CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Boot Camp Boogie

Very early on June 20, 1955, my folks and I shuffled our feet in a group of other subdued young men and their parents, waiting for the unknown to arrive. I noticed some of the guys showed up without parents, and I felt silly around them. These were men, already on their own, I judged. I was anxious to be on the road, to get rid of these folks of mine too, to be on my own. The thing I didn’t realize till later is that the service does not put a man on his own. It’s just a Big Momma who shelters, feeds and clothes him and tells him even more severely what to do than parents ever did. As my drill instructor snarled, “When I tell you to shit, mister, your only duty is to ask, ‘How high?’”

Weeks before that morning, I had taken the entrance tests for the military and done pretty well. Many years after that morning, when I desperately wanted to know what my IQ was because I needed, I really needed, to be a genius, I found information in a psychology text that correlated my entrance exams for the military to standard IQ tests. I found I’m not a genius, that my IQ might be around 127 if the textbook correlation is accurate. Nearing 66, much more settled, I accept my IQ without bitterness.

Many people will laugh at my concern with my IQ, and I chuckle about it now too, but I think almost everyone struggles with real or imagined physical or psychological characteristics, and it takes maturity to be able to accept who we are, flaws and all. At that point in my 17 year life, how mature could I be? Unlike a nose that can be changed with surgery, an IQ is limited by genetics so, granted, my worry was truly laughable. What could I do about it anyway? But when I was in college, competing with other bright people for grades, on the curve sometimes, and for attention in the eyes of the profs. and fellow students, I did get fixated on my IQ, but I was obsessed with so many things at the time. I, like so many others in English programs all over America, wanted to write the great American novel and only a genius could do that. Right? In addition, I wasn’t very strong, I wasn’t courageous enough, women didn’t like me, blah blah, blah. Ah, well...! Anyhow....

A coach bus arrived, and we new recruits climbed on, after hugging mom and shaking dad’s hand, for a trip south to Cincinnati even though our final destination was to be north of Dayton at Great Lakes Naval Training Station or Great Lakes, NTS, up in the third largest city in the nation, Chicago. Chicago’s the stomping grounds of the legendary Chicago poet, Carl Sandburg, one of my wife’s favorite poets. Actually, the naval training center’s in Waukegan, north of Chicago, but I didn’t know the difference then.

In Cincinnati, our Dayton contingent joined up with recruits from northern Kentucky and from other southern Ohio cities and hamlets. In a large dusty room with school room chairs, we filled out and signed more forms, raised our starboard hands and swore to protect the United States of American from foreign enemies. We were issued chits to go down to a restaurant and eat lunch. It was my last “lunch” for four years. From then on, I ate “chow”. “Ceilings” became overheads, “walls” bulkheads, “front” forward and “back” aft, “left” port and “right” starboard.

At the restaurant, I called Sue from a pay phone. I thought it was the thing to do. I sensed a great movie moment in the making, to be heading out for the unknown and missing the woman you’re leaving behind and saying a last goodbye to her on a pay phone in a dirty dive, but the real conversation felt awkward, and I was disappointed when I hung up. She wasn’t sad enough, the moment not dramatic enough. Reality is always popping in to spoil the big moment.

Next we recruits walked to the train station and waited for a train. Some of us sat on the floor and played Blackjack for nickels and dimes. I think I won ninety-five cents. I felt rich, nervous and large. A breathless space opened up in my chest. I grew excited, like I belonged in any wartime movie I’d ever seen. This is what real men did: gambled, drank and went to war. Only I wasn’t old enough to go in a bar and get a drink (except the Arrow back in Dayton) and, sadly for me, there was no war. I’d have to find another way to die. Later, Frank Sinatra would show me a way. When the train chugged in, we all piled on and headed up to Chicago.

It seems to me we arrived in Chicago on the same day we boarded the train. I don’t recall spending the night on that train, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what we did when we arrived at Great Lakes. If we arrived that same evening, I don’t know what we did because it took all day to process into the camp. We must have been given bunks for the night outside the fences of the Training Center. Next day, we spent all day processing, getting oriented, assigned to a company, having heads shaved, given uniforms, lectures, indoctrination, and shots. Shots!

