Soldier of Misfortune

This book begins with a brief synopsis of my childhood, and details the circumstances and events that led from my being opposed to military service, to actually joining the Army by the age of eighteen. The story then transitions into a commentary on my three years of service in the Army, and finally concludes with a summation of that experience.

From my earliest youth, my mother instilled within the belief that there was no such thing as a justifiable war. After all, Viet Nam interrupting her marriage with my father early in their marriage was part of the reason they divorced.

She also hated anything to do with guns; hunters were detestable. This point hit home with me when we watched Bambi for the first time.

Suffice it to say, I never thought I would go into military service. It represented everything my mother taught me to hate at a young age. But life has a way of turning things around.

Chapter 1: Life on the Ranch

When I was two years old, my mother moved to a house on the outskirts of Madera, California, on avenue eighteen and a half. I recall we had a dog named Lester that could run forty five miles per hour; we clocked him chasing our car. He was a nice dog, but our mailman was afraid of dogs and sprayed him with mace one morning. Lester ripped his pants off.

We had a pet black widow that lived by the light switch in our basement. My mother kept brushing away the cobwebs to turn on the light, and the spider eventually weaved its web around the switch, creating a hole in the middle of its web. My mother was impressed with the spider, so we peacefully coexisted. She said it was good to have spiders around because they cut down on the flies. It was a typical response of a former 4H cowgirl raised on a farm, born and bred tomboy with cow crap in her ears. Needless to say, I inherited my respect for wildlife of all various life forms at an early age.

One of my hobbies back then was sharing meals with my cat friends. I used to grab a bag of dog food and a feline would accompany me to a closet where we would share some biscuits in private. “One for you, one for me,” I’d say to the cat as we shared our meal. I had a strange affinity for butter as well. I’d take a bite out of a cube of butter as if it were a banana. My brother and I would also eat dirt while playing like we were cooks. We got a bad case of worms, and my mother fed us large quantities of Tabasco sauce to flush them out. Hot sauce is an excellent remedy for worms; it served as a cure, and as a deterrent of future outbreaks. We stopped eating dirt.

At avenue eighteen and a half, I was busted by my babysitter for playing with matches. That same babysitter also found me trying to ram a butter knife into a wall outlet. She did a good job keeping me from destroying myself and those around me, but she didn’t protect me very well from her two maniacal daughters, Vickie and Eva. One day while I was playing in the backyard, I grabbed an electric wire the skirted our fence. It was turned off, so I didn’t think anything of it. Vickie, however, was intently observing me from a window in our garage, waiting for both of my hands to latch onto the wire. When the moment arrived she seized her opportunity and plugged in the juice. It was an old system that is now banned because they were known for killing cattle. Instead of a pulsating electrical current, the current was constant. I wasn’t able to let go of the fence, and my sister, who happened to glance out her bedroom window, saw me being electrocuted to death. She ran to the garage and unplugged the electric fence, effectively saving my life.

My daughter’s name is Victoria, but we call her Tori. Under no circumstance is anyone to ever call her Vickie. I hate that name.

When I was five, we lived in town. I remember learning how to ride my bike without training wheels. I left that bike in the driveway of my friend Jerry’s house, and Jerry’s dad backed his truck over it.

My dad would come by a few times a year and take me, my brother, and my sister to one of his job sites. And sometimes he’d take my brother and sister camping, but he said I wasn’t old enough to go yet.

He was a contractor/framer, and my first job at five years of age was helping my brother pick up blocks and sweep floors. I mostly played, but by the time I was seven, I took the task seriously, because it meant being paid five dollars. That was good pay back then! We had a Seven-Eleven right behind our house that sold balsa wood airplanes that broke within five minutes, but that five minutes was worth every dime!

Living in town lasted only a few years, and my mother hated every moment of it. When I turned seven years old, we moved to my Grandpa Walter’s forty-acre ranch on the other side of town.

I recall my first night’s sleep at the E5 ranch in vivid detail. I was sleeping in a sleeping bag, thinking about how it was almost like camping. My mom bought me a new cat I named Lovey Dovey, because she was such a friendly cat. She had a really large belly when she crawled into my sleeping bag that night, but her belly was normal sized when she crawled out the next day. A strange wriggling sensation tickled my feet, where she deposited her fresh litter of kittens.

My brother and I went hog wild at the ranch, as most country boys do. Many of my early memories there were associated with the times I got hurt, but miraculously, my injuries were never fatal.

We had a rope swing in the barn, and my brother and I would climb a fifteen foot ladder and swing off like monkeys, crashing through a pile of garbage cans below like a bowling ball smashing through pins. That barn had two narrow ledges at the top that we’d play around on all the time. My brother rode the ladder down one time from fifteen feet up. The ladder fell backward after he got to the top, and down my brother went, landing square on his back. He didn’t break a single bone in his body, but it took him a while to get his breath back. He also had a whale of a headache.

I never fell off the ledge or the ladder, but the rope certainly bit me. We had a stick tied to it, and there was a nail penetrating the end of the stick. I jumped for the rope and that nail entered my right breast under my nipple and came out the top of my breast, while I screamed and did my rendition of A Man Called Horse, hanging and flailing wildly about with all my weight on that nail. I managed to pull myself up with one arm, and yank the nail out with my other arm. I think my mom gave me some cow medicine or something, because we never went to the doctor; couldn’t afford it. I still have the scars.

We also played down at the Madera River that skirted our property. There was a dam that was fun to play around, despite the fact that we heard someone drowned there not too long before. We also dug tunnels in the river bank, but this activity didn’t last very long. My brother and I dug a tunnel five feet deep into the soft sand of the embankment, totally disregarding the eighteen inch thick layer of solid hardpan over our heads, and the crack that was forming in the ceiling. “Hey Char, look at this cra…” I said while sticking my hand in the crack. The next thing I knew, several hundred pounds of sand smashed us flat, and the hardpan broke into several boulders. Fortunately they rolled over us rather than falling flat and suffocating us. The sand served as a cushion, so we weren’t even hurt that bad. One of the boulders squished the crap out of me. I mean it literally made me soil my jeans as it rolled over my body like a giant rolling pin! My brother and I still laugh about it to this day.

After the boulder rolled over the top of me, I was lucky enough for my right arm to be near enough to the surface to break free and dig my head out for a breath of air. I probably looked like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead popping out of the Earth like that.

After I dug myself out, I heard my brother’s muffled cries for help below a heap of sand, and I dug his head out in time for him to take a breath of air. The boulder that squashed me like a tube of toothpaste came to rest on top of half of my brother’s body and pinned him down. Someone saw me and my brother and flagged down a van on a nearby road. It took four muscular men to heave that boulder off the top of my brother.

What was my mother to do with her wild children? We showed her the cave-in latter that evening when she got home from work. I remember the look on her face while she eyed the boulders. “Don’t dig anymore sticking tunnels down here.”

“God must really want us alive, huh ma?” we balked while looking at the carnage.

I almost drowned at that ranch as well. I didn’t know how to swim, but it didn’t stop me and my brother from jumping in our reservoir. Back then, we didn’t have ‘floaties.’ I just used an old board, and in my excitement, it slipped out of my hands. The water was over my head, and nobody saw me fall off my board. At first I panicked and stuck my hands up, but only my fingertips penetrated the surface of the water, and still no one saw me. I was completely out of air and panicking, but then in the middle of my desperation, I was inspired with a brief moment of clarity. I couldn’t swim, but I still knew how to walk. Being so afraid and tensing every muscle in my body, in addition to having no more air left in my lungs, made me dense enough to stand firmly on the bottom of the reservoir. I simply turned and started walking on the bottom. The edge of the reservoir was about ten feet away, but I eventually walked my way out.

Aside from these life threatening episodes, I recall with glee one of the best features about living on the E5 Ranch in Madera. In our feline heyday, we had fifty cats! And it was my responsibility to feed them. If Tarzan was Lord of the Apes, I was Lord of the Cats! I would bellow out my unique cat-call, and cats would come running and meowing from every direction as far as the eye could see. They would come high and low, off the roof of the house and the barn, out of the trees and bushes, and from every nook and cranny, stirred up from their secret cat hiding places. I loved feeding those cats.

When I turned eleven years old, my mother suddenly got a wild hair and decided to move to another state two thousand miles away. Why she picked Arkansas, I’ll never know, but that was our destination. That was one wild and wooly trip.

My mom sold her Madera ranch and made a down payment on another forty acre ranch in Arkansas. We loaded up a yellow Rider truck and a large cattle trailer with all our goods, and headed off down the road. Our favorite house cat, Dudley, died from a kidney stone when we reached Barstow. My mom blamed herself for not noticing his pain during the midst of all the moving. We stopped for the night and rented a hotel room. At the begging persistence of her children, my mother decided to honor Dudley by allowing us kids to sneak a dozen cats in through the window and keep us company during our mourning that night.

The next day while driving down the freeway, my sister was honking the horn and flashing the headlights wildly from the Rider truck behind us, trying to get our attention. We eventually pulled over and asked her what the problem was. Sy, one of our Siamese cats, somehow broke free from his cage and was doing a balancing act on the back gate of the cow trailer. My mother hit a bump when we pulled over, and he fortunately fell back inside the trailer. When we opened the back gate of the cow trailer to put him back in his cage, a dozen cats darted past us and scrambled out onto the freeway in a blind panic.

Before my mother, brother, sister and I moved to Arkansas, I remember the heated debates that ensued between my mom and dad. He was upset that we were moving so far away.

My parents divorced when I was an infant, so I didn’t know my father that well. He has this weird thing with small children; he feels terribly uncomfortable around them. But his attitude started to change toward me as I approached my teens. When I turned eleven, he finally let me go camping with my brother and sister. Rough camping trips those were, but I loved them. When he married his third wife, Rose, she had a son named Matthew. It was at this time that my dad decided to try to assemble me and my brother with his new family. Our moving to Arkansas put a slight damper on these plans, needless to say.

For the next five years of my life, I bounced back and forth between Van Buren, Arkansas, and Fresno, California.

