Part Eight: Summer of Suck

I arrived at Camp Lejeune in May to begin my summer of Personnel Student Input before I started my official training to become a field medical technician. On paper, this is a great idea because it gives budding 8404s (the enlisted classification for the job) the chance to experience what their unit does firsthand, becoming a part of the unit enough that when they come back from FMTB, they can jump right in without any learning curve. In reality, it is an utterly miserable time. You’re stuck wearing the Navy blue camouflage uniform in brutal Camp Lejeune heat and humidity, constantly being interrogated by Marines as to what the hell you are, losing any credibility you might have had when you have to admit you’re just a boot. Most of your leadership treats you like shit as a way to get you ready for the instructors down at Camp Johnson to continue treating you like shit. I have tried hard to block this summer out of my memory, aside from one or two things, such as the memorable incident where the M4-toting guard at the main gate refused to believe Great Lakes was an actual military installation, subjecting me and my passenger to a search and interrogation at the side of the road before his dispatch convinced him that it was indeed more than “just the lakes, dude”.

(I should take a moment to say that, even though I was still in the Navy, I will frequently talk about the Marine Corps and use terms like “in the Marine Corps”, because many of the oddities and experiences I had at Camp Lejeune are endemic to that particular organization.)

I was also introduced to the Marine Corps phenomenon of vehicle inspections. Many states have vehicle safety inspections (although Louisiana’s, in many cases, amounts to paying a guy at a Shell station $20 for a two-year sticker), but the Marine Corps version takes on a different form. Before any four-day weekend or leave period, your E-6 (who may look like the offspring of Dana White and Jim Cantore) will take one look at your $300 car, with its broomed-on Rustoleum paint job and mismatched interior, and his first question will be, “Why the fuck are you still driving this?” His inquiries will take on ever more rhetorical forms, as if he’s never heard of an E-3 fresh out of boot camp (even if you are nearly two years removed from boot camp) who knows how to work on a car older than he is. He will ask you how much money you have saved up, believing that you’re too naïve to not see right through the logic that a more expensive vehicle saves on repairs. This irony is best appreciated when you’ve just come out of a two-hour personal finance class where you’re told that any decision involving money or credit is a poor one, since after all, your number one reason for being here is to go to war to die. I would have thought that, being a command entirely composed of corpsmen and Navy medical officers, there would be more common sense at hand about such things, but I was proved wrong. Having normal adult human problems is something the military is simply not equipped to handle.

As I had at Dam Neck, I was tempted a time or two to get a newer car, one which wouldn’t attract as much unfair ribbing before every 96. Like any military town, Jacksonville has no shortage of shady “BUY HERE PAY HERE” and “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” car lots, all of them eager to cash in on the guaranteed money of service members. With all respect for Marines, the typical junior Marine does not use their first credit approval on the most practical or tasteful of vehicles, and most of these lots were stocked with body-kitted-up Mustangs, Civics, or two-wheel-drive pickup trucks with suspension lifts and big tires on big wheels. I didn’t find any of these vehicles interesting enough to take a long-term commitment on. Most of what I was interested in was either overpriced, a polished turd, or both. I came close to handing in the Electra for a 2001 or so Park Avenue Ultra, but the dealer tried to tell me that the whining power steering was actually an artifact of the supercharger, so I walked out on that deal.

I was slow to begin exploration of the world outside of Camp Lejeune. My barracks was six miles from the main gate, which took almost an hour to get out of on some weekdays (this was before I discovered the other gates out of the base) and the “it’s just the lakes, dude” incident made me wary of passing through it lest I get interrogated by another M4-toting guard who went to the Marine Corps school of geography. I had also learned the hard way of the existence of the “blotter”, a report the local police agencies send to the base commander every so often on service members who commit infractions out in town. I was unpleasantly lectured on the importance of sticking to the speed limit, and how lucky I was that there was a new commanding officer, because under the old regime even my 49 in a 45 would have had me reduced in rank and thrown on restriction for 45 days. Since I felt I was being treated like one anyway, I went back to my high-school freshman hobby of playing video games, figuring it was less risky than going out and driving the car I paid for with my own money and worked on with my own hands.  

In August, coincidentally the same day I arrived at Great Lakes for boot camp two years earlier, I headed across town to Camp Johnson to report to Field Medical Training Battalion, where I was reintroduced to 80-man rooms, squad showers, and marching everywhere in stifling heat and humidity. The day-to-day grind at FMTB was no less miserable than PSI, but it did feel good to put on my Marine desert cammies on for the first time. Finally, the feeling that my career was going somewhere and I might even become someone! Eager to get out of the squad bay and the depressing run-down industrial confines of Camp Johnson, I returned to the Buick, taking tentative trips down U.S. Highway 17 to Wilmington, then up it to New Bern, and driving all over the Jacksonville area in between. The Buick would turn out to be an ideal U.S. 17 vehicle, and this was just the first few of many, many miles the two of us would plie on its length through the Mid-Atlantic.

Part Seven: The Electra's New Clothes

After my grandfather’s death, combined with my beloved Buick’s surprising spate of unreliability and the continuing downward spiral of my military career, I rediscovered alcohol, thanks to a recent and unexpected move to the “cool” barracks, Building 550, where alcohol was allowed. It had been quite some time since IS students were allowed to live in 550, but since I had been on hold so damn long, the barracks managers took pity on me and found me a room there. Sure, my room in 550 was smaller, my shower didn’t drain all the way, and no electronic signal could pierce the walls, but I felt like I had finally made it, allowing the legend that had built around me and my circumstances to grow. And now that I had access to booze (even though I was still underage and could get in a lot of trouble if I had a particularly bad night), I had another outlet for my resentment and disillusionment, albeit an unhealthy one. With no one to go with me and a little wary of what might break next, I didn’t take the Buick on any extended trips, just driving it to and from the schoolhouse and the occasional trip out to Lynnhaven or Norfolk.

In November, right around Thanksgiving, I got the final word. I was being denied a top-secret clearance. Since I needed one to go to ‘C’ school, that also meant that I would no longer be an intelligence specialist. As I was escorted out of NMITC for the last time, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with my future, except that I was, at least in my head, effectively done with the Navy. I transferred to the base training command hold, where most of my days consisted of sitting in a classroom all day, trying to find the one spot in the room where I could get cell signal, punctuated by the occasional manual-labor working party. I met with a career counselor who provided me with a handful of ratings I could transfer into, I told them that at this point I really just wanted to be out, but I was reminded of the fact that I had given the Navy six years of my life so I had to pick something. My options were undesignated seaman/airman/fireman (a phenomenon unique to the Navy, one can opt, or be forced, into a general job group and have the opportunity to move into a specific rating later), hospital corpsman (military medic), dental technician (an extension of the last), engineman (diesel mechanic), and musician (which required an audition so I didn’t bother with that). I originally chose engineman, given my decent abilities spinning a wrench, but that rating closed up before my orders were finalized and I ended up deciding upon hospital corpsman. I was not looking forward to being in a job I had no interest in, and which had a 95 percent chance I would end up in Iraq or Afghanistan, but everyone above the rank of E-5 I spoke to seemed to be positive about its career opportunities, and I felt that it certainly beat going deck (undesignated) anyway. I packed up the Buick and left Dam Neck for the last time the week of Christmas.

At the time, the ‘A’ school for hospital corpsmen (hereinafter referred to as “corps school”) was located at Naval Station Great Lakes, north of Chicago. I had already been there for boot camp in the summer, but I had never experienced a true Midwestern winter. With all the work I had done to it over the past several months, it would certainly make the trip just fine, but the car had never (as far as I knew) experienced the wonders of road salt, applied to the roads by the cubic acre in the part of the world I would be spending a winter in. The original champagne paint, rough when I bought the car three years earlier, had now worn all the way to bare metal in some spots. Most of the hood by the windshield was now bare, surface-rusted metal and the roof was almost completely so. The landau roof had no length more than a quarter of an inch between brittle cracks, many chunks of vinyl or whatever it was made of had peeled away. Taking advantage of temperatures hovering in the 60s and 70s (pretty typical for Louisiana in December), I went to Home Depot and bought out their entire stock of Rustoleum paint in Safety Red and Flat Black, as well as a massive supply of duct tape and Rustoleum Leather Brown. I took the car through the cheapest setting on an automatic wash (the only time it was ever washed) to get all the pollen and road grime off, then parked it on a couple of blankets I got on clearance at Wal-Mart and set to work.

Automotive paint is best applied by stripping the car to bare metal all over, applying a coat of primer, and then spraying the color on. I had simply bought a selection of rollers and brushes, with which I broomed on a couple coats of Safety Red to the body of the car, even using some detail brushes to get in between the logos and around tight spots. On the underside, anything that wasn’t directly involved with the performance of the running gear, or keeping it affixed to the body, was hit with a thick smear of the Flat Black. My work with fixing the landau roof was equally ghetto fabulous. I used four full rolls of duct tape making a staggered lattice structure over the destroyed vinyl, taking care to tuