so hopefully you read the first installment of WIADHB and enjoyed it. I think I may continue on with the story. It may be a little cathartic for me and a little revealing to you all as to what makes DHB tick.
I remember the first day of boot camp, actually the first evening really. It was the evening of May 3rd and we had arrived at Great Lakes, Il. Looking back, I was a father for all of 72 hours and here I was, standing in line if I remember correcty at DEPS in Philly just seconds earlier. Everything had moved so quickly. I remember fragments of that day. I remember flying from Philly to Chicago with the largest black guy I had ever met, blakely. The guy was a monster. Blakely I would guess was 6’5″ and I’d guess about 225/250 at age 18. He was from Philly and he was a helpless teddy Bear. For the sake of trying to draw a parallel I laugh when I think of Blakely being Bubba and me being Forest, YES F’ing forest gump :). I don’t know how we became friends, but I befriended Blakely that day and many of the other black guys in my company over the course of the next 9 weeks. Truth be told, I had a harder time getting along with the white guys but that is another story
So what I remember most about boot camp was that it was hard. It was awful and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I hated being bossed around by fucking idiots that were smarter than me because they were higher in rank. It’s an awful system and I loathed every day. I really felt sorry for Blakely. The guy was an easy target. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else and man did he pay for it. The guy could do nothing right. The only thing that I think saved him was it was under Clinton’s “kinder, gentler military” otherwise the Petty Officers would have beat the ever loving shit out of him a dozen or so times. You could see it in their eyes they regretted not getting a piece of him.
So, what I also remember was that for the first 5 weeks I had NO communication with my fiance/mother. I was alone, trying like hell to make it out of Boot Camp. I was terrified every day of failing out. There was no freaking way I was going to fail this. I had already struggled through highschool. But physically, physically the last thing I was going to do was fail. I had always liked to think of myself as strong and tough. I know that sometimes mentally I may have not been as smart as the guy Aceing every test, but when it came to holding my own phsically, I was more than capable. I was not meant for failing something like this. A physical challenge. I was meant to beat boot camp. I didn’t realize that bootcamp required a physical toughness and an intelectual toughness. Once I recognized the mental part of it, it was that which awakened me to so many other hypocrisies in life and had a great deal to do with who I became, that I will one day expound upon too. For now though I will stick to Boot Camp.
Then I understood it mentally. I got what they were trying to do to me. They were trying to BREAK me. Every fucking day it was me against them. Their “we know best” mentality. I am not saying I was right in this thinking, I’m just saying it is what motivated me. It was what made me succeed. I hated the man. I hated it. I hated it. I will say it again. I hated it. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being oppressed and bossed around to the point that I had to shit on command. I hated it. I can hear some of you already, “it’s what you signed up for”. Yes it was, I signed up for daughter and her mother. I didn’t do it because I wanted to. I did it because I had to if I wanted a better life for all of us.
Blakely, he didn’t have it mentally. A few other guys didn’t have it mentally. And if they had had a gun, they wouldn’t have made it out alive. The one guy whose name escapes, Paul someone, had forearms as thick as tree stumps. They were almost freakish, they were literally like Popeye arms. One day, we came to find out that he attempted suicide, he couldn’t handle it. Physically, it was no problem, but mentally he couldn’t hang. Even though it was Navy bootcamp, the mental aspect of any bootcamp is what seperates the people that can pass from the ones that fail.
Every day I did what I had to do to get through. At AA they talk about one day at a time, one minute at a time. Well mentally and physically, I had to tell myself it will be fine, just do this next, just do it, and every minute that went by was another minute closer I got to achieving something only MEN would be able to do. That my father, my stepfather, my grandfather and only a few other people I knew could say they had done. I did all this, so I would come home having accomplished something in my life for my daughter. So, 20, 30, 40 years from that day I left Cleveland Ave by St. Elizabeths at 4 am with my fiance and daughter sleeping soundly on the sofa bed of her parents house, I would be on my way to gaining a better life for me, my fiance and my family.