Chapter One: "Reception"

“What the hell are you looking at?” was the first question I heard from a drill sergeant at basic training, and it was the first of many to come over the next eight weeks.  My eyes snapped away from the vehicle-like contraption ahead of me and squarely into the eyes of my new drill sergeant.  I didn’t have a good answer for his question, this man in the funny brown hat, so I stood there and mumbled a harmless, “Nothing.”  Wrong answer!   I felt the strong grip of his hand pulling me by the wrist, and I shuffled forward to avoid further eye contact, hoping he would not recognize me later.  I was at army basic training, and the impact had not yet set in.

I moved to join a growing crowd of other recruits near a vehicle where a second drill sergeant shouted above the roar of a sputtering diesel engine.  We needed to go from the Ft. Dix, New Jersey Greyhound Bus station to the post Reception Station, but it was too far to walk.  That’s when a drill sergeant yelled at us to board the curious contraption that soon became known as the “cattle car.” 

Despite our loud, intimidating drill sergeants, the reception process was benign, but I could feel tension in the air all around me.  The clouds that had rolled into central New Jersey that morning were humid and ominous, and I felt uneasy about my situation.  Ft Dix did not look very promising either, and I got the sense that I had entered a controlled military environment, very controlled.  It had a sterile feeling, something between a south-central Los Angeles hospital and a downtown Detroit Department of Motor Vehicles office.  Like the DMV, everything looked official, but I could tell that no one really cared about my presence among a growing mob.  The only person who had noticed me up to now was a drill sergeant who had the name “Grayling” embroidered on his camouflage top, and he was the one who had already yelled at me.  I looked ahead at the guys climbing into our cattle car and it hit me, we were in the US Army and past the point of no return.  A storm-ridden horizon full of intrusiveness began to sink the simple rowboat that was my confidence.  The enlistment contracts had been signed, swearing in ceremony completed, tearful goodbyes made, and I was about to get my official reception to army basic training.

I looked at the cattle car and winced. “You’re kidding!” I thought.  “We’re riding in that contraption?”  Luckily those words were not audible because more sets of attentive drill sergeant ears and eyes began to surround us.  Our cattle car’s structure was the transportation equivalent of an ocean-going shipping container, with plenty of rusty dents as evidence.  The days of hauling textiles, automobiles, and Ikea furniture were over for this rust bucket, which had been demoted to moving people around on land.  In order to transport us, however, several modifications had been made to ensure our complete discomfort.  First, tiny windows had been installed all around and a doorway placed into the side of the container.  The windows were pointless because they were so scratched and dull we could barely see out of them.  Their presence merely taunted us with what lurked outside.  Three-inch holes that had been cut into the metal frame were the only luxury provided, giving us just enough fresh air to breathe to ensure our consciousness during the passage.

We blindly followed orders and filed one by one through a hole that had been cut by a blowtorch operator who was evidently paid for speed instead of quality.  I half expected to see torn metal around the doorframe, the kind of hazard imposed by a freshly opened tuna can.  Apparently, the army believed that this shipping-container-death-trap-from-hell was the perfect vehicle for hauling us around Ft Dix. 

In addition to the nausea that had sworn an oath of service in the pit of my stomach, anxiety had overtaken my mind.  Contemplating the next eight weeks I would have to endure in order to survive basic training almost made me dizzy, and I wondered how I had gotten here.  Then I remembered the slick, fast-talking recruiter who promised I would see the world in glamorous style.  Jackass.

I thought about what other military jerks I might find in the army.  Somewhere in the world of disgruntled transportation officers, there was a guy, obviously mad about his assignment to…I don’t know…Ft Nowhere, Oklahoma, who came up with the idea to bolt shipping containers to 1972 International truck chassis and play the evil game: “Wheel of Unfortunate Recruits.”  I was not amused with his invention, which trapped me into an experiment that was certainly incapable of passing a J.D. Power & Associates safety test.  Who was the guy who came up with this idea?

You know the people I’m talking about; everybody knows at least one.  Civilians usually call this person “boss” or “Crazy Uncle Bill.”  Working late in the garage, they stumble upon a career-advancing development: “Oh, this device will work most efficiently as an anesthetic-free molar extraction tool; let’s build thousands and test them on recruits!”

Another design modification overlooked by the National Transportation Safety Board was the absence of seats on our “Midnight Express,” or any poles to grasp.  To accommodate this dilemma of physics, which can be summed up by the expression, “Maybe you can fit ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag,” Drill Sergeant Grayling proposed a graceful solution for us “ladies.”  He shoved our entire compliment of one hundred and twenty recruits into a space approximately seven feet wide and twenty feet long, problem solved.  One-by-one, he pushed us each through the door so we would only have to make one trip to the reception station

 The voice in my head sarcastically shouted out: “E Company, Second Sardine Battalion, reporting for duty, sir!”  

Inside the cattle car I had the personal space of just over, um, one square foot.  We were packed in so tight that there was no room for me to fall down and hit my head.  Poles to hang on to, common on a city bus or a subway, would only have taken up more space, and we might not have fit everyone in on one trip if they had been present.  I couldn’t understand my dizziness until someone said they thought they had vertigo.  That’s what I was feeling too…yeah, vertigo!  It couldn’t be anything else, in my expert medical opinion.  Diesel fumes and the body odor of dozens of other nervous first-day army recruits made me wonder if perhaps there was some way out of this desperate situation.  Was falling down and hitting my head somehow an option?  Probably not, given our limited space. 

In my dizzied state, I looked around and there we were, guys from all over the country who were literally pushed into the cattle car suddenly felt all alone…but all together.  There were young men who grew up tough in New York City, not Manhattan or Long Island, but Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.  Some were guys from Philadelphia and Newark, who had recently lived at the top of the food chain as high school seniors.  Some had been bullies who had, through tenure alone, earned the right to turn their class rings stone side down to slap the heads of new incoming “maggot” freshman.  Other guys had always been on the receiving end of that high school humiliation and had sought out the army to develop strength and earn respect.  They looked forward to returning home in their new Class-A uniforms to proudly show everyone that they had become something good.  They came from places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Poughkeepsie, New York.  Basic training would be the great equalizer for the meek since they would finally be able to stand toe-to-toe with bullies and be respected.  The benefits of basic training went even further, giving them confidence and a fulfilling career, while their high school enemies worked in auto repair shops and shipyards along the coast.  Although nervous, they felt they were aspiring to something noble and rewarding. 

Just days before enlisting, we had gone out of our way not to sit too close to anyone on the subway or had headed straight for the back of the bus to avoid contact with other passengers.  Now, in the cattle car, we stood together with no fewer than four strangers making direct physical contact on all sides of our bodies.  I watched the Greyhound bus fade out of sight through a greasy side window of the vehicle, and my mind began to wander.  It was a like a scene from a World War II movie as we headed off on our long trip to Auschwitz.  I could hear the slow, dramatic violin crescendo increase in desperation, keeping rhythm with the diesel engine of death.  All would surely soon be lost.

Our first cattle car trip ended at a building where we would meet the rest of our drill sergeants and draw our new army uniforms and old, used field gear.  The cattle car stopped and the door swung open.  Drill Sergeant Grayling had magically arrived before us, and he had brought friends.  “What the hell are you waiting for?” he barked, eyes exploding out of their sockets.  That little Nazi punk, I thought.  Were questions the only thing he had for us, or was he as stupid as he looked with that thin mustache that didn’t quite meet in the middle?  Was it a mistake that it didn’t come together under his nose?  Or was it some sort of genetic facial hair disorder?  He was probably born with that sorry excuse of a mustache.  He would have been easy to identify among the other newborns at the hospital.  He was the only one with a little mustache, and instead of passing out cigars to friends, his father probably gave him one after each feeding.  This was a career soldier, born to give us hell. 

After a closer look, I could see that his mustache only went half way up to the bottom of his nose too, which made it thin and short.  How could that happen naturally?  Maybe he was trimming it early one morning and had accidentally shaved too much from one side.  Perhaps it was one of those delicate situations where you mess something up and try to even it out, but you only mess it up worse while trying to “fix” it.  He’d probably stood there looking into a steamy mirror with his natural look of inquisitive, squint-eyed confusion and asked, “What the hell?”  Did this man have no answers?  His hair sculpting was ridiculous looking so he compensated for it by yelling at us.  I pondered his shortcomings.  Did he have a debilitative disorder that crippled his ability to make direct statements instead of only questions, or was he really just that stupid? 

After the question “What the hell are you waiting for?” which we translated into the command, “Get the hell off my cattle car!” we spilled out of the vehicle into a disorganized mob of zombies.  We knew we were supposed to do something but didn’t know exactly what or how.  Before we could adjust, another screaming hothead came out of nowhere and shouted for us to “fall in.”  We screwed that up too.  Unable to benefit yet from the knowledge that “fall in” meant get in formation, or that a proper formation required us to line up in four rows of ten each, or what “formation” meant at all, for that matter, we resembled more of a train wreck than a military formation.  You’ve seen the spectacle on cable news – helicopters twirling overhead, the rhythmic pounding voice of a news correspondent explaining that the twisted mass below had once been something, but it was impossible now to determine exactly what.  We were a contorted mess!  The precision of our formation looked like the adjoining “w”s around Charlie Brown’s bright yellow sweater.  Any way you looked at it, we were not in a straight line, so our drill sergeants “helped us” by ordering us to do push-ups while still in our civilian clothes.  If we couldn’t stand up right, then we didn’t deserve to stand up at all.

We tried to do our first army push-up in correct form; the next thing we screwed up, and from above we heard an unfamiliar voice booming.  “I am your senior drill sergeant!  Welcome to basic training!”  The cadence of his speech was trance-inducing.  The pace was consistent, each sentence ending with his voice trailing upward.  After a moment, I thought I recognized the voice.  There was something eerily familiar in the enunciation and the emphasis of key words.  Could it be?  So alone, so far away from home, and so disconnected from the gentle life of my childhood, could I find solace here in the voice of…my father?  What was he doing here?  I heard every word like dad was yelling at me from upstairs. “Boy, you better not slam that door, again!  You come back here right now!”  I looked up and wondered, Papa?  Is it really you?  With sweat starting to roll down the creases of my eyelids, I squinted at the silhouette emerging from the center of the sun.  The man’s shadow darkened the space where I had stopped doing push-ups to try to get a good look, and I realized he had begun directing his orders specifically at me.  He said, “My name is Sergeant First Class Keehn, and your ass belongs to me!”  Oops.  It was not the voice of my father, and as his banter resumed so did my push-ups.  He held his stare at me but announced to everyone that, “You will go into this building,” pointing to the structure behind him.  “Inside, you will receive your new uniforms.”  And his methodical instructions continued.  I was still mystified by the familiarity in his voice but had more immediate concerns, like, how long was this push-up thing going to last?  Since we could hold still in the push-up position for only about forty-five seconds, some of us, namely me, were ready to collapse.  The drill sergeants must have wanted to laugh, but they were not, under any circumstances, allowed to.  Nor were they allowed for that matter to show any light-hearted emotions in our presence.  They therefore ordered us to stand up and move into the building before total muscle failure set in.  No one had prepared for the physical demands of basic training and it showed.  Our drill sergeants must have wanted to laugh hard enough to blow beer through their noses at how pathetic we looked.  But laughter was the furthest thing from my mind.

I walked through the door as ordered, and before the inviting shade of the non-air-conditioned building could cool the sweat permeating my t-shirt, we were once again commanded to stand in line and shut up.  Fortunately, this line was a simple straight one down a painted hallway of cool concrete cinder blocks.  It reminded me of the school building I attended in Toledo, Ohio.  Emmanuel Baptist Christian High School was about as far from Ft Dix, New Jersey, as a suburbanite kid could get without joining the French Foreign Legion.  Standing in line, as straight and unassuming as I could, I realized that I wasn’t in Ohio anymore, and I was certainly no longer a revered senior in those hallowed high school halls.  Like it or not, I was back at the bottom of the pecking order as a freshman again. 

In the quiet corridor leading to the equipment issue room, I held on to my processing paperwork as if it were my only friend in the whole world.  I would eventually make real friends, of course, but looking ahead, my survival instincts screamed that it would not be the boob standing in front of me.  Private Stan Mertzke stood an even 6’0” with an overdeveloped size fourteen boot and a jaw that never seemed to completely close.  He stood hunched over, constantly fidgeting and looking around like he was waiting for something to happen.  Mertzke looked like either a nervous junkie on the lamb, or a spasmodic SCUBA diver running out of air at sixty feet, and I did not like my odds of survival standing next to this lesser-known fourth Stooge.  This walking drill-sergeant-magnet would surely get into a lot of trouble over the next eight weeks, and I didn’t want to be associated with him in any way.  He drew enough attention to himself that anyone near him would also suffer the consequences for allowing him to remain a screw-up.  It was guilt by association, and he brought the guilt to our association.  Standing in line together, we resembled a depression era black-and-white photograph of desperate men huddled outside a soup kitchen, only Mertzke stood out like a full color clown with rainbow hair, a red nose, and orange oversized clodhoppers cushioning his bunions.  I knew instinctively that he would not be the basic training blood brother who I would write fondly about in my letters home. 

Maybe he had a death wish, maybe he had to go to the bathroom, or maybe he was just itchy, but after about thirty seconds of squirming, he attracted Drill Sergeant Grayling’s scrutiny.  With probable cause, his eastern European-style investigation took the form of a full-blown “Vher haf yju hidten tze biblez?” interrogation when Grayling started in.  “What is the problem over here, private?”  Before Mertzke could demonstrate his ignorance, like a Georgia NASCAR fan in box seats at the opera, Drill Sergeant Grayling continued his visceral assault.  “Is there somewhere you have to be, son?”  The inquisition was lower in volume than outside, but what Grayling lacked in clamor, he made up in bone-chilling tone.  Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Drill Sergeant Grayling spoke as if he had to enunciate each word under the scrutiny of a linguistics coach who punished students with electric shock therapy for mispronunciations.  The image was clear in my mind: Mertzke sitting at a broken down card table in a cold, brick-lined room with the dim light of a dusty bulb hanging from a cord, just inches above his lumpy forehead. 

Grayling could not have been more intimidating in that sterile hallway if he were Satan incarnate (And at the time, I was convinced that he just might be.  Given my theology background, I was a self-proclaimed expert in these matters.)  The encounter was frightening in a “hand over your wallet and jewelry” sort of way.  With the cattle car quietly parked outside, and the running around like chickens-with-our-heads-cut-off routine halted, the realization that I was in this for good was utterly demoralizing.  I had signed a contract, and I wasn’t going anywhere.  The walls closed in around me, and there was no escape. 

Drill Sergeant Grayling asked again, with more determination, “Well, is there somewhere you have to be?”  Mertzke was expected to answer this question that had no legitimate reply, and Drill Sergeant Grayling maintained his cold, hard stare.  The seasoned drill sergeant only needed one word from his victim to get the ball rolling, so I listened intently for any clues that might help me in the future.  After a few “ums” and “Well, I…” attempts at an answer, Mertzke was finally punished. 

“Get down on the floor, private, and start doing push-ups!”  Drill Sergeant Grayling commanded.

During the encounter, I discovered a pattern to the drill sergeant’s query technique.  I decided that there were only two acceptable answers to any question posed by a drill sergeant:  “Yes, drill sergeant” and “No, drill sergeant.”  When neither one seemed right, a soldier could always bail out for push-ups by answering, “I don’t know, drill sergeant.”  But, the sentence must end confidently with “drill sergeant.”  Here is a little guide.

Drill sergeant: “What are you looking at, private?”

Recruit: “Nothing, drill sergeant”

Drill sergeant, louder than before: “What do you mean nothing? Am I nothing to you, private?  Do you think I’m nothing? I said, were you looking at me, private?”

Recruit, hesitant and more nervous: “Yes, drill sergeant?”

Drill sergeant: “Yes, what? ‘Yes’ you think I’m nothing or ‘Yes’ you were looking at me?”

Recruit: “Yes, I was looking at you drill sergeant.”

Drill sergeant: “Why were you looking at me? Do you think I’m handsome? Am I good looking, private?”

Recruit, getting nervous: “No, drill sergeant”

Drill sergeant: “What do you mean ‘No?’  Am I ugly, private?”

Recruit, blathering, eyes rolling around his head like a seizure victim: “Um…I was just…uh,”

Drill sergeant: “SHUT UP!”

Result: Push-ups until your ears bleed.

