"Peace"

In February of '91 I was flown down to Ft. Benning, Georgia to start Basic Training at twenty two years of age after talking to a recruiter and dropping out of my senior year of college.  I arrived at Reception Battalion on Sand Hill with long wavy hair and rounded John Lennon glasses.  The dreaded hair cuts/head shavings were on day two or three and during those first few days I picked up the nickname "Peace" from the other soon-to-be basic trainees.  We were a strange mix of shorn and unshorn young men caught between worlds of civilian and soldier.

Because I had three years of college I was given the rank of E-3 or “Private First Class”.  They put me in charge of six other young men and expected me to get them to formations and march them to the various appointments necessary to begin Basic Training.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I left-faced them when it should have been right.  I gave commands while in the parade rest position, not knowing I needed to be in the position of attention before doing so.  I had to make up the fire watch list that involved one hour shifts throughout the night of someone walking between the bunks with a flashlight.  Because I had no real authority if the shit was going to roll it was going to roll uphill making me the focal point of everyone’s frustrations.

It was a very dark time for me and something I had not anticipated.  I'd naively thought I would show up at Ft. Benning and be immediately immersed in yelling Drill Sergeants and crawling through mud.  This in-between place was lonely and interminable.  To make matters worse, the cohort of seven men I was a part of was an anomaly.  Everyone else was in a group of thirty or more and rotated through every 3-4 days.  Because my group was so small, they had a hard time getting us out to one of the Basic Training units and as a result we were there for ten of the longest days of my life.

At least a few of the six men in my group were what I'd consider to be of the criminal element from stories they shared of their backgrounds.  Whenever I'd screw something up they would make vile threats and demean me with the crudest of language.  Unlike Basic Training, there was no close oversight by a noncommissioned officer and so it felt like being in a sequel to the Lord of the Flies.  And in our culture of growing sexualization, these guys were the shock troops.  Every moment of downtime was spent talking of sexual exploits, both real and imagined.  To hear tell it, every female existed simply to fulfill a male's sexual fantasies and no perversion was too far out there to be the object of discussion.  My refusal to participate further isolated me, though there were a few who later showed me a begrudging respect for not going with the flow.

At some point I found time to send out a distress call to my older sister from a pay phone.  I don't know why I chose to call her over my parents, but when I heard her voice I immediately and involuntarily broke into tears that grew to sobs as I tried to speak.  Growing up our relationship had been adversarial to say the least, but that moment was the beginning of a change that continues to benefit me and my family.  It made that momentary experience of a perceived endless hell bearable and sowed seeds of healing in our relationship as brother and sister.  Those troubled young men had unwittingly acted as a catalyst for me to see her in a new light and for that, I remember them fondly.

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