that awaited us. Then it was to CIF to be sized for pt uniforms that we would wear until we were issued our ACUs. At four am, we were finally allowed to enter the barracks that would be our temporary residence for the next nine days until the drill sergeants from our company would come to pick us up.

The joke amongst the thirty or so of the girls that I was with at reception was that they were fattening us up to bring to slaughter, because all we did was get up at 4 am and take roll, go to breakfast and return to “clean the barracks” aka station someone in the hallway and the rest of us would sleep until a more reasonable hour and or write letters home. Then take roll before lunch and the same before dinner. I was still attempting to sleep off the jetlag that I was suffering from, so I slept most of the time. It was probably for the best, because there wouldn’t be much time for that soon.

The one thing that we did accomplish that week was a trip to the “Reception PX”. The special thing about this one was that there was no contraband available, no soda, candy or snacks. Only digital camouflage items, black spandex and cotton granny panties obviously mismarked bikini cut. What about this was bikini cut? I could have tucked the top into the massive sports bra that I would take to wearing two of in order to provide some support. When we returned to our quarters to store our purchases, I watched the other girls start marking their items with their name like in summer camp, and wondered who would want more of this crap?

On Sunday morning we brought all of our possessions downstairs along with all of our issued clothing and pretty calmly loaded onto the white school busses that would bring us the company on the other side of post. The ride over was eerily quiet. DS Carr was stationed on our bus, but we were lucky, and we didn’t know what we were in for. He was stoic; most of us were convinced that he was catatonic.

A soon as we pulled up in front of the “company area”, a group of portable classrooms surrounded by deep gravel pits, they pounced. At least three drill sergeants jumped onto the bus and were screaming commands all at once. It was chaos, you couldn’t discern one voice from the next and I just kept my head down and followed the herd in front of me and tried to block it out. I stumbled in the rocks and made my way toward the covered area where they were dividing us into platoons. I couldn’t understand the number that they gave me, so I just went to the group that the sole female drill sergeant was standing with. Boy was that a bad decision.

We had to stand with our bags over our heads for what seemed like forever, but was probably only a couple of minutes. One girl collapsed on top of her bag, pretending to pass out. But all that got her was a few quick slaps in the face “to revive her”. She would be one of the first to become a “Sick Call Ranger” and feign illness to get out of training, which in turn just gets you chaptered out via a medical discharge or incompetence, without the shiny bonus check the rest of us were here for.

Once we were allowed to go inside, the females were separated and instructed to dump out our bags. Of the items I was instructed to purchase and bring with me I was only able to keep the travel undies I was wearing along with the shampoo and conditioner I had packed (and my hair thanks them). Everything else was packed up in our personal bags and stored behind a locked door in the female restroom. We were organized alphabetically and assigned to our bunks and corresponding lockers. I was trying to be nice when I let my bunkmate take the bottom bunk, despite the fact that I am 5’1” on a good day. I spent the next ten weeks silently cursing that decision every time I nearly face planted on the tile floor.

Over the next few weeks the shock of what I had done wore off and I began to feel homesick. At home I don’t go four days without talking to my mother, how was I going to go ten weeks? The one thing that made me feel better, closer to home was writing letters. I hand wrote at least two pages directed by the red lens on my flashlight. I wrote about everything, my bunkmate and her neurosis (holding it and not going #2 for weeks), the girls who refused to bathe, and who was in trouble. I was probably the only one in our company who wore out a bulb in their army issue flashlight from overuse. But mostly I just wrote about what I missed about home, what I knew I was missing; my twin nephews, then just eight months old were learning to walk, my two year old niece started to talk or that I wouldn’t be there for the birth of the nephew that my sister had just announced she was having. It helped that I received a few funny letters from my family with pictures of everyone. I started a list of food that I was craving, mostly fresh vegetables and baked goods from the Greek Festival or just anything that hadn’t been fried and/or removed from a gigantic aluminum can.

Despite the fact the heat and humidity that comes with summers in South Carolina, the males never ceased to believe that they were still attractive. Nothing could dampen their spirits or make them aware of the gigantic sunburned whitehead that was pulsating at my eye level. I just kept my mouth shut and tried to keep out of sight. It turned out that our female drill sergeant happened to be a medic with a bit of a sadistic side and pushed those of us who were potentially up for that job so that she could decide whether we were up for it. If not, you weren’t going to leave Ft Jackson.

I am not physically coordinated, so doing choreographed movement was something that drew a fair amount of unwanted attention my way. The last few weeks I spent most of the day just praying for the day to be over so that I could go to bed and mark that day off the calendar. DS Burt took to threatening a size 14 gauge needle IV to anyone who passed out from dehydration (Note: most IVs that are preformed in this situation are given with a 20 g needle, a much thinner gauge that is easier to insert into veins that have shrunk due to lack of fluids.)

One of the few times I saw my cell phone at basic was on Mother’s Day. I happened to call home during our family party and they passed around the phone so I got to talk to everyone. My mother had passed around some of the letters that I had written home and we joked about the raspberries taking over the garden at home and my impending graduation. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room that afternoon. Somehow these moments were forgiven and we never teased each other for getting teary eyed on the phone with loved ones. Our collective longing to be home with our families seemed to edit it from memory.

But before I knew it, those long days were over, and I was at rehearsal for graduation on the one patch of grass that was well maintained on post. Sixteen of us, all between 4’11” and 5’3” made up the front row in formation and stood for what seemed like hours in the early morning sun. Our drill sergeant had warned us not to pass out there on the field, and with that the one joke I uttered to him during the entire ten weeks escaped. “Don’t worry. If I fall, I’m too short to hit anyone on the way down.” I think that was the only time I saw him laugh that week.

It took me two trips to get all of my baggage to the bus stop that would take us away, but I was determined to leave. We sat in the 110 degree “breezeway” for three hours waiting for the briefing that we needed before boarding the plane to Ft Sam Houston. Once they did let us inside, it was just to hand out our graduation packets and shove us on a charter bus to the tarmac and board a chartered plane heading directly to the San Antonio airport in which there was another chartered bus heading directly for reception at Ft Sam.

Luckily when we arrived, the former drill sergeant that was in charge, Sgt Wilson, was too tired to yell, it was a nice change. The forty or so people I had travelled with from Ft Jackson had all been female, save one. So when we showed up at G Company, it was quite a surprise to see all males. We had all been told that medics are primarily women and had expected this time to be more estrogen filled than basic, we were out-numbered 5:1.The next six months would be a blur of long days starting at four am and ending long after the last light was shut off in the barracks. The biggest change was that I actually talked to people at AIT and just avoided trouble, which was really the only time we had to talk to the platoon sergeants in charge of us.

Morning formation was at five am, followed by an alternating schedule of either a three mile run or muscle failure; when we would essentially do as many push-ups and sit-ups as we could in order to cause muscle failure combined with some stretching and cardio. Breakfast was at 6:30 and there was barely enough time to take a shower and change before class at eight am. The first eight weeks our classes were very much like a high school anatomy class, where in we studied in order to take the NREMT test, which qualifies you to be an EMT- Basic. What they don’t tell you is that in the civilian world, that qualifies you to drive the truck and yell “Breathe!” when you aren’t giving oxygen, because that is all you are allowed.

The group I hung out with that summer had a few things in common; we loved to do anything that was free, had an eye for adventure and a taste for Texan beer. Oh… and we made friends with the local bartenders, that didn’t hurt. It was 100 degrees or warmer for over 100 days that summer, so what better place to spend as much of it as possible in water parks and the air-conditioned basement bars of downtown San Antonio sipping pina coladas and watching college football? It was me and Whitney and a rotating cast of guys from our company who could hold their liquor and liked to “ be the gentleman” and pay at least partial cab fare. Now that we’ve graduated, we are scattered around the country and the world. But we have a lot of cool pictures and common stories. Some of these even ended up on video and I’m glad most of it has stayed off of YouTube so far. I can always count on them to fill in the blanks of my memories of that summer.

So as I step out onto the porch in the morning and the damp wind envelops me, I am always surprised to find myself in the city, and not surrounded by dirt paths and tall pine trees that line the shore. It smells just like the lake that I spent my summers at as a child, the air filled with the clean scent that comes after a heavy rain, wild roses and rhododendrons in bloom and the sweet smell of decay. Everything about my daily life has changed and yet I feel drawn to things that remind me of home. I bake cakes that my grandmother baked, knit hats for the family members that I rarely see but talk to nearly every day, and I tend to the vegetable plants on the porch.