Not even “Yes, drill sergeant” or “No, drill sergeant” kept me out of trouble, but it was better than attempting dialogue with the formidable figure.  I concluded the best thing to do was plead the “I don’t know” defense.  It was quick, less embarrassing, and bypassed the catch-22 situations that have no right answer.  Although the “I don’t know” defense shows no potential for leadership, no personal conviction, and a mere passive willingness to stick it out there with all you’ve got, it does show a drill sergeant that you will do exactly what he wants.  That is a key to basic training.  Here is every drill sergeant’s goal: break a soldier’s natural will, get him to understand who is in charge, and convince him that there is nothing in the world he can do to get out of it.  The drill sergeant must make recruits understand that basic training is not the place to show natural leadership skills – it is the place to show that you know how to follow orders without question.  Tony Robbins and his “Personal Power” mantra would not survive a 15-minute infomercial at basic training because a recruit’s job is not to explain how much he knows but to demonstrate how much he does not know.  Besides push-ups, scrubbing linoleum, and peeling potatoes, there isn’t much more to it. 

All drill sergeants are severely dedicated to the task of molding recruits into soldiers, and they take their jobs so seriously you would think they received their mission orders directly from the commander in chief.  In a cult society of small brains and large egos, they chant their creed in unison.

The Official Drill Sergeant’s Creed:

I am the Drill Sergeant.  I welcome the task of training the guardians of our country with enthusiasm.  I will train many men and women who may some day be great leaders in our army.  My only request is that they remember me as a leader.  I am proud of my past and even more proud of my future.

I am the Drill Sergeant.

This was the official Creed of the Drill Sergeant in 1987.  They gave it to us to read and posted it on our barracks wall to remind us.  Let’s break it down for naïve civilians, anyone who did not see the movie Full Metal Jacket, and those living in Utah or the Dakotas.

Creed: “I am the drill sergeant.”

Translation:  You are nothing.

Creed: “I welcome the task of training the guardians of our country with enthusiasm.”

Translation:  I own you, freak.

Creed: “I will train many men and women who may some day be great leaders in our army.”

Translation:  You are shit now, so shut up.

Creed: “My only request is that they remember me as a leader.”

Translation: You will be completely brainwashed when you leave here.

Creed: “I am proud of my past and even more proud of my future.”

Translation:  I needed this hellhole assignment to get promoted, and I can’t wait to get the fuck out of New Jersey.  SO SHUT UP AND KEEP DOING PUSH-UPS, GUANO!

Private Stan “Guano” Mertzke continued doing push-ups, repeating, “four drill sergeant, five drill sergeant, six drill sergeant” and so on, until his hopeless voice trickled to a panting, asthmatic whisper that wreaked of donut jelly and cheese whiz – the staples of his civilian diet.  Inching forward every few seconds, the line methodically crept toward a door.  Mertzke scooted on all fours to keep the line going, and Drill Sergeant Grayling paced back and forth through the doorway like a crazed crack addict needing another hit.  It was difficult for me not to watch the struggle unfold at my feet.  It was more difficult not to tip my head down to see how long Mertzke’s pauses would be or to watch his elbows buckle under the pressure of his overweight body.  When Drill Sergeant Grayling stepped through the doorway to check on the progress of the line ahead, Mertzke stopped doing push-ups but keep counting.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was nothing less than a countdown to Armageddon taking place right in front of me, and there was no way for me to extricate myself from its proximity.

Over Mertzke’s wheezing, I heard Drill Sergeant Grayling’s highly polished combat boots turn back in our direction.  Instinctively my head snapped up, and my eyes stared straight ahead, trying to read the bottom line of the imaginary eye chart on the distant wall.  I tried to look innocent, but it was too late.

“What are you doing, private?” he demanded, unaware of Mertzke’s cheating.

Well, at least it was a trick-less question that wouldn’t trap me in an endless circle of pointless exchanges.  Drill Sergeant Grayling threw me a softball that I would hit right out of the park.  That’s right, I, Super Recruit, had an answer that would not get me in trouble or trap me in a dizzying cycle of catch-22 confusion.  I hoped to avoid Mertzke’s fate, as he lay below me like an exhausted manatee in the third day of childbirth contractions, so I took a deep breath and stepped out on faith.

Confidently I answered:  “Nothing, drill sergeant!”

Wrong!

“Private, were you staring at this fuck-up down here?”

Oh no, a tactical change in direction that caught me off guard.  Instead of trapping me into an endless game of whether or not I liked men or was a steer or a queer, Drill Sergeant Grayling went straight into attack mode, chewing on my vulnerable guilt like I was a Siamese cat at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.  At least I could fall back on the simple “Yes/No” answers I had rehearsed in my head earlier.

“Well, were you?” he sternly repeated.

“Yes, drill sergeant,” I said firmly.  I thought it would help to sound confident and look him directly in the eye while telling the truth.

He looked at me, pointed to Mertzke with an extended middle finger, and asked, “Why were you looking at that fuck-up?  Do you like him or something? Do you think he’s cute?  Are you enjoying this, private?  And don’t ever look at me, you freak!  You keep your eyes and head faced forward at all times.  Jesus Christ!  Staring at me like we’re on our first date or something.  You have a long way to go, private!”  I didn’t even have a name yet; I was just “Private.”  The moment Grayling committed my name to the black hole he called a brain, was when my life would take a sharp turn into oblivion.  I had no idea how close I was to that moment, and I had no idea which question to answer.

“Well?” he insisted.  Great, back to the cycle of answerless questions that would probably cause even me to doubt my heterosexuality.  Steer or queer, I was screwed.  Now I hoped to just get on with it and join my fallen comrade on the cool linoleum below.  I was ready to hit the deck and start counting.  Besides, we were practically in the equipment issue room so I wouldn’t be on the floor too long.  My answer was short and precise, and my head and eyes were most definitely facing forward.

“No, drill sergeant?”

“No, what, private?”

Oops.

“No, I don’t like him, drill sergeant?” I knew where things were headed when he inched closer to my inner ear, telling me I was an unworthy opponent with his hot breath.  Why was he even wasting his time on me?  Like the Los Angles Lakers on their way to another NBA championship, Grayling tossed me around just to prove I didn’t even deserve to exist in his realm.  He was the pit bull, and I was the newborn kitten, eyes still shut from birth.  Or was it fright? 

As it turned out, everyone either saw then, or heard later, what followed and how my status as a heterosexual male had been questioned.  For my punishment, I was forced to continue doing what had gotten me into trouble in the first place.  I had to stare at Stan Mertzke’s doublewide butt until Drill Sergeant Grayling got tired of it.  That was it; I had to look straight at Mertzke and make sure he didn’t cheat on his push-ups.  Wow, Drill Sergeant Grayling had seen him try to get one over.  Great, now I would be a rat and be fond of Mertzke’s ass.  Shoulders straight, head down, I didn’t move an inch. Not because I liked the view but because I feared it would be my ass on the floor, or worse, if I flinched. 

The line crept along around us, and everyone paraded by, thanks to a special invitation from Drill Sergeant Grayling.  Finally, he told Mertzke to stand up and get back in line.  My sentence communed by association, all I got was a “go to hell” look from Drill Sergeant Grayling, and permission to enter the room ahead.  My day was not starting off well.  Two drill sergeant encounters within thirty minutes.  I wondered what could be next.

Although he apparently enjoyed inflicting humiliation on me, Drill Sergeant Grayling had also sent a message to everyone else: Don’t talk in my line, don’t move in my line, don’t scratch your ass in my line, don’t pick your nose in my line…and so on.

We all got the message loud and clear.  It was more fun and more effective for him to toy with me than to explain his complicated set of rules to every recruit within the range of his voice.  After all, he could only yell so loud for so long.  Drill sergeants must receive efficiency training in several different aspects of their job so the repetition doesn’t drive them crazy.  How could the art of humiliation be that difficult to master, I thought?  You yell a lot; that’s not hard.  You grow a bad mustache to look tough; I could do that.  And you learn to enjoy making people feel so small that they could play racquetball against a street curb.  As rewarding as it may have been for our drill sergeants, it still had to get boring after a while.  I had no idea how much the enjoyed it.

The issue room smelled old and musty, and a maze of giant, rusty Erector set shelving lined every wall.  It created a labyrinth stuffed with outdated army gear, which would eventually serve as our training equipment if we could get through the room unscathed.  Stenciled signs with two-inch spray painted letters hung from the top of each row to identify the many items we would collect and sign for.  Dim yellow florescent lighting dangled above us to (barely) illuminate our way.  From what I saw, the room was circa 1973, and so were the civilian workers who manned each counter.  The staff mostly consisted of military retirees, collecting a second income to supplement their disability checks or the pay from a wife’s part-time job in the nearby town.  They moved swiftly behind the brown paneled counter that separated us worthless recruits from such seasoned veterans.  Each one had an assigned position; they handed us boots, uniforms, underwear, socks, hats, and two duffle bags.  They hardly spoke, only asking in a drone-like tone, “What size?” before counting out the proper quantity.  We shuffled along the line that methodically snaked through another door and into a different room where the tedious equipment issue process continued.

 It took almost two hours to collect enough supplies for the next eight weeks.  Eventually, I was in the checkout lane and back in front of Drill Sergeant Grayling, who seemed agitated with our “molasses in winter” pace.  He was always ahead of us, and we rarely escaped the scrutiny of his squinty glare.  The official checkout consisted of nothing more than a piece of paper to verify and autograph.  The signed documents were neatly stacked at the end of the counter by another civilian drone who, evidenced by his blank stare, either suffered from shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder.  It appeared as though anything could set one of these guys off, so I headed out the door for fear of causing myself yet another trauma.  We huddled near an exit and stuffed our duffle bags with everything from tent poles and sleeping bags to t-shirts and dress uniforms.  While I was trying to collect my thoughts, a recorded deadpan voice started playing in my head.  It looped on an audiotape, like an ignored airport announcement.  I heard:

“Thank you for shopping with the army.  Your forced patronage is appreciated. Outside the door, your drill sergeant is waiting for you where your training is about to start.  You may now kiss your worthless life goodbye!  Thank you…and don’t come back here ever again!”

The haunting voice played over and over in my head, and as I forced my gear into a duffel bag, I nearly pierced my new plastic rain poncho with a dull, bent tent stake.  I was nervous because our drill sergeant reprieve was over, and something uncomfortable was surely waiting outside.  I turned to leave the room and spied the haunting eyes of the men who had issued our gear.  They were empty and hollow, and I recalled their monotone, couldn’t-care-less voice, “Boxers or briefs?” You could tell that they had done their boring jobs for a long time and found no satisfaction or upward career track in them.  What did they have to look forward to?  A promotion to socks and accessories?  Like the drill sergeants outside, they were prohibited from cordial pleasantries.  Their mechanical movements from the supply rack to the counter told me that I had to graduate basic training and get anywhere else in the army before I ended up replacing them in fifteen years.  I turned away and left the room to face my next challenge.

The door swung open, and a piercing light pried its way into my squinting eyes.  It was blinding after being inside a windowless building for so long, and when clearer vision returned things moved in slow motion.  I saw that Senior Drill Sergeant Keehn and his pals had managed to turn a slumbering, clumsy mob of civilians into a neatly lined up formation of…soldiers?  Not quite!  We were still worthless recruits who didn’t deserve to take up space, but that minor detail wouldn’t halt the impending process of becoming a soldier.  Lingering near the back of the line, I had missed out on the “fun” of Senior Drill Sergeant Keehn getting everyone into a straight line.  There were my fellow recruits, frozen in place with stone cold looks on their faces.  I didn’t want to think about the of methods used to provoke this behavior because it apparently involved either cattle prods or horrific methods that even Steven King would find appalling.  I could tell by the looks on their faces, which were blank but not quite dead.  They were the undead.  It was a sign that something bad lay ahead in our next eight weeks. 

When we had first gone into the building, we were a mob of disoriented idiots who fell out of a stuffed cattle car while being screamed at by intimidating authority figures, to whom we had not yet been formally introduced.  Now we were the same mob of disoriented idiots ready to get back onto the same cattle car, but this time we each had a duffle bag the size of a small hot water heater strapped to our backs.  Everyone stood motionless and quiet. 

I was weighed down by gear but successfully exited the building and stumbled toward the formation.  I felt awkward, like I was arriving late to my toughest professor’s class back at Bible college.  Head down, I would look for an open seat in the back of the room and hope Dr. Carter would not associate my tardiness with my faltering grade point average.  Today however, the “professor” was a drill sergeant and the “students” had already been given a stern lecture on the finer aspects of a proper formation.