Now there’s one of my first memories about boot camp that stands out. They herded our company into a large room with tall, dusty windows on three sides. The line of men and boys circled the walls and some of us still strung out into the hallway. I was inside the room, leaning against a wall and joking around with the nearest guys, still very much the boy from Roz Young’s journalism class. One by one we would step up to get our shots. The doctor in white lab coat asked us to warn him if we felt like fainting. I laughed at the thought, and his eyes narrowed. He crooked his finger at me and told me to step forward....

Okay. I was scared. I took my place beside him.

“So you think it’s funny?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“We’ll see,” he warned. “Corpsman?” He reached out to take the hypodermic from his assistant.

I made a fist and cocked my arm in such a way as to receive a shot. The doctor made a violent motion as if to fling the needle into my shoulder. The needle stopped inches short of my skin. I didn’t flinch. I had told myself not to flinch or move. Like in the battle with the guys who wanted to pants me, I had to be brave before my comrades. I felt proud of myself not to have flinched. I’d be a legend in my company.

“Um,” the doctor said, “I guess shots don’t bother you.” Then he gave me my shot in a normal way, and I was through and went outside to wait with the others till the process was done. No one mentioned the incident then or ever. I remained a Nobody with a Nobody’s destiny.

One thing I really remember about the service: waiting in line. You had to wait in line for everything from getting shots to eating chow. Chow lines, pay lines, supply lines, movie lines, lines, lines, lines, lines. Sometimes lines led to complications which were painful. Lemme ‘splain....

A few weeks after our training began, we waited in line to get our teeth examined. My enamel was always soft, and I could be depended upon to produce cavities almost on demand. I had a doozy of a cavity in one of my molars. Slowly I inched along the dingy bulkhead in a dark passageway with the rest of the members of my company until I got my turn in the chair. With his little metal pick and absolutely no chairside manner, the Canadian army dentist who was being trained on us “boots” (thus, the meaning of “boot camp”) probed my teeth and then THAT TOOTH and the pain began.

A few lucky recruits got to return to the barracks, but they gave me a shot of Novocain and sent me into another line to wait to have the tooth worked on. They felt that letting a boot sit in the chair and wait for his gum to go numb would waste the trainee dentist’s time. Well, a couple of hours later, after the Novocain wore off, I found myself in the chair again while the trainee prepared to remove my tooth. They had no time to fill teeth in boot camp, I discovered. They pulled everything in sight.

The trainee needed more training. He snapped the tooth off at the gum line. Pain!

“Get the chisel,” his handler told him.

I really didn’t want to hear that, but again, I resolved to be brave, not to make a sound of pain, to be stoic as hell, stoic as any cowboy or Marine in any movie I’d ever seen.

Wang, wang, wang, the dentist hammered my tooth until it split into four pieces. I squeezed shut my eyes, arched and stiffened my back in the chair but remained silent as the trainee began to pry the pieces out of my bleeding gum one at a time. These minutes of pain belong somewhere in the top five moments of pain in my life, but I never let out a sound of pain, not a peep of a moan, though tears rolled down my cheeks, squeezed out of the corners of my eyes by excruciating pain. The pain didn’t stop when I escaped the chair. My cheek and jaw swelled and pain throbbed all afternoon after I got back to the barracks. I drank and spit blood for hours. We had no aspirins to kill pain in the barracks, and I had no idea how to report the pain and get to a corpsman. So, again, I decided to be stoic. I wasn’t going to complain to my fellow recruits. You just didn’t do that.

Speaking of stoicism or, you might call it, aggressive/passivism: back in junior high at Belmont, one of the tough guys from the in crowd had me face down in the dirt one time. He’d bent my arm up behind my back just about as far as it would go.

“Say, uncle,” he said. “Say uncle!”

With each command, he pushed on my arm, but I was determined not to give in. My arm slowly lost feeling and grew cold. I had him over a barrel because I realized my arm wasn’t going to hurt much longer.

“Go ahead and break it,” I grunted from my face down position. Dust puffed out from the ground under my nose.

At that point, I won the victory. Disgusted with my stoic pacifism, he got off me. It would not be the last time stoicism gave me a moral victory. More than once, I challenged people to hit me and offered no resistance. Usually, they couldn’t go through with it. These days, I’m not so sure the tactic would work. Guns are such an impersonal way to hurt others. Of course, like most quibbles from the past, I don’t know who the battle was with or what it was about. All I recall is my feelings and thoughts in the confrontation with another animal in the school yard near the jungle gym.


Once we arrived in our barracks where we lived for the next 9 weeks, some of the men probably came a little more into focus for me, but at this time in my life, I can remember very little about the personalities of my fellow recruits back then. So I cheated on my writing plan. I got out The Keel yesterday (October 5, 2003) which was the yearbook (or 9 week book) each graduating company received. In it are our pictures, shoulder/head shots as well as a couple of pages of pictures of groups of us going through various training exercises, and I recognize all the faces but I can’t recall beans about what my comrades said or did. Some of this lack of recall has to do with the stress of the situation and the driven pace we lived at, I’m sure.

We had several African American boots with us and two of them from Cincinnati got together to tap dance for us. One time, I started a spontaneous comedy routine about a male clerk at a lingerie counter. Everybody was so hard up for entertainment that any Nobody could draw a crowd. In a few minutes, I had a good crowd laughing in the hallway, maybe 30 or 40, about half of all the recruits in the 303.

Midway in training, I became Company Clerk, and I felt quite proud of that. The company was officered by three recruit officers, an Acting Chief Petty Officer, a Master at Arms who supervised cleanup details and a Company Clerk who logged the company in at all classrooms and functions and who kept the company rolls. Right at the beginning of our time there, the Company Commander asked if any of us had experience in military prep schools. The guy who volunteered that he had attended a military school was immediately designated ACPO, a sort of acting boot commander of the company. He was a preppy boy, a nerdy New Englander to us boots from the Midwest. I don’t recall how the other two boot officers were decided. This arrangement lasted part way through boot camp, then a weird thing happened.

One night shortly after we all settled into our racks, after “lights out” sounded, we heard someone climb onto the wooden picnic table in the center of the barracks. A disembodied voice began to tell us how he’d run away to get married just before leaving for boot camp, how he and his loved one just learned they were married by a fake priest and now she was pregnant, and he needed to send money to his girl for some reason or other. In short, he made a plea for money from his fellow boots. It was our ACPO.

An ominous silence settled on the barracks after the tale was told. I listened awkwardly, never having experienced such a frank disclosure of serious problems in my life. I was embarrassed for him. Then I heard bunks creaking as men climbed out of them. Locker doors opened with a clatter. Finally, a few coins sailed through the dark. I sensed they were pennies by their puny sound when they hit the table, the overhead, the deck. Probably a few even struck the ACPO. His silence filled the barracks, the table squeaked again, and that was the end of that, but a few days later a whole new set of boot officers were assigned, and I was one of them. At least that’s when I think I became the Company Clerk. I may have been Company Clerk all along, but the story of the Acting Chief Petty Officer is factual. I recognized his picture immediately in The Keel as well as the picture of the man who became the new ACPO, a totally different sort of cat with craggy face, wide smile and crazy eyes. The new MAA (Master at Arms), an Irish redhead, also looked and acted the role, and I suppose I fitted the nerdy clerk image.

The daily boot routine was designed to push us to function 18 hours a day at maximum stress. Sometimes, due to watch schedules and, specially, during service week (when our company took responsibility for maintaining the entire camp Moffet, i.e. cleaning the geedonk, the library, washing dishes at chow hall, walking guard duty for the larger camp) recruits struggled to study and work and do calisthenics with four hours sleep a night. Anyhow... I was exhausted almost all my waking hours and wanting to nod off in the middle of classes.

Every morning we recruits hiked out to a round of calisthenics and to a round of marching, to hours of classroom study, and to rounds of eating meals, always in ranks of men. Daily we cleaned our barracks and our clothes and ourselves to be ready for inspections, announced and surprise. We smoked only when the smoking lamp was lit and only at the single maroon-colored picnic table in the middle of the barracks. We hand scrubbed our gear with scrub brushes and laundry detergent and dried them on clotheslines out back in the U of the winged buildings. Each building was two stories tall, shaped like an elongated “H” which would hold four companies, two up and two down, connected by long central passageways. In our barracks, we were quartered 2nd deck, port side.