Chapter 2: Backwoods Arkansas

We arrived at our Arkansas ranch at midnight in the middle of a blizzard. Exiting the warm cab of our vehicle, we were blasted with Arctic winds which swept down through Van Buren every winter. It was about fifteen degrees outside.

We were introduced to icy walkways as we blindly skated our way to the backdoor of the house and slammed into the concrete in a pile of shivering human flesh. We fell asleep on a blanket that night in front of a roaring fireplace.

The next day was a sight to see. Such a beautiful ranch that was, with the house situated on a hilltop in the middle in a forest of scattered pine trees. The living room window overlooked a small lake at the base of the hill. A large buck was grazing on the front lawn. After his eyes met ours, he bolted away at lightning speed and we never saw him again, but we couldn’t have asked for a better welcoming committee. We also had an eagle that lived on the property, and he never left. In fact, he made a grand display one morning, showing us his new wife, as they both sailed over our lake at the bottom of the hill, and coasted right over the top of our house.

Arkansas had some interesting weather. Everything about it was extreme. It would freeze in the winter, and boil in the summer.

There was a pair of shorts that were left out on the laundry line to dry one summer and were forgotten. I noticed them in the middle of winter, and took note of their frozen condition. When I tried to take them off the line, they fell and broke into several pieces when the hit the ground.

As for summer time, it would get to about one hundred degrees with ninety-five percent humidity. The only thing anyone could think to do was swim.

It would snow and hail every year. When it hailed, chunks of ice would pulverize people daring enough to run outside. When it rained, it didn’t warm up to the idea with scattered sprinkling, like it does in California. Out there, it rained! Our air conditioner was struck by lightning. Lightning also blew the top off a pine tree near the end of our driveway. Some of those lightning strikes would suck the electricity right out of the power lines and we’d have small five to ten second blackouts when it would strike near by. Booming thunder would shatter windows if they weren’t storm proof windows. And water came down in bucket sized drops. Those who were driving had to pull over and wait a while when the rain would get radical. Clouds were extremely dense, as well, which created a strange effect. One time I was able to stand half way inside a rain storm, and the other half of my body was dry. The rain drew a strait line across a dirt road.

Sometimes as many as a dozen tornadoes would skirt around the area at the same time. They’d kick houses and cars around like a giant wayward child kicking his way through a room full of balls. Full grown trees would be plucked and tossed as if they were weeds, and then invariably the tornadoes would instinctively gravitate to the trailer parks for a round of bowling. My brother’s house was directly in the path of a class five tornado that ripped through the center of town back in 1995. It suddenly changed course less than one hundred yards from his house. That particular tornado killed a few people from what I recall. Entire houses were plucked off their foundations, while their neighbors weren’t affected at all. One family was chased from room to room as their house was being torn apart. They all ended up packed into a single closet. When the vicious roars of the tornado passed, they opened the closet door, and the entire house was completely gone. All that was left on the bare slab was that one single closet.

Tornadoes are strange that way.

When people from Arkansas heard I was from California, they’d make a big deal out of the earthquakes. I’d just laugh.

It wasn’t until I started going to school in Arkansas, that I realized how different the people were out there. There are a number of crude jokes about incest in Arkansas. For example, “You know you’re from Arkansas if your family tree is a stick.” I’m convinced that there’s a high degree of accuracy to those jokes. I entered half way into a conversation at school where one boy was talking to another boy, describing how good looking a particular girl was. I was following along with the conversation just fine, until I heard the girl was his sister. I couldn’t say too much, though. I was from California, and they had their own jokes about Californians, of which there is also a certain degree of accuracy.

When I first moved to Arkansas, I went to school there and spent the summer at my dad’s house in Fresno, California. This reversed a year later, when I went to live with my dad. I then went to school in Fresno, and spent my summers in Arkansas. This was quite a culture shock, to say the least.

In Arkansas, I remember working hard and playing hard.

My mom would chop down pine trees on our property, and cut them into four foot logs we’d load into our truck and sell to a local shaving mill. My mother had biceps the size of soft balls; she was an expert with that chainsaw.

Some of those logs were over three hundred pounds, and it would take me, my sister, brother and my mom to get them into the back of the truck. We’d work most of the day to get two loads of cord wood, which we were selling for forty dollars per load. One year we decided to change things up a bit and we all got jobs at the shaving mill we were selling the wood at. All we had to do was pack bags with shavings, which sounded a lot easier than cord wooding.

The process was simple. We had to stand in a pile of shavings waste deep, and pack bags full of shavings until they were completely full, and then wire up the tops of the bags. Once complete, we’d throw them in a large pile that was loaded into the diesel trailers.

The part that made it hard was constantly breathing sawdust, and working next to the industrial dryer that was used to dry the shavings. In short, we were breathing sawdust, and working in an area that was about one hundred thirty degrees, with ninety-five percent humidity. Needless to say, the shaving mill wasn’t any easier than cord wooding.

The years of working with my mom cord wooding added up, and my mom kept telling me someday she’d pay me back. Finally when I turned fourteen, she bought me a three wheeler ATC. I’d disappear for hours on end.

Our neighbor had some bluffs that overlooked a river valley, and I’d go climb around on the cliffs. There were a number of caves there, and the entire place was later cordoned off by the state department as an archeological site. My friend Arthur grabbed a piece of human skull sitting on an excavation tray and said, “Hey dude, look, take this for your fossil collection.”

“Are you insane!” I yelled back at him. “Put that man’s skull back where you found it! Haven’t you heard anything at all about Indian burial grounds?”

I had an extensive fossil collection. Fossils are everywhere out there. I found a dinosaur tooth in my driveway. I also had a number of fossilized plant and shell specimens.

On rare occasions we’d go riding horses (before my mom sold them). I had a demon-possessed pony aptly named Buck, who had the bad habit of running under thorn riddled low-branched trees and making ninety degree turns at full speed. I lost a shoe on one of those turns. He broke loose on another occasion and then made an instantaneous stop to graze, while I toppled onto my back in front of him. He then stomped his way over the top of me and stopped and turned around when he was through. I think he wanted to make sure that I was crying loud enough to satisfy his little ears, which were perked up with glee.

We gathered the attention of our neighbors when we went riding horses. A delegate of every species came along. Our two dogs would take the lead, and even one of our cats, Ginger, would try to keep up as well. She’d end up sitting on someone’s saddle after about a mile of dragging her tongue on the ground trying to keep up. Ginger was an extraordinary cat. She would catch deadly moccasin snakes for her kittens and parade them in front of everyone sitting on the front porch, making sure we all saw how brave she was. She also went out on the end of our dock and jumped into the lake all on her own. My brother and I screamed and yelled for help one day, pretending to be drowning. She loved us so much she jumped in the lake and swam out to us, hoping to save us.

George was my only friend in Arkansas. He was a bit on the slow side, but he was still a good friend. His brother was an absolute pervert; poor George.

We’d wander around the woods all the time together. Below the bluffs on my neighbor’s property, there was a jungle-type area with large vines strewn throughout the forest, and we’d swing on those vines like a couple of monkeys. I loved swings of all types, but the best swings involved water, because in the summer, going swimming was the number one activity. I learned how to do a number of acrobatic tricks off Cedar swing. My buddy George gave it his best shot, but didn’t let go until he was swinging back toward the bank and ended up slamming his ribs into the creek bank. “I’m alright, didn’t even hurt,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath and unsuccessfully hiding an obvious unbearable pain.

We would go cliff diving as well. I could do flips off the cliffs at the abandoned rock quarry. The rock quarry cliffs gave many variable heights to jump from, ranging from twenty to forty feet high. Mulberry cliffs, however, were a different story.

One year my brother and I went to Mulberry cliffs and contently observed some inebriated maniacs doing flips off the top of the highest point. The picnic area was facing the cliff diving area, which was on the other side of the river. People would go there to eat lunch, get drunk and either watch a cliff diving expedition, or be a part of it. This year, my brother figured we’d be part of the expedition.

We swam to the other side of the river and started climbing. We climbed, and climbed, and then climbed some more. When we reached the top, I looked over the edge and got sick to my stomach. This cliff had to be over fifty feet high. I almost puked just looking over the edge, and I scampered back about fifteen feet. I was utterly terrified. “Forget this man I’m climbing back down.” Mulberry cliffs didn’t have many options. The highest point provided the only decent runway for a jump, so it was all or nothing.

All the people on the other side of the river were watching us and after they saw my squeamish display near the edge, they started hooting and hollering. “Jump!” they were yelling at the tops of their lungs. “Don’t be a chicken sh**!” another yelled. My brother looked at me with a slight disappointment.

“If you go, I’ll jump whenever you’re ready.”

“Fine, let’s do it.” I had to completely blank out my mind and not think of anything. Once I was absolutely brain dead, I ran and jumped off the cliff, and that horrible feeling of falling terror surged through every atomic particle of my being. My feet slammed into the water below. Even with shoes on, it was extremely painful.

The Fourth of July was a blast. We’d buy bricks of bottle rockets and make miniature rifles out of PVC pipe, and chase each other around shooting bottle rockets at each other. Sometimes our clothes would catch on fire and we’d have to drop and roll. All the fireworks and firecrackers that are illegal in California were legal in Arkansas.

The one thing I didn’t like much about Arkansas was being so stinking hungry all the time. There never seemed to be enough food. My sister got a job at some restaurant, and she’d bring home loaves of bread they were throwing out. I’d eat an entire loaf of bread for a meal if there was nothing else to eat. And when there was an actual meal prepared, the family motto was “Head down, elbows up.” Not much conversation went on at that table. We ate like complete animals, burping, farting, and licking the plate after most meals. It wasn’t until years later when I met my wife, that I learned how socially unacceptable this was. Well, sort of. My stepmother had conniptions, but she was easily disregarded because of her fanatical antics. I’ll discuss that later.