Wandering along with the last few stragglers, I felt as if Mertzke and I had hung up the rest of the group.  As a result, it was critical to rush into the cattle car, and do so with the least possible amount of drill sergeant assistance.  Again, we faced the mathematically impossible task of getting 120 recruits, each with 80 pounds of gear, into a 140 square foot shipping container, but this time we didn’t worry about offending anyone’s personal space.  We crammed into that cattle car as tight as books on a bargain bookshelf and abandoned all hope for a comfortable ride.

The best way to move into a cattle car of 120 people with bulging duffle bags and empty spirits is to drop your arms to your sides and push into the person in front of you as much as possible, shuffling forward inch-by-inch.  After an eternal ten-minute ride, my overwhelming claustrophobia was staved off by an abrupt stop when we reached our barracks.  This is where basic training would really start.  We were face-to-face with all the rumors, fears, and challenges of army basic training, and none of us were prepared.  Some of the tougher guys from New York and Philly acted brave.  Although no one knew what to expect next, we figured it would not be fun.

The doors swung open with an eerie screech, and the verbal abuse resumed.  “Why are you still on my cattle car?  Move, move, move!”  Again he had managed to arrive before us.  It was Drill Sergeant Grayling, leading the charge in front of nine of his peers in Smokey the Bear hats.  It was a frightful sight for a kid who had grown up in a comfortable middle America home and whose last communal living arrangement had been on the campus of a very conservative Baptist Bible college. 

We fell out of the cattle car with the grace of pigs being prodded toward a slaughterhouse.  Fortunately, we didn’t have far to go.  We were ordered to halt in front of a plain three-story red brick building that would serve as our living quarters for the next eight weeks.  We lined up outside of the building, and I could see a small white sign on the corner that read, C-27, my new street address.  Then my dad began speaking again.  Drill Sergeant Keehn reminded us that he was our senior drill sergeant and barked out orders that directed us to another drill sergeant who would issue our room assignments.  After we got our room number, we would have exactly one hundred and twenty seconds to go to the truck behind him, find the civilian luggage we had arrived with, get up to our rooms, drop off our gear, and get back into formation. 

“Adams!”

“Here, drill sergeant.”

“Bockert!”

“Here, drill sergeant.”

“Carr!”

“Here, drill sergeant.”

“Circle!”

“Here, drill sergeant.”

Drill Sergeant Grayling yelled my name, and I scrambled to the front of the formation to retrieve the index card with my room assignment on it.  The way his eyes rolled when he looked at me, I knew that he had my name memorized and looked forward to calling it as often as possible – if for nothing else than to make an example of me in front of the others.  Now, “Circle” is an easy last name to mock, but it didn’t help my cause when, running to get my index card, I lost my balance and fell flat on my face in front of everyone.  At 149 pounds, I looked like a malnourished water buffalo with a fully developed hump on its back, the overstuffed duffle bag still strapped to my shoulders.  I rose to my knees in the form of a petit mal push-up, stood in front of Drill Sergeant Grayling, and in an effort to show some sort of decorum, reached for the index card and said, “Thank you, drill sergeant!”  I was a deer in his headlights, and he was the Mack truck ready to plow right over me.  His response was abrupt, stern, and of course, vociferous.

“Don’t thank me, private. Get your ass upstairs and stow your goddamn gear!  NOW!”  With his volume rising word by word, and with each syllable precisely enunciated, I knew that we had each other’s attention.  He not only knew my name, but now he had the face to go with it.  Good for him, bad for me.  I ran upstairs, dumped my gear, and ran back as fast as I could.  Without the aid of a bullhorn, Senior Drill Sergeant Keehn counted to 120 the whole time at a level that could drown out a fleet of B-52 aircraft surrounded by Apache attack helicopters.  That man could scream!

Back in formation, we had hardly been given the time to notice the style of our new accommodations, locate the bathrooms, or most importantly, acknowledge our new roommates, except to bump into each other in our haste.  Out of breath, unsure about what would happen next, and completely overwhelmed, we shuffled back on to the idling cattle car for yet another trip into the unknown.

We were on our way to Central Processing, and I was scared to death.

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