Recruit studies taught us to shoot straight, obey commands, handle small boats, make beds, pass inspections and tests, advance in grade, know ordinance and gunnery, damage control (how to handle fires), know the rates (jobs), follow military discipline and law, tie knots, keep clean, salute, march, obey commands, stand watch, man a helm, first aid, swim for survival, obey commands, spit shine shoes, obey commands, semaphore, name the nomenclature of ships, rifles and boats, understand command structure and recognize military insignia. I believe we even learned to recognize enemy (Russian) aircraft and surface vessels by profile and to obey lawful commands.

Recruits were clearly informed they could disobey a command “if” it was not a lawful order. When I saw the movie, “The Caine Mutiny”, I understood clearly what underlay the plot. Remember Fred MacMurray’s role in that movie? Fred should have gotten an Oscar for that moment when Keefer betrays his friends. I can still recall MacMurray’s uneasy twisting voice and manner as he backpedaled about his judgment that Captain Queeg lost control of himself at the crucial moment. What me, Keefer shrugs. What do I know about psychology? That moment is indelibly etched in my memory, that’s how good Fred’s acting was.

Every man in the camp was in competition with his fellow boots for favors and honors. If a man didn’t pass his tests, he could be set back to do the whole nine weeks over. But more specially, each company was in competition with other companies to win flags to carry in the battalion parades (marches). Our company was the 303. Each week, if I recall correctly, companies earned flags which could rotate from company to company as the honors changed hands. At the end of the recruit period, each company carried the flags they’d won for the whole nine weeks. Flags were awarded for academic honors, inspections, military drill, etcetera. Our company didn’t win a lot of flags. We did earn a drill flag and an academic flag at least once, but we had to drill one of our guys with an 85 IQ for the big test at the end of the week. Over and over, drilling the information into his head. He did okay, and we won an academic flag.

We all kind of lived aware of the “GI party”. Supposedly, this party was given to men who made the company look bad or who displeased the whole company in some way, like he wouldn’t stay clean or he wouldn’t study and keep the company grade point average up. It’s what “fuck ups” got for letting the company down. I never saw a GI party that I can recall, but you sneaked up behind the guy and threw a military blanket over his head and then beat him with bars of soap in socks or, if it had to do with cleanliness, a bunch of boots put him naked in the shower and scrubbed him with standard issue, stiff bristle scrub brushes. This was a rumored punishment. I never saw one, and they would have been illegal if observed by higher ups, but I think rumors like that are allowed to float around just to intensify the pressure to do well.

All this macho stuff inspired me to pull another trick similar to the one I pulled at Harry’s Parkview Pharmacy. One of our exercises at boot camp was to learn to survive a gas attack, to learn to put on a mask and stand in gas without panicking. To this end, they herded us into a dilapidated wooden structure with a dirt, I think, floor. We were told to put on our gas masks and then tear gas was pumped into the structure. After the shack filled with visible gas, we were told to take off our masks and get a whiff of tear gas. We did, and it became a test of wills to see who could remain the longest in the gas. In fact, I think the instructors encouraged the test of wills. For some reason, I could, again, withstand the effects of the gas longer than most. Finally, the instructors forced the two or three of us still within the gas to emerge from the building. We’d passed the test with macho honors, I remember feeling, and I was, as usual, proud.

Pressure to “measure up” to the group is quite effective with immature males. I had a friend who used to work on railroad gangs, laying and straightening track in the desert lands of Eastern Washington and Oregon. He swears the tactic of the bosses was to get the group into a rage so they’d work like a mess o’ demons to prove their worth to each other, mano to man. He said most of the men drank a lot too, and with hangovers going for them, they got into a frantic state of rage and pain where it was kill one another, kill themselves or put that energy into track laying. He was on a gang which one day set a record for miles of track laid. During that record breaking stint of work, one of the alcoholics cracked. They found him hanging from a tree just around the bend one morning.

Recruits often long to get out of the service after a few weeks of boot camp. I know I was miserable and frightened under command. They had me scared, but I don’t know what of. I was young, away from home for the first time, and under the command of a heavy drinking Petty Officer First Class who was our company commander. He came in red faced and smelling of alcohol often. He was probably a veteran of WWII or, at least, Korea, a Captain Queeg of lesser rank. One time, when my marching wasn’t going so well, he kicked me in the shins. Not bad, since my shins were wrapped in standard canvas leggings. Actually, I thought it was sort of funny, which is often how I handle aggression coming my way, but you don’t laugh at a time like that, and it did make me nervous to be bossed around by someone who I thought was dumber than me.

Rumors also circulated about suicide attempts at other barracks than our own. We heard that a boot had dived out the second story window of another barracks and broken his neck, but since there was little contact between companies, we had no way of confirming the report. I think we all could believe it because, for many of us, being away from home and being driven like that was a new experience. Maybe more than one man let the thought of suicide or madness linger for a minute or two in his mind. I didn’t. My breakdown had to wait till years later when my pain threshold was breached. I was scared and lonely but not desperate in boot camp.


Day by day, the weeks ground themselves away. Sunday, recruits went to a nondenominational church service. I don’t believe they could require us to go, and so, I think, if a boot didn’t want to go, he was allowed to sit outside the chapel on benches by the wall in the huge quonset hut, drill hall where companies drilled during inclement weather. And I have a memory of doing just that, but my memory is very vague on it so I’m not sure. I claimed to be an atheist at times during my military service. It cost me a girlfriend one time in my last year of service, but I don’t know what my beliefs were during my boot training.

I liked to walk camp watches at night. The base patrol had to walk his rounds within a certain time limit and check in at the guard shack at the end of each round. I found an open door one night and went into a dark office building and sat in a chair for a little bit and enjoyed the comfortably anxious feel of a dark, empty building around me, just like I always did and do. Whether or not I looked for spare change in desk drawers I can’t recall. I think I reported the open door at the end of my round. Later, I got to thinking they may have left a door open on purpose to check if the guard was really trying the doors he was supposed to be checking.

Eventually, the 303 took it’s turn at service week. We hardly slept that week. My part of service week was to clean and to supervise the cleaning of the gee dunk (snack bar) and the toilets and floors of the main building. Because the job was so immense, other boots were assigned to the building every night and the service team had to supervise them. Lots of sweeping and plunging and moping. It was my first experience inside a woman’s bathroom too. I had to empty the little metal containers for used feminine hygiene products. Sometimes they really stank. That’s one thing I remembered for a long time but had forgotten until this moment in the autobiography. For years now, I’ve found no other reason to be inside a woman’s toilet.

Once a week, on , the service team for that week had to clean, wax and buff the snack bar’s linoleum deck. Navy shoes left lots of black marks on that linoleum, and before putting down the wax every black mark had to be steel wooled off it and the old wax stripped from the deck. Somehow I found myself leading the team whose job it was to get the gee dunk floor scrubbed, waxed and buffed. The extra help lasted only until ten o’clock or something like that, then they returned to their own barracks. Right off I saw they weren’t motivated to get things done. At the rate we were going, we’d be into next week before we finished.

Now, being the kind of guy I was, I didn’t know how to boss people around to get things done, so, remembering my Tom Sawyer, I thought I’d try to make the work as fun as possible and also to try and get the guys to want to work for me because they appreciated how I treated them. So I fed lots of my hard earned money into the juke box, cranked it up and tried to get an atmosphere of joyous energy going. Well... with some of the boots it worked pretty well, and they set to with a will, but there were some hard cases, “street wise city kids” was my thought, like the bullies around McGee Street I’d had so much trouble with. They just fucked off and wouldn’t respond or they worked to a minimum standard. When the help went back to their barracks, we still weren’t done, and our service week crew was exhausted when we finally did finish and return to the barracks for a few hours sleep. Luckily, this was at the end of service week and we could soon return to our normal 6 hours sleep at night.


For some reason (my retirement in nine days?) last night (October 7, 2003) I was thinking about epitaphs for my tombstone. I liked best, I’ve said all I’m gonna say!