As wild as I was at the Madera ranch, I became even wilder in Arkansas. My great great grandmother’s uncle was the famous explorer, Merryweather Lewis, and that exploring blood of his surged in my veins. I’d explore for miles in the woods surrounding our ranch, completely disregarding NO TRESSPASSING signs, even if they said “VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT.” In Arkansas, signs like that are not jokes. George and I were actually chased by a crazy coot with a shotgun one time when we accidentally wandered into his backyard which was tucked so deep in the forest its presence took us by surprise. I didn’t see a road in sight. Another time I found a fully furnished abandoned cabin, stocked with really old furniture. There might have even been skeletal remains in there for all I knew. I wanted to go inside, but I couldn’t, because it was completely packed with mud dabber wasps. It appeared to have been abandoned for decades. The few segments of driveway we were able to find were littered with extremely large trees scattered through the middle.

Sometimes I’d meditate in the loft of our old barn, where I had my own personal area set aside, adorned with a set of twelve point buck antlers mounted on the back wall. I wore overalls, an old black cowboy hat, usually didn’t have any shoes on, and usually had a weed sticking out of my teeth. I was as hillbilly hick as they come.

Then when the summer was over, I transferred to the inner city of Fresno, California. I was able to change my clothes, alter my eating habits somewhat for the sake of my stepmother, and alter my dialect as well, but that was about all. I was still a barbarian at heart.

Chapter 3: The Inner City of Fresno, CA.

“You can take John out of Arkansas, but you can’t take Arkansas out of John,” my mother once said as I prepared to go live with my father in Fresno. She was right. I was unequivocally wild.

While my mother might have prepared me for the hard work ahead of me, I wasn’t very prepared for my father’s abrasiveness. My mom and dad were both very tough, hard working people, but they were very different in they way they communicated with me. My mother was always sensitive to my feelings, but my dad was awkward around children and exceptionally harsh at times. I never talked back to him, and to tell the truth, I was always a bit afraid of him. Suffice it to say, my mother’s nurturing was in stark contrast to my father, who didn’t have a nurturing bone in his body.

After a few conversations with my dad concerning the hard core discipline he passed down to me, I discovered that I inherited a rich heritage of ornery characters from his side of the family. My Great, Great, Grandfather Charles A. Milor I, was a Senator of Arkansas back in the 1860’s. I don’t know much about him, but he had to be tough and determined, because he took a stand against slavery in a pro-slavery state, and was murdered for it. My dad also told me quite a bit about his dad, my Grandfather Charles III. He was the runt of the litter, and had to help the family earn a living starting around eight years old. Because they were so destitute, he didn’t have enough clothes to wear in the winter and he was frequently sick with pneumonia. Later in life, this led to him losing a lung, which he lived without for over twenty years.

My grandpa’s motto was “Cover the ground you stand on.” As a youngster, he had to contend with a neighborhood bully for several years, until he finally fought back with enough ferociousness to defeat him. The years following that incident led to one fight after another. Bullies were drawn to him like a magnet because they mistook him for an easy target. He was small and skinny, but his amazing speed made all the difference in the world.

Because of his extensive experience with fighting bullies growing up, he eventually became a division champion of boxing in the Army, but his Army career as head of the military police in Puerto Rico was cut short when he was diagnosed with emphysema. That’s when he lost his lung. But despite this setback, he pushed onward, earned a Master’s degree in history and eventually worked his way up to a Principle position in the Madera school district.

All along the way, he never stopped fighting when the need was warranted. Always looking out for the underdog, he got into a fight with a football coach on one occasion, because of the way he was treating one of the players. He later confronted another teacher who was showing up to work drunk and acting belligerent with the students. Years after that, he became friends with numerous influential people in Madera county. One of his favorite activities was playing cards, and some of the card games would include people that were of ill repute. He was involved in a fight on more than one occasion during those card games. One man, Pete Wilson, owner of a shorts shop in town, made Charles so mad that Charles knocked him out. The stench of deification and urine filled the room as Pete pissed his pants and emptied his bowls right there on the floor. News travels fast in a small town, and by the end of the next day, everyone all over town was talking about how Charles knocked the shit out of Pete Wilson.

My Grandpa Charles wasn’t an abusive man; quite the contrary, he was a firm believer in justice, and as I already stated, he always stood up for the underdog. But sometimes his desire to instill a survivor mentality in his children was a bit extreme. For example, his version of a swimming lesson was throwing his children in a lake and saying “Sink like a rock or swim like a fish.” Needless to say, I avoided him around his swimming pool before I learned how to swim.

One day when my dad was building a barn for him, I saw a cute little baby mouse scamper from under a piece of lumber, and I pointed at it and mentioned how cute it was to my grandpa. Charles stomped on it and said “Damn pests.” I cried over the would-be pet.

Grandpa Charles was a tough nugget. He generally meant well, but he had an ornery streak of dark humor a mile wide. One of his favorite sayings that really got under people’s skin was to say “Didn’t hurt me none,” whenever someone got hurt around him and whined about it. My dad said one day when he was a kid, he and my grandpa were building a fence together. He accidentally whacked my grandpa on the head with the back edge of the shovel blade while tamping in a fence post. My grandpa started spouting off obscenities, and after about five minutes of cussing, my dad mumbled, “Didn’t hurt me none.” He cracked a smile, enjoying the bitter taste of his own medicine.

Like my Grandfather Charles, my dad also encountered a bully who wouldn’t leave him alone when he was a kid. When my grandpa saw his beaten condition, he was ruthless on my father. “I swear if you don’t pulverize that bully I’ll give you the whipping of your life!” My dad beat that bully black and blue, more fearful of my Grandpa Charles than the bully’s retaliation. Later, in another school district, my dad encountered an even worse bully. His contention with Boe Boe eventually led to a fight so terrible, it ended with Boe Boe’s face being completely disfigured. They dispatched an ambulance and sent him to the hospital where they performed surgery on him; he had a metal plate inserted in his skull to hold it together.

Boe Boe was hard headed, both literally, and even more so figuratively. One year later following a basketball game, Boe Boe secretly stayed behind waiting for all the players to leave, one by one, hoping my dad would be the last to leave. He was on this occasion, and Boe Boe approached him with a proposition.

“I have to admit you beat the crap out of me last year and won that fight. I won’t argue with you about that. But I think I can beat you if we fight again.”

My father didn’t want to fight anyone. Had it been my Grandpa Charles, Charles would’ve knocked him out right then and there, but my dad wasn’t as hot headed as my grandpa. He only fought if he was mad enough and felt he had to defend himself. He explained this to Boe Boe, but Boe Boe wasn’t getting it. “We don’t have to be enemies or anything,” Boe Boe continued. “Nobody’s around, and it’s just you and me here. It’ll be just a friendly fight to see who wins, just between the two of us.”

“If you want to attack me and force me to defend myself, I will, and I’ll do the same thing I did to you last time, or maybe even worse. But I don’t believe in friendly fights. You’re going to have to provoke it, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

Boe Boe decided to let the matter go. It was probably a wise decision, because I don’t think getting into fist fights would be a good idea for someone with a metal plate holding his skull together.

My father worked feverishly to grind the same fiery spirit into me, just as his father before him, but his methods of instilling a survivor mentality were slightly different than my Grandpa Charles’. My dad wasn’t as violent as my grandpa, but that might have been due to the fact that he took his aggressions out at work. Few men work as hard as my father did.

As stated before, my earliest memories of my dad were of him picking me and my brother and sister up, usually at a ridiculously early time, like four A.M., and taking us to a construction site to work with him. If we didn’t get out of bed when summoned, we could expect a short order of a pitcher of water to assist us.

I learned about an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wages starting at five years old.

I was no stranger to hard work living with my mother, and it was a good thing, too, because I worked my tail end off with my dad as well. I graduated from my days of picking up blocks and sweeping floors, and advanced to actual carpenter’s work. My dad bought me a set of carpenter’s bags, a good hammer, a framing square and a few other tools, and off to the job site I went. I’d stack and nail up walls, blocking, and roofs. The first power tool I used was a drill, and then came the nail gun, and by the time I was fourteen, I was using a worm drive skill saw. At sixteen years old, I was a descent carpenter’s helper, experienced with all the basic tools of a carpenter, and there were a number of tasks I could be cut loose on without supervision.

My dad was an all out slave driver on the job site. Framing houses is excruciatingly hard work, and my father made it even harder than it already was. For example, when nailing off a roof by hand, if I rested my arm on my knee while I hammered nails with my other arm, my dad considered this a rest break, which was not allowed. Break time was at 10:00 AM, not while I was nailing.

My dad successfully created an environment of competition among his crewmembers, because everyone on the site was usually trying to prove who was the studliest. We never carried a normal load of lumber; it was always right at the limit of either our flexibility to reach around something, or near the point of muscle failure. It’s a miracle I didn’t get a hernia. We had to be quick as well. When we carried studs from point A to point B, we were expected to jog or at least walk briskly when returning to the stack for the next armload. Speed and efficiency were preached on daily; triple-tap nailing was acceptable, but double-tap nailing was much better. Any little shortcut to reduce the amount of steps it takes to complete any given process, no matter how insignificant it might have seemed, was important to my father. My Uncle used to work for my dad and one day complained about his constant shortcut suggestions. “I bet you lay awake at night thinking about things like that,” he grumbled. That’s when my dad fired him.

Like my mother, my father had an exuberant appreciation for, and expectation of being tough. To that end, the degree of ‘toughness,’ also worked its way into the equation of who was the most studly when I was working with my dad. Every year my hands would get covered with blisters until they bled. Everyone had blisters that would crop up from time to time, and the remedy was either wrapping an old shirt around our hands, or taping them up with duct tape. As for the pain, it only lasted for the first fifteen minutes or so, by which time the blisters would become numb. My hands were like sandpaper back then, with a few torn, purple fingernails and a few dozen splinters. I haven’t framed houses in nearly twenty years, but my hands still have some of those old calluses.

We would work large splinters out of our hands with a pocket knife, and suck it up when an occasional finger got bashed with a hammer, or a foot was smashed by a board. Even now I have a high tolerance for pain, which isn’t much appreciated when I expect the same out of others, namely my kids.

My dad didn’t always get on our case for lacking a brisk pace, but he certainly monitored how long my stepbrother stayed in the outhouse. My stepbrother would periodically sneak off to an outhouse, and my dad would start throwing rocks at it, yelling “Get the hell out of there and get back to work!”

We’d commonly work twelve hour days, which were nothing short of constant weight lifting and aerobics. And most work days were in the blistering heat. I’d get terrible sunburns and blisters all over my back when I was stupid enough to not wear a shirt. The central valley of California ranges from one hundred to one hundred ten degrees for close to two months out of every year in many places. One year we secured work in Coalinga, and I had to nail off plywood roofs when it reached one hundred sixteen degrees.

“If you fall off the roof, you’re fired before you hit the ground,” my dad would say half-jokingly to his crew members. To a certain extent, he inherited that same ornery sense of dark humor my Grandpa Charles had.

Remodeling jobs weren’t very fun either. Sometimes I’d be tasked with work that many other contractors would never do, like using a chisel to chip mortar off old bricks to salvage them for other jobs. Remodel jobs usually meant I was the resident gopher as well, because I was the smallest person around. I was the one elected to crawl under the houses with the spiders and other pests, or in the attics, wallowing in fiberglass insulation. The only thing worse than working in burning hot crawlspaces was working in burning hot crawlspaces while wallowing in fiberglass insulation.

Working with my dad framing and remodeling houses was every bit as hard as cord wooding or the shaving mill with my mom, but it had its perks, as hard as that may be to believe.

For one thing, I was really strong and muscular, cut up one end and down the other. I had a serious six pack, and my endurance and constitution were off the chart. I almost never got sick, (still don’t), and my energy was boundless. This energy, of course, was fueled at the expense of an endless appetite. The only time I wasn’t hungry was right after I finished eating. Thirty minutes later, I was hungry again. I would eat three bowls of cereal in the morning and the only reason I didn’t eat more is because I ran out of time. The moment I returned home, a constant flow of food flowed down my gullet; I never walked passed food without grabbing something. And I wasn’t picky about what I ate. As for the three-second-rule for dropping food, I didn’t see the need for any rule at all. Food on the floor was fair game, no time limit required. And food that was stepped on was still salvageable if the grit could sufficiently be picked out of it.

No matter how much I ate, I never gained a single pound. I continued to eat like a pig most of my life, and it didn’t catch up to me until I turned thirty. Then I had to slow down.

I was still the consummate barbarian when it came to the dinner table, but my stepmother was quite the opposite of my mother when it came to dinnertime etiquette. In fact, once everyone was seated, she didn’t want anyone to get up from the table again, even to get a glass of juice. She was an extremely strict and stressed out person. And while I was completely free and unbridled with my mother, my stepmother ran a tight ship. She was absolutely fanatical about cleanliness. She made lists of chores for my brother, stepbrother and me, and if we didn’t complete them and pass her inspections, she’d have an all out conniption. Sometimes she’d literally throw tantrums and start screaming and throwing things. Seems somewhat paradoxical, now that I think of it; she’d make a mess of things if the place wasn’t clean enough.

High strung she was.

In addition to being in extremely good shape, framing houses also had an element of danger that was appealing to me. Cutting and shooting things with powerful weapon-like tools, and performing balancing acts on the tops of houses, made framing an interesting occupation. I’d constantly have to walk on the tops of bare framed walls and up and down rafters and joists while holding heavy loads of lumber or power tools. I honed my sense of balance to extraordinary proportions.

Working with my dad consumed quite a bit of my time during the summers with my dad, but when I wasn’t working, I was restless in the city. I wasn’t used to being confined, so the first thing I started doing in my spare time was exploring the district. I quickly made friends and set out for adventure.

I remember my first time wearing camouflage fatigues, like it was yesterday. Somewhere I heard they could practically make a person invisible, so what better way to test them out than in a game of hiding-go-team-chase-tag with my friends.

What was hiding-go-team-chase-tag? It starts out with a team of rambunctious kids playing hide and seek, but once the seeker spots someone, it turns into tag. The seeker had to see, and tag whoever he/she found. It didn’t end there, however. Once the seeker tagged someone, those two people worked as a team to find and chase down the remaining members of the group. Each person tagged would join the pursuing party, until only one person remained, who was declared the champion of the round if he couldn’t be found. Everyone would wander around the neighborhood yelling “Okay, you’re the champion now, come on out.” Naturally the champion wouldn’t come out until everyone passed, so the hiding spot wouldn’t be compromised.

The champion then had to be the next seeker. Why? Because I would’ve been the champion of every round of the game, and no one would’ve wanted to play with me.

I could run like a jackrabbit on fire, climb like a crazed squirrel-monkey on steroids, and now with my fatigues, I could hide like a chameleon. One time I simply lay in a pile of grass about 12 inches tall, and one kid after another walked right past me within just a few feet and never saw me. I’d hide in trees and bushes, and completely vanish from sight. After this, I was hooked on fatigues, and my appeal to military paraphernalia blossomed. I was a regular at a local Army Surplus store. I had utility belts, knives, flashlights, pouches, canteens, ropes, an e-tool; anything I could get my hands on that had to do with the military, camping, or survival. Whenever I earned any money working on framing houses with my dad, I’d immediately go to the Army Surplus store and acquire the latest gadget with corresponding pouch.

Our boundary was half a city block, not to extend beyond the boundary of the sidewalk or the back alley. Within that block I had every back yard mapped out. I knew who had dogs, and who didn’t. I also knew which houses to avoid for reasons other than dogs. It was a rough neighborhood; gangs, druggies and drunks, bums and prostitutes all frequented the area. Despite the dilapidated district, our parents let us run the gambit of the neighborhood in our little pack even past dark on the hot summer nights.

Sometimes my adrenaline would be kicking in full gear while being chased, and I wouldn’t know where to draw the line. One of my best get-away locations was my neighbor’s garage. If I was being chased by two or three people, I would make my way to my neighbor’s back yard fence, and from there, leap onto his garage, which was a separate building from his house. Once on top of my neighbor’s garage, I could jump over my back yard fence and land on top of my own garage, then jump off my garage into my backyard and effectively evade three people. On one occasion, I was being chased by five kids. They knew my tactics with this get-away zone, so two went into my neighbor’s backyard, and two went into my own backyard, while my stepbrother pursued me onto my neighbor’s garage.

I couldn’t accept defeat, so I did something different. I ran and leaped from my neighbor’s garage onto a telephone pole that was next to it in the back alley. My stepbrother was preparing to make the leap as well, to seal my doom, so I began to climb. He made the jump, and I was shocked. He was sick and tired of me constantly getting away! I climbed all the way to the transformer, hearing its threatening buzz in my ear. The second my stepbrother reached for my foot to tag me, I sprung away from the pole, flying over my stepbrother’s head, and landing back on top of my neighbor’s garage. I was lucky to not crash through the roof I landed so hard, feeling the entire structure sway under my feet. Somehow I managed to escape from five kids on that occasion. It’s a miracle I never got hurt.

Hiding-go-team-chase-tag was the beginning of my early adventures. I had a tree house in my back yard, which I called “The Club.” With all of my Army gear, I got into the military spirit of things. I made myself the general of my own Army, and my friends were all drafted despite their conscientious objections. Poor Rami, I could talk that kid into practically anything. We’d dress up in camouflage, face-paint and all, and conduct expeditions throughout the neighborhood and beyond. I had enough gear for everyone. Rami and Pat were my leading Generals. Jason, Brian, and Lonnie were Colonels; Mark and Johnny were Majors; Ted and Charles were Captains, and the Army grew as the years passed.

In every mission, the goal was to not be seen by anyone, both as a feat of stealth, and also to avoid embarrassment. None of us liked the cartoon character GI Joe; we took our activities much more seriously than to mimic a cartoon character. However, we strangely adopted the term GI Joeing when speaking about our missions.

Being wild in the backwoods, or job sites was fully acceptable, but I liberally applied my undomesticated ways to the city as well. Needless to say, I had little respect for boundaries, which was not acceptable in the legal sense, but I simply couldn’t help myself. The city was too confining for the animal that I was.

My friends and I spent time in almost every back yard on the block. I climbed on a few neighbor’s houses as well. There were two churches in our neighborhood, and I climbed both of them on a regular basis. I could get up on the Lutheran church, run across the roofline and get back down the other side in less than twenty seconds; Jason timed it. That church had a few surprises in store. On the North side was a light sconce with lose wiring, which electrocuted the dickens out of me.

I also climbed on top of the Shangri La Chinese restaurant which was two blocks away. And then there was the thrift store on the other side of the alley, which I heard on the News, had its roof collapse a few years ago. I found an access panel into the attic of that thrift store. I actually made my way into the store. I didn’t break anything, so I didn’t consider it “breaking and entering.” I didn’t steal anything―just got inside to see if I could. After wandering around a few minutes, it finally occurred to me that if I was caught, I would’ve been mistaken for a burglar, so I quickly left the way I came.

I had two friends across the street from my house; my stepbrother and I would constantly visit them. Two sisters. They weren’t our girlfriends; just friends. One time their parents were gone and I climbed on their roof, entered their attic, climbed into a bedroom through a crawl-space, snuck up on them while they were watching a scary movie and roared from behind them, “Hi there!” while grabbing one of them on the shoulders. Poor girl pissed her pants.

The older I got, the more adventurous I became. As people moved out of the neighborhood, I would gather my troops and we would go on a mission to ‘penetrate the enemy fortress’ without causing any damage. We never broke or vandalized anything; that was the rule. And we never needed to.

When I was sixteen, I climbed a pole laden with barbwire to get to the top of my High School auditorium. It was a colossal structure over fifty feet high. Making my way from the pole to the roof was quite a feat. The pole penetrated the roofline about two and a half feet away from the edge of the eve, so I had to let go of the pole to grab the edge of the eve, releasing my feet from the pole and hanging some fifty feet in the air. Falling would’ve meant instant death, but I was fairly confident in my climbing skills, and I didn’t think much about the consequences of failing.

I knew the rooftops of my High School like few other students, or employees, for that matter.

I scaled one building in particular by running strait at the wall, and stepping up on an electrical junction box attached to the wall. I’d leap off the box, pushing myself up and away from the wall. I’d then flail my arms forward and snatch the roof like a cat clawing for its life. I could’ve been Jackie Chan’s side-kick.

I loved anything that had to do with heights, and balance. I suppose I acquired this character trait from working with my dad; probably would’ve made a great circus performer. I was able to walk across the horizontal bar of the football goal post from one side to the other, with the pole vibrating over six inches while I walked.

At my High School, I’d balance my way across metal fences over one hundred feet across. One was at the top of the racquetball courts, which could’ve killed me if I fell. The worst thing that ever happened in all this acrobatic madness was a gash in my leg. I was climbing emergency exit stairs from underneath, and tore a hole in my leg when landing on top of a pole used to hold the side door open. The pole had a metal hook on it that ripped a four inch chunk of flesh away from my leg behind my knee. I remember seeing the fatty tissue, and the slow oozing of blood, flowing to the rhythm of my pulse.

I lived only one block from school, so I walked home, with blood sloshing in my shoe. My shoe was full of blood by the time I reached home. The doctor said I was really lucky. It was like someone grabbed all the fat on the back of my leg and peeled it away from my muscle layer. I was actually able to see my muscle fiber in there, covered by a thin transparent sheath. I was a bit worried when I looked at it after it happened. It only felt like a scratch. It was even stranger walking home, feeling completely normal and not having any pain, yet having the sensation of warm pools of liquid flowing down my leg.

Sometimes when it doesn’t hurt, it can be a cause of greater concern.

I also made my way into the abandoned section of a nearby College; used a grappling hook on that occasion. Someone spotted me on the inside of the abandoned building, and I about crapped my pants. I suppose it was some janitor in there wandering around in the dark. That was my last expedition, because I realized that at seventeen years old, the authorities would have little tolerance for such activities.

While living with my dad, I found adventure in the city, and occasionally in the summertime, I found adventure in the high Sierras with my dad and usually a friend or two of mine would come along as well. We would go camping at least once or twice a year, sometimes more. While my parents most certainly would not have approved of all of my various GI Joe expeditions in Fresno, when we went camping, we were actually expected to explore the wild, so long as we followed a few simple rules to keep from getting lost. And as dangerous as the GI Joe expeditions were in the city, GI Joeing in the mountains may have been even more dangerous.

I got sucked into a whirlpool during one camping trip. It took three people to pull me out. On another camping trip, I almost went over Devil’s Falls above Bass Lake. A sign near the top of the falls said 9 people died there, but I didn’t see the sign. The creek looked shallow and crossable where my stepbrother and I went across. It wasn’t, and fortunately my older brother Charlie was there to save us. He grabbed a tree branch, jumped out into the current, and swung past us and grabbed us before we were swept away and down the waterfall.

We’d spend hours hiking, fishing, rock-climbing and rock hopping up in the high Sierra creeks. I love the California Mountains.

On one camping trip my brother drank water from a stagnant creek with a dead sheep in it. A tree fell on the sheep’s neck while it was drinking water, because its neck was pinned under a fallen log, and only its bloated stomach protruded from the water. The bloated belly of the sheep looked exactly like a granite rock, and my dad stepped on it to get a look of the scenery. A strange noise of hissing gas was heard, and we all looked around, wondering where the noise was coming from. Finally my dad realized his foot was sinking on the sheep’s stomach. Fortunately he withdrew his foot before it burst through the skin.

My brother caught Appendicitis shortly after drinking the contaminated water, and we had to immediately rush him to the hospital in Bishop.

My dad didn’t walk like a normal person when we went hiking; he was on a mission, and the hiking was a force march. We would spend all day hiking into a place just to get a decent fish. When I was finally allowed to go hiking, I could barely keep up at first. My brother and I spent all day climbing a shale covered treeless mountain to get to Gable Lakes at the top, somewhere near Iron Mountain. We struggled trying to keep up with my dad. My brother was inadequately equipped, wearing a pair of thin leather moccasins, thinking he would be tough like the Indians. Charlie wore holes in them by the time we reached the top of the mountain, so he was essentially barefoot for the trip back down. As for me, I became wedged in a gulch between several boulders and a black cloud of mosquitoes descended on me. They were so thick I was inhaling them and getting them stuck in my eyes and ears. I was madly swatting and started yelling and hyperventilating in panic. My dad had enough mercy to turn around and come back for me that time.

By the time we reached the top of the mountain where Gable Lake was, it was ice cold up there, with nothing but thick rifts of snow everywhere. As for the lake, it was frozen solid, so we couldn’t fish. We wanted to build a fire to warm up before going back down, but we couldn’t because there was no firewood; the elevation was too high for any trees. My brother’s feet were a blistered up mess, and now they were frozen.

We had no choice but to simply turn around and go back down the mountain. On the way down, thick clouds blew in from the north and a thunderstorm engulfed us. We were so miserable by the time we made it back to the truck, my dad gave up on finding a camping spot that day and we spent the night in a motel in Bishop.

On another trip my brother and I ate some raw meat because we were starving out of our minds. My dad got sick of listening to us complain while we were hiking, so he fetched some chicken out of his pack, skewered it on a stick and burned it over a blazing fire. It was charcoal black on the outside and bloody on the inside, but we ate it anyway.

Most of our adventures in the mountains were arduous. For a little while there my dad got into cross country skiing. For those who don’t know, it’s much easier to begin with moderate downhill skiing before advancing to cross country skiing. We were so tired we could barely stand. Then my brother had to go to bathroom, and figured he could manage it without removing his skis. Mistake. He fell backward on his own pile of you-know-what.

Then there was the time when we were driving to our famous Mark’s Mine camping spot. While we ate lunch at Oakhurst on the way to the mountains, our dog Katie found a bag of Oreos in the back of the truck and ate the entire bag. Later on when we hit the dusty dirt road, my brothers and I were gagging in the thick clouds of dust kicked up from the road and billowing in through the back of my dad’s homemade camper shell. Like Arabians trapped in a sand storm, we had to cover our mouths with our shirts just to breath. If that wasn’t enough, Katie started acting up, fidgeting all over the back of the truck, then suddenly a burst of greenish colored diarrhea squirted out of her butt and sprayed me and my brothers. Instead of staying still, she panicked and darted to and fro, imitating the effects of a sprinkler system, spraying us and all of our camping equipment. She literally gushed with torrents of green liquid and occasional clumps. The putrid images of that incident are etched vividly in my mind. My brothers and I started pounding on the rear window of the cab, yelling at my dad to stop the truck. As soon as he stopped, Katie exited the vehicle trailing her green liquid as she went. My brothers and I then scrambled out, caked with a muddy mixture of dust saturated with diarrhea. Our camping gear reeked of diarrhea that entire camping trip.

Those reading this might wonder, what’s so fun about all this? My answer: absolutely everything! Camping trips are the spice of life! For men, camping trips allow us to get back to our roots, drop all the masks of society and inhale the barbarism that quietly dwells within us. As for any women that also enjoy camping, I can’t speak for their perspective as I can my own, but I know that nature has wonderful things to offer everyone. Women typically like camping when the environment and circumstances are more controlled, but men are more likely to view setbacks, such as getting vehicles stuck, unpredictable weather, and lacking the proper equipment, as opportunities to adapt and overcome with creative solutions. Even when the problems can’t be solved, getting through them is like being victorious in battle. Such setbacks are generally remembered as the highlights, which is why the majority of my memories of camping have to do with all the setbacks. And they are fond memories, indeed.

Campers are explorers, and engineers faced with all sorts of interesting challenges. Campers are also hunters. What they are hunting may vary, such as a particular location, or they may hunt for fish, or elusive game. But they’re usually hunting something.

All my early camping trips included fishing, and sometimes canoeing down the white water rapids of various rivers. When I turned fifteen, my dad bought me, my stepbrother, and my brother our own bows and arrows, and we went to an archery range, which was a blast. My mother tells me that my father is an outstanding archer. One time he shot a rattlesnake in the head when it struck at him and my mother.

Then when I turned sixteen, my stepbrother concocted an idea that strangely appealed to me. He mentioned his idea to me before going to our dad. “We should ask dad to buy us some rifles and we can go hunting.”

My early memories of everything my mother told me about guns and hunting popped into my mind. She hated guns, and I simply adopted her views back then, because she was my mother, and I believed her opinions about everything were correct without question. But a number of years had passed since I ever thought about my opinion of guns, so I had to readdress what I believed about them.

To begin with, I loved knives. I had over a half dozen of them. I also had a bow and arrows, which I loved to shoot. I further had a wrist rocket, which I was really good at. In fact, the only thing missing from my military repertoire was a rifle.

I went fishing, so I was already involved with hunting a particular species. Other thoughts entered my mind as well. All the meat I ate was once a living creature that was killed by someone. The only difference between the meat I ate from the store and the meat I would eat from hunting is that meat bought from the store was obtained from creatures that never had a taste of freedom, while meat hunted in the wild was obtained from creatures that at least experienced what life is supposed to be like. From the animal’s perspective, it’s better to allow an animal to be free and hunt for it, than it is to cage it up and slaughter it per some predefined schedule.

Various inconsistencies also entered my mind. My mother raised chickens, rabbits, and cattle, and I was no stranger to the killing and food preparation process. In this respect, I’m not really sure why my mother was so opposed to hunting since she personally killed with her bare hands, some of the animals she raised. My father also raised rabbits, and I saw him on occasion nail one in the head with a pipe. I didn’t enjoy watching it; killing it was simply necessary. I also loved teriyaki rabbit.

The more I thought about the idea of hunting, the more it grew on me. I eventually agreed with my stepbrother, and we went to my father with the idea. I ended up buying a twenty gauge shotgun, and a seven millimeter rifle. We went hunting pigs in Coalinga. We also hunted deer, but never shot any. Squirrels and quail were also on our agenda, but we had bad luck finding decent hunting grounds. The hunting process was still fun, regardless. Something mystical, ancient and tribal took place as I crept through the forest as quietly as possible with a shotgun in my hands, searching for prey. I felt the woods soaking through me; my ears were in tune, and my eyes peered in all directions. All senses were on full alert.

And as it turned out, I was also a natural marksman.

Chapter 4: Off to Basic Training

I was seventeen years old and still in High School when I joined the Army. If asked if I wanted to join the Army just one year earlier, I would’ve said “No way!” However, I underwent a transformation beginning around ten years old, and I ended up assessing my character traits as highly compatible with military service by the time I was seventeen.

When my friends heard I was joining, they weren’t surprised. In fact, I discovered that the majority of them figured I was destined for military service far before I ever conceived the notion. Let’s see, I wore fatigues all the time, had a proclivity for reconnaissance, stealth, and getting into and out of places that were nearly inaccessible, considered camping my all-time favorite activity, and had acquired a collection of survival gear that would have made Rambo jealous. The only item I didn’t have in my collection was a Geiger counter for surviving post nuclear war attacks, but I decided to belay that item since I learned how to use an empty coffee can to detect gamma rays.

I was also bored with all that city life had to offer, and was ready for the next level. Why risk life and limb, and possibly get arrested for climbing abandoned buildings when I could climb buildings with an M-60 strapped to my back after jumping out of a tank, and get paid for it?

“What sorts of things do you like?” the recruiter asked me.

“I like camping, hunting, rock climbing—sort of attracted to dangerous things I suppose.”

“The Infantry is just like camping, but on steroids. In addition to hiking, you get to ride helicopters, and repel out of them. You go through obstacle courses, and all sorts of fun stuff. The Army has all the best schools, and offers the widest variety of things to do. You will have a blast!”

For anyone that likes camping, note to the wise: the Army is NOTHING like camping. There are no campfires, no sleep, no fishing or hunting for food, no decent food for that matter, no relaxing, reading, exploring or rock-hopping, no leisurely swimming, boating, skiing, or…fun. There is, however, an excessive dose of cold, wet, hungry, and tired. The exception to this, of course, is blistering hot and near heat stroke, hungry and tired. Did I mention no eating? Oh yea, I said hungry; I guess that covers it.

I suppose if everything unpleasant were extracted out of camping, then that would constitute a small fraction of Army life.

As for hiking, there’s plenty of that, but it’s more like jogging, and always in the most unlikely places to walk. In the Army, when marching cross country, soldiers are trained to walk against the natural flow of the terrain, in the more inaccessible and less likely to walk places, because if there are any traps, they are always laid in the most likely to walk places. So if there’s a fairly simply ravine to follow to the top of a mountain, Army troops will walk on the side of the steep ridge rather than up the ravine. Or if there’s a semi clear forest with sparse trees on the left, but on the right, dense brush riddled with thorns, Army troops usually opt to crawl on their bellies through the brush. I’ve had a number of uniforms shredded when less than a hundred yards from a natural clearing. This would never happen while camping.

I believed my recruiter, thinking I was setting off to a prolonged, glorified camping trip, and the next thing I knew, I found myself on a bus bound for Fort Benning, Georgia. It was absolute mayhem the moment we arrived. The Drill Sergeants were barking like bulldogs at us newbie’s as we scampered off the bus, tripping and stumbling with our bags. I was expecting this, so it wasn’t any surprise. In fact, it was hilarious, and it took all my concentration to not howl with laughter. It’s strange how differently people take new and stressful situations. For me, none of this yelling was personal; it was simply part of the job of the Drill Sergeant to tear everyone down, before building everyone back up (except that I don’t remember any building up part). In any case, we were being prepared for a wartime environment, and everyone needed to be reading from the same sheet of music.

The first part of basic training was in-processing. There’s a saying in the Army: hurry up and wait. They would rush us like the entire planet was going to explode if we didn’t get to the next station on time, screaming at the tops of their lungs, shoving people and throwing things at us. “Move it move it move it move it!” they roared with such ferocity, and we tripped and piled on top of each other, scampering from one station to the next, only to stand in line for hours. Two hours; four hours; even six hours for some lines.

“What are we doing? What’s going on? Who is in charge here, why are we just standing here?”

“I don’t know,” was all anyone could say.

Paperwork was always in such disarray, mostly because of some ridiculous rules they were trying to abide by. “You have to do all these forms over again. Don’t you know you have to use black ink you *&^% idiot! You used blue ink, which is not authorized. Everyone knows that.”

Who ever came up with that stupid ink rule, anyway? Whoever made the ‘black ink’ decision had to be high ranking, because it applies to all paperwork in the Army. I imagine some general somewhere earned an extra star because of it; ludicrous.

Most of basic training was no big deal to me. As stated earlier, I was no stranger to hard work, and following orders. I never questioned either my mother or father, so basic curtsies and respect were simple enough. I was also in excellent physical condition, so I actually enjoyed the exercise, which was a complete joke (at first) compared to what I was capable of.

But a few things bothered me. I didn’t like the way some of the troops treated each other. Any large group of people clustered in cramped quarters is going to have problems, but in the Army, conflict extends beyond the statistical norm because of the addition of cultural clashes, racism, and guys with chips on their shoulders a mile wide. These complications mixed with a heavy dose of sleep deprivation and manufactured stress that would make otherwise good natured people irritable, created a rich environment of strife. But that’s what it was all about. It’s better to push people to the breaking point in a controlled exercise environment, rather than waiting to find out that they can’t handle excessive stress when lives are at stake in a real-world environment. I understood this reasoning, which helped me immensely to not take things personal.

But others in our platoon didn’t have this kind of understanding. Others like Fayhee, who was awakened for guard duty during the night one too many times. He whined and sniveled about how he wasn’t getting enough sleep, but the person waking him up had little pity because he wasn’t getting any sleep either. Every second Fayhee whined was one less second the person trying to get him out of his sleeping bag was kept from his beauty sleep. The guy picked up the bottom of Fahee’s sleeping bag and dumped him out on the hard cold ground. Fayhee then proceeded to grab a bottle of aspirin, then ran off into the forest and swallowed every last pill. He was promptly evacuated, but the bivouac continued on without skipping a beat.

Drill Sergeant Dickenson told us the next day, if anyone had a problem with guard duty, to please let him know about it, so he could double their guard duty shift. He then also added, “If anyone of you Heath Cliffs wants to kill yourself out here, please let me know about that too. I’ll make sure it gets done right, because I want to see everyone succeed in their efforts.”

Then there was another guy that wasn’t with us very long, so I can’t remember his name. He kept talking about how much he loved the idea of killing people. That was apparently why he joined the Army; he wanted to see combat and experience the feeling of murdering someone. He was trying to make people afraid of him, but I was simply irritated. I told him to stop talking and go ahead and try to kill me if he wanted to, because I thought if he really wanted to, he wouldn’t have wasted his time talking about it. He was extremely upset that I wasn’t afraid of him, and he’d say things like, “You have to sleep sometime.”

I’d say in return, “Why wait? Just do it right now, because I’d rather be dead than have to listen to your stupidity.” He eventually went to the Drill Sergeants and told them he planned on killing someone, anyone, if they didn’t discharge him. They gave him what he wanted, discharged with a Section 8, insanity. I think the whole ‘I’m going to kill someone’ routine was merely a ploy he used to get out, nothing more.

Another guy, Mustang, was discharged with a Section 8 as well. It happened while we were doing pushups to the point of muscle failure. A swarm of Drill Sergeants hovered around him while he was doing pushups, and they were all screaming at him in unison. He snapped, leaped from the ground and took a swing at Drill Sergeant Dickenson. I thought it was amazing that he didn’t have enough strength to do one more pushup, but had plenty of energy to throw a tantrum. He was on the ground eating dirt in a split second, with his arm twisted behind his back. Drill Sergeant Dickenson was once part of Delta Forces; no one messes with those guys. After he was calmed down, he was escorted back to the barracks, but he then had another outburst and threw his helmet at the Company Commander. That was all it took for him.

Two other guys should’ve been kicked out on Section 8’s, if the Drill Sergeants actually knew what they did. One guy paid Private Payne fifty dollars to bust his leg. Payne was a really comical black guy, and I remember him telling the story, busting up laughing all the while. “Are you serious? You want me to bust your leg for fifty dollars?”

“Please, I can’t take it anymore! I’d rather live with a limp than end up killing myself. Please have mercy on me and do this. I don’t want to get kicked out on Section 8, either, because that’ll ruin my chances of getting a job after I get out. I’ll just say it was an accident, I swear. You’ll be doing me the biggest favor of my life. I’m begging you.”

“Sure, why not,” Payne replied, and took the fifty dollars. The guy extended his leg, stretched out away from his side, and Payne stomped on the side of his knee, snapping his leg like a twig. “Wow, that was the easiest fifty bucks I ever made,” Payne replied while the other guy screamed and writhed on the ground.

He didn’t get a Section 8, but he would’ve if they knew what he did. As for the other guy that should’ve received a Section 8, he purposefully broke his own arm on his bed frame. How is that even possible? Something in that young man’s brain must have been broken for him to consciously injure himself to that degree. None of the antics we were dealing with warranted these extreme measures. I’m actually glad basic training weeded these guys out, because I certainly didn’t want my life to be in their hands if we were ever in a pinch together.

I generally dealt with problems by praying and quietly doing what I was told. Keeping my head down served me well in basic training. One week from graduation, during bivouac, Drill Sergeant Dickenson asked me what platoon I was from. “Your platoon, Drill Sergeant.”

“Hell, you must be a pretty damn good troop,” he grumbled half asleep. I believe that was the only compliment I ever received from any Drill Sergeant, but it was a compliment, and Drill Sergeants don’t give compliments. It goes against their nature. It’s like cats living peacefully with mice; it simply doesn’t happen. So I rank that comment of his like an award received at a formal ceremony with cheers, salutes, waving flags and confetti.

I had a full blooded Indian friend named Cypher, who was so far beyond everyone else with coping he didn’t seem to think there was anything difficult at all about basic training. He told us that when he was eleven years old his parents would drop him off in the wilderness with a pocket knife and leave him out there for two weeks. And here I thought I was the wild one. Survival was part of his cultural heritage, passed down from generation to generation.

Cypher had a weakness, though; he was overweight. The interesting thing about him, however, was that his weight wasn’t a hindrance. Drill Sergeants would cluster around him when people were dropping like flies during a run or while doing pushups. But Cypher could run really fast, and no one ever saw him do pushups to the point of muscle failure. He was as strong as an ox. The Drill Sergeants would be unfair to him during physical fitness testing, hoping to fail him because of his weight. They’d count only one out of every five of his pushups to discourage him, saying all kinds of insults amidst their counting, but he’d simply keep going without even pausing. They finally got tired of counting and simply let him finish the required amount to pass the test.

Cypher also did something no one else dared to do. At Fort Benning, the way to tell the difference between newbie’s from regular enlisted that are not in basic training was simply to look at their ranks. Taking this into account, when we went to the Post Exchange (PX) to get our mandatory haircuts, Cypher broke away from the group without being noticed and made his way to the clothing and sales department where purchased E-4 pin-on ranks (a rank low enough to be overlooked, but high enough to be left alone). Then late at night, when everyone was asleep except the guards on fire watch and a few Drill Sergeants wandering about, he’d stuff clothes into his bed to make it look like he was there sleeping. He pinned on the E-4 ranks and using his Indian ways, he snuck out past the guards undetected. He spent nights on the town, eating pizza, going to the movies and thoroughly enjoying his freedom. Some people are meant to be free and nothing can stop them.

I heard Cypher snuck out a number of times and never got caught. Others thought they were getting away with murder by buying M&Ms and smuggling them into the barracks inside their canteens. Even I thought I was the supreme rebel one night. When Chuck and I were assigned to watch the phone at the headquarters office all night, where they had a vending machine, we performed a reconnaissance of the area. When the coast was clear around midnight, we purchased a soda and snuck it outside into the bushes where we took turns drinking it. We were treating that soda like it was the most precious thing on the planet! But none of us could top Cypher’s bold, risky stunt that probably would’ve got him kicked out, (or rewarded depending on who caught him).

Then there was Kevin Guatney. His favorite activity was to see what kind of nonsense he could get people to believe. He lived in a dream world and wanted as many visitors to his planet as possible. He talked me into going into a night club with him once, which I hated. I don’t like night clubs at all. While we were there, he tried to speak with an Australian accent to some lady and convince her that he was from Australia. He wanted me to play along, but I wasn’t much fun for him. I thought the ploy was stupid. He also used to tell me that he was part of a select group of people whose consciousness is taken away to another world; a separate reality just as real as the reality we all know. He said every night before he’d fall asleep, a box would form in his mind, and he would step into it. Off he’d go to this other world, ruled by a man named Sharman. He told me with all manner of sincerity that he’d send the box to me, and when we awoke the next day, he asked if I was there, because he remembered seeing me. “No, man, you’re obviously dreaming,” I replied. Strange character, that Guatney was.

His story telling eventually came back to haunt him a year later, when he lent his cherry red Ford Mustang to Edward, a bonehead native of Guam. I liked Edward, who was nicknamed ‘coconut head,’ for obvious reasons. We had a few good laughs together, but he was such a complete idiot. He drank enough alcohol to knock out a rhinoceros, then raced Guatney’s Mustang all over the backyard of Fort Ord (20 square miles of training ground), until he rammed it into a tree. Instead of confessing to what he did, he dowsed the car with gasoline and set it on fire, completely destroying the vehicle beyond recognition. He then concocted a story for Guatney, saying that the engine simply exploded and made him crash into the tree. Everyone laughed at Guatney, amazed that anyone would be stupid enough lend anything to Edward, much less a cherished vehicle.

Quite a few people faced their inner demons in basic training. On the day we went through the confidence course, everyone was slightly surprised to discover that Bork, who was one of the few going to Air Borne school right after basic training, had acrophobia.

Then there was always at least one guy in every platoon who struggled with being overweight. Being overweight wasn’t a problem for Cypher, but it sure was for Glenn. Those Drill Sergeants were ruthless; they’d come into the chow hall and make a V-line for Glenn, knocking his food tray on the floor if they saw desert on it. Then they’d scream belligerently at him, calling him a fat body. They’d contrive the most painfully hilarious concoction of colorful phrases anyone ever heard, and it was nearly impossible to not laugh, as painful as they were to the recipients. But no one dared laugh, because laughing meant being subjected to the same treatment. Crank and Hicks found out the hard way about that. They were caught laughing, so the Drill Sergeant nicknamed Crank “U-G,” and Hicks “L-Y.” He then told them that whenever he said “Say it,” they had to repeat a phrase.

Crank would say, “Hi, I’m ‘U-G.’”

Hicks would then say, “And I’m ‘L-Y.’”

Then together they would say, “And together, we’re U–GLY.” It seemed a fitting punishment, with Crank’s ogre like appearance and Hick’s severe case of acne.

The insults were part of our training. The Drill Sergeant always yelled about having intestinal fortitude, which generally refers to being tough in all ways conceivable, although it could also mean intestinal strength, which would be developed primarily in those who were full of crap all the time. I suppose it would make sense for senior staff to always talk about having it.

“Sound off like you got a pair,” was another commonly heard phrase that began with Basic Training, and continued throughout the Army career. A special dictionary could be written for Army phrases. If someone was told “Left Face,” in a formation command and someone mixed up his movement and turned right, the predictable response was someone yelling, “Your other left!”

We were also instructed about the various meanings of “Yes Sir.” All Drill Sergeants wanted to hear was “Yes Sir,” but to motivate us to bellow loud and clear, “Yes Sir” could mean whatever we wanted it to mean, in our minds.

And of course, probably the most notable of all Army words is “HUA,” which some say is an acronym for “Heard, Understood, Acknowledged.”

Poor Hodge, he cultivated all these phrases, trying to sound off like he had a pair, and bellowing HUA with all his might, but it didn’t have much vigor with his childlike voice. Hodge’s inner demon was immaturity. Like a small child, he was extremely forgetful, and found it difficult following basic instructions no matter how hard he tried. Furthermore, he had a boyish complexion that most found irresistible to tease. He would’ve been the perfect model for a Norman Rockwell portrait of a boy eating cookies and milk being served by his mommy. When the barracks were inspected, he didn’t do something right with his wall locker and the Drill Sergeant knocked his entire wall locker over and then flipped his bed and proceeded to tear the rest of the barracks apart. We could’ve been seriously hurt by those Drill Sergeants. They pulled out dresser drawers and other various objects, and threw them as hard as they could, while we dodged left, right, and dove to the floor avoiding them. It’s a miracle no one was hurt.

After this incident, the very next day, Hodge left his wall locker unlocked, (a cardinal sin), and the Drill Sergeant threw another conniption. About two hours later, Hodge’s wall locker was found unlocked once again. The Drill Sergeant was so angry, he took all Hodge’s equipment and threw it out the window of the three story building for all to witness. It was one thing after another with Hodge, and tempers flared when the Drill Sergeants started punishing all of us for Hodge’s mistakes. I thought the poor guy might try to commit suicide like Fayhee, because he was dealing with a tremendous amount of stress with everyone constantly angry at him. He didn’t have a single friend. I talked to him a few times to try to cheer him up, but his trust had been violated so many times by people pulling pranks on him, he didn’t trust anyone, including me. Then a jerk named Munoz punched him in the face, and a fight broke out. I was glad to see him swinging back, but he was too angry to land any solid punches; too bad. At least he made it through basic training―kudos for Hodge.

For most people, inner demons come in the form of various fears, but for some, those inner demons can take the form of over confidence. Jim Calder for example, a natural born leader, exuded confidence, but his ego was off the chart. He was charismatic, highly intelligent and had a way with getting people to follow his lead, but sometimes he was a complete asshole. On the last night of basic training, he got into an argument with the biggest most muscle bound guy in the platoon, and said just the right combination of words to push the man over the edge. Before he knew it, Jordan connected his fist with Calder’s jaw and picked him up off the ground and flung his body over the full length of his bunk, where his head smashed into his metal wall locker. Calder was knocked out cold, and those who were watching thought Jordan might have killed him. They checked his pulse, and after slapping his face and splashing cold water on him, Calder finally awoke.

“Dude, I’m sorry I hit you like that. You shouldn’t have said those things. I lost control. Are you okay?”

“Who are you?” Calder asked. He had no idea who Jordan was, nor did he remember anything about basic training. The last thing he remembered was being at home in Corvalis, Oregon. Jordan started crying because he felt so bad about hitting him and he was worried that Calder might have suffered permanent brain damage, but Calder just looked at him and said, “Dude, why are you crying? I don’t remember anything you did.” Then Calder started crying, not because of the pain, but because he was upset that he couldn’t remember who anyone was. He was robbed of his entire experience of basic training. He couldn’t believe they were graduating the next day. Calder couldn’t stand the thought of going through a graduation ceremony the next day for completing a six week block of training he couldn’t remember.

His memory eventually came back during the graduation day. He even admitted to Jordan that he deserved the beating, and not to feel bad about it.

Chapter 5: Having What it Takes

A hunger for adventure was part of the reason I joined the Army, but a bigger reason had to do with a desire for independence, and ultimately, more freedom. Joining the Army meant I wasn’t going to rely on anyone from my family to support me at least for my three year enlistment. This appealed to me greatly. But little did I know that freedom was something the Army did not have on the menu. I quickly learned that soldiers are not free, so that the rest of society can be free. I wasn’t even free to eat a candy bar or drink a soda in basic training, much less take a walk alone in the evenings. Army basic training is prison, except the work is harder and the food is worse. No one is allowed to do anything without specific permission, and there is absolutely zero time off. Even a simple phone call was a limited privilege. Every hour of every day and night was allocated to a specific activity, and free time was nowhere to be found in that schedule. I thought life was strict under my stepmother’s rules, but the Army had home life beat considerably.

My stepmother might have thrown a fit or two over dishes not being cleaned good enough, but her antics didn’t touch the mind games the Drill Sergeants would play with us. For example, when we were given a wall locker inspection, a sheet of paper was handed to us that had a diagram of how everything should look in the wall locker. The flashlight in the picture showed the lens facing forward, as well as the on switch. In reality, however, the switch was on the side if the lens was facing forward. My wall locker was absolutely perfect, with all my socks individually canoed, all my clothing ironed and pressed flat as a pancake, no dirty laundry, shoes and boots polished to a gleaming shine, etc. But that flashlight was impossible to comply with because the diagram had an inconsistency. I tried to comply by turning it slightly sideways so both the lens and the switch could be seen, but this minor twist of the flashlight was all it took for the Drill Sergeant to completely demolish my locker when he laid eyes on it.

We had three Drill Sergeants with a fourth alternate from another platoon, and they all took turns with us for various days. They rotated their schedules in no particular pattern, so we never knew which one was going to be in charge for the next day. This wouldn’t have been any big deal, except for the fact that all four Drill Sergeants had specific requirements, many of which conflicted with each other. They each had a way they wanted the shoes placed under the bunks, they each wanted the laundry bag folded a certain way at the end of the bunk, and the list goes on. Every time they found something set the way the others wanted it, it meant multitudes of pushups, screaming, and a varied list of punishments to follow, such as cleaning the toilets, extra duty until midnight, skipping lunch in the chow hall, etc. The gist of all the mind games was simply to always have a reason to punish us and crank up the stress.

While all the Drill Sergeants were extremely strict and played their little games, one Drill Sergeant in particular disturbed me, because it was evident that some of his behavior wasn’t an act. Drill Sergeant Benson, the fourth Drill Sergeant who was rarely in charge of our platoon, had some serious problems. One morning while we were in formation outside, we could hear him in his office screaming at a beautiful young lady wearing a dress. She stormed out of the building, and he briskly stormed out after her. We thought he was about to start beating this woman right there on the spot. “Woman, you best understand who you’re dealing with here. I have power, real power. Watch this,” he yelled at her, then turned toward us. “Everybody drop! Now!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “Sound off! I can’t here you!”

When we dropped and started doing pushups, he singled out a few surprised troops and charged his massive, muscular frame toward them, making like he was going to kick them in the face. “Keep eyeballing me, and see what the *&^% happens to you!” He then turned and started yelling at the woman again, who was completely humiliated and somewhat scared of him. She slowly backed up and walked away. He continued to yell and cuss at her as she went, then turned all his anger and aggression on us and kept us doing exercise for the next two hours. Periodically he acted as if he was going to attack one of us.

Drill Sergeant Benson had an absolutely beautiful voice. When we ran in the mornings, he’d sing cadence in a perfect pitch, echoing his flawless voice throughout the base, amidst the buildings and in the humid morning air of the swampy countryside. “Oh let the cold winds blow; let ‘em blow, let ‘em blow. From the East to the West, Charlie Company is the best.” He held no reservations in his cadences, bellowing as loudly as he could, with a remarkable key. Another he sang was “One two three four, sweep mop, and buff that floor,” but when we marched near women, he’d change it to “One two three four, kick slap and beat that whore.” If they turned to see what we were singing, he’d change it back to “Sweep mop and buff that floor,” so the women would think they didn’t hear us right―or not.

But behind that beautiful voice was a silent rage. On another occasion, Drill Sergeant Benson was playing a game of pool with one of the troops from his regularly assigned platoon. He probably ordered him to play pool with him. About forty soldiers were crammed into the break room that night, which was a rare privilege for us to have. Benson had a knack for saying the funniest things, and making facial expressions and gestures that would bring anyone to tears, despite their fear of laughing around him. He was an incredibly gifted comedian―absolutely hilarious. This evening was perhaps one of the most jovial times we had in basic training, up until the point his opponent sunk his last ball in the corner pocket, thereby effectively defeating Drill Sergeant Benson; big mistake.

Drill Sergeant Benson started laughing hysterically. “I bet you think that was funny,” he replied, then said a few ridiculous remarks that made everyone laugh and lighten up. Then in a split second, he whipped his queue stick past someone’s head, nearly hitting him, and slammed it down on the pool table with a thunderous whack. “SHUT THE *&^% UP!” He roared, and the room was immediately silenced. He then grabbed the soldier’s shirt at his chest and shook him violently, yelling “I should *&^%ING KILL YOU!”

I was amazed at how perfectly he had command over his emotions. He was joking and laughing as if he were part of a comedian’s night club routine, then instantaneously snapped and started screaming as if his children had just been murdered. He literally had the look of murder in his eyes. Something inside me came to conclusion that that man was very unstable, dangerous even, and I always made sure to keep my distance from him. He played the roll of chaotic psychopath a little too well.

The Drill Sergeants were never pleasant, but I adapted fairly well. Most of them never noticed me, so I didn’t catch much flack from them. I was also adapting to the lack of privacy and the little mind games going on all the time, but probably the worst part of my basic training experience was not eating enough food. It was even worse than when I was living with my mom in Arkansas. Back then, I could eat a horse and ask for seconds. The only time I wasn’t hungry was thirty minutes directly following a complete meal, and that’s no joke. I maybe had three or four percent body fat. Constant hunger drove me insane more than just about anything else. My sense of smell came to life when I was in basic training. Usually I couldn’t smell a turd if one was stuck under my nose, but during basic, I could smell food all over the place.

Drill Sergeants would come into the chow hall and kick people out before they finished their meals. Sometimes they’d knock trays on the floor and such, and the first time I saw this happening, I didn’t wait to get to my table before I started eating. The old habits I had while living with my mom came in handy, and I started stuffing handfuls of food into my mouth just to get some calories in my body. Half my food was gone from my tray before I sat down. I rarely used the utensils; they weren’t fast enough.

Knowing my weakness for food, which was a bit easy to notice, a few soldiers in particular would always think up ways to taunt me. “Hey Milor,” Braggs called out one day, “You want my Pound Cake?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“Okay, bend over so I can pound it up your @$$!” he’d yell. Everyone would laugh, and as soon as the laughter would die down, he’d pipe up with another question.

“Hey Milor, I got some jam here. Want it?”

It was always those two stupid questions from Braggs; pound cake and jam. Everyone would howl with this ridiculous elementary school humor. Maybe it was worthy of a slight giggle the first time, but these guys howled like it was the funniest thing they ever heard in their lives, EVERY single time Braggs said it. Okay, whatever.

Sleep deprivation also bothered me, but I survived it at least as well as everyone else. My friend Chuck didn’t deal with a lack of sleep very well, however. It brought out his propensity for sleep walking. One night I saw him lying on his bunk with his arms stretched out in front of him, looking like he was rearranging an invisible wall locker. He was quietly mumbling something, so I approached him. “The Navy cap goes here,” he made a motion with his arms and hands as if he just placed something on a shelf.

Navy cap? We were in the Army, but he was talking about a Navy cap. I moved my hand in front of him and pretended to grab the invisible cap. “No, it goes over here.”

“Stop it, you’ll screw up my inspection,” he quipped and put the invisible cap back where it was.

“This doesn’t go here. You shouldn’t even have this,” I moved my hand in front of him again, pretending to grab something else.

“Cut it out, or you’ll get us both in trouble,” he returned, then meticulously replaced the invisible object back in its place.

On another night, I happened to be on fire watch, which was another excuse to deprive us of sleep. They’d make us pull guard duty shifts all night. They called it fire watch, not because the barracks were going to suddenly burst into flames, but because we had to get used to less sleep and pulling guard duty throughout our nights. Guard duty plays a large roll in the Army life.

During fire watch, I’d pace back and forth, and as I rounded the corner of Chuck’s row in the open bay barracks, I saw him standing in the dark next to his bunk. I paused and stared for a moment, wondering if he was going to go to the bathroom or something, but he didn’t move an inch. He just stood there, staring off into nowhere land. I approached him, stopped in front of him and stared into his eyes. He looked right through me. I waved my hand in front of his face, but he didn’t respond.

I had to sweep that night, so I fetched the push broom and approached Chuck. “Sweep,” I said, then handed him the broom. Like a mindless zombie, he grabbed the broom and started sweeping. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t do a very good job, but he actually swept his entire isle before he started to snap out of it. I quietly watched him, giggling the entire time. The light was on at the end of his isle, and under the light he finally stopped and looked down at the broom.

“Broom?” he mumbled, looking at the broom curiously.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I guess I’m sweeping? Why is everyone asleep? What time is it?”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“Why am I sweeping?”

“Good question. Why are you sweeping?”

Chuck got irritated with me, realizing that he was sleepwalking and I was somehow messing with him.

Sleepwalking can be a detriment to soldiers. It’s actually one of the questions they ask on the questionnaire at the physical processing center before joining the Army. If people sleepwalk without sleep deprivation or excessive stress, they’ll be even worse in the Army. Chuck was a case in point. Later when I went to my unit at Fort Ord, I heard about troops that fell asleep during long marches. They wandered out of formation during missions with nighttime land navigation exercises and ended up walking into trees, tripping over rocks and the like. For the most part, they only hurt themselves with scrapes and bruises, though I did hear about one guy that broke a few bones because he sleep walked over a cliff.

Sleepwalking incidents aren’t that uncommon when soldiers aren’t given enough sleep, but they can become dangerous when people are performing more functional tasks other than sleepwalking, such as loading and firing a weapon. Chuck went to Airborne school after Basic Training and didn’t stay with the majority of us, but his issues might have caused him problems later on if a supervisor found out about his condition. If he was functional enough to interact with me on a rudimentary level while sleeping, and hallucinating parts of his surroundings, he might have been functional enough to arm a weapon and fire it at someone thinking he was shooting at an enemy.

Despite the negative experiences endured in Basic Training, there were a few simple pleasures that I recall with delight. That soda Chuck and I commandeered from the vending machine, for example, was the best soda I ever had. And a few smuggled M&M’s tasted beyond delicious.