Eventually, our time at boot camp came to an end. If we were in good standing, we got to take a leave. I guess it was sort of a practice leave, like a gob would take from any ship he was stationed on. I believe we had a choice as to what city we wanted to go to: Milwaukee, Waukegan, Chicago. I chose Waukegan. Don’t know why. The sound of the name? Maybe I was a little bit afraid to go into the larger city of Chicago? All I remember about it is wandering around Waukegan’s city streets which were like any streets in America and, then, going to a dusty USO building, something like a “Y” with rugs, marble and palms, on a quiet side street where nothing was happening but pool playing and ping pong. I think I had the movie “Stage Door Canteen” in mind when I went to the USO. But things had of changed between wartime America to 1955. There weren’t lots of beautiful starlets in Waukegan to fall in love with. I may have talked to one of the women behind the counter near the entrance; I do recall sitting bored on a couch in the lobby, staring at the gray, maroon, black pattern of the tile floor.

In our last week at boot camp, since I was one of the top students, me and a couple of other recruits with good grades were called to a special meeting. Not knowing whether we were in trouble or what, our little group reported to the indicated quonset hut. When the officer came in, he told us we could be candidates for flight school if our vision was good enough. I’d been wearing glasses to see blackboards ever since I was twelve years old. Discovering I couldn’t see blackboards and buying glasses was one of the fixes my folks tried when my grades started to fall in school. When I mentioned my glasses which I wasn’t wearing, I was immediately dismissed. Disappointed, I went back to barracks.

Soon, all us boots about to be promoted from Seaman Recruit to Seaman Apprentice got to put in for the duty we wanted and the schools we wished to attend. We got to put down three choices, but I don’t remember what I put down. One of them was Sonar School. That I do know, but I think it might have been my 2nd choice, not my first. Anyhow, when the paperwork came in, I was assigned to Fleet Sonar School in Key West, Florida.

My folks came up for graduation day at Great Lakes NTS. The graduating companies paraded and, then, we got leave to go home for a couple of weeks and money for plane tickets to our destinations. I think.... That’s how travel was usually handled. If I remember right, we were never issued plane tickets. We’d get travel pay and per diem for traveling from one duty station to another. Pay was always for just a little bit more than we needed. The money was always sufficient for our needs. Some guys would take the money and, then, look for military transport. Trouble with that is that officers could bump you and there had to be room for you.

My take home pay was something like $86 a month as a Seaman Apprentice (SA). I was also having a U.S. savings bond taken out every month.

At home, they took pictures of me in my uniform which I still have; the pictures, not the uniform. I look so young and goofy. If ever there was a dorkotype, it’s the picture of me in my baggy, Navy whites, hat cocked silly on my shaven head. I looked like a kid, playing sailor.

I don’t remember much about that September leave. I don’t remember much about most leaves, but, like most of them, I was restless from the get go, ready to take off again a couple of days after getting home. That’s the way it was for me in those early days. When I was home, I wanted to be gone. When I was gone, I wanted to be home. I never felt at ease anywhere I was in those days.

My folks and Sue took me out to the Dayton International Airport at Vandalia, Ohio. Vandalia’s where the Grand National Trap Shoot used to be held every year. Out I go, stepping briskly in my white uniform, out to my prop driven plane to fly down to Key West. In those days you walked right out onto the wide tarmac and up steps into the side of the flying bird and into the stewardess’s always beautiful, youthful smile, and away you went. It was for me like being offered a ride on a magic carpet ride.

If I recall correctly, there was no airfield at Key West. We flew into Miami, I think, and we took a Greyhound from Miami on our own to get to the base. And my best estimate is that I was on my own from the moment I landed in Miami, and I had to seek out the bus station, and buy a ticket to Key West and, then, find the base on my own and report to the gate and show my travel orders, and then a small bus or jeep did show up at the gate to take me to my temporary billet until permanent quarters were assigned next day or in a day or so. All this being on my own was pretty large for a still 17 year old, though almost 18. I can recall I was always a little anxious when I was traveling in and out of strange airports and cities and duty stations. I suppose I always expected to get lost. I suppose I always wanted some mommy to be there to show me where to go.

Truth is, I had been deeply influenced by John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart and war movies into trying to be a swaggering macho sort of guy, but I was, actually, still a home body, a middle class kid, though I couldn’t see myself clearly when I was in the midst of this period. I so wanted to be anything but what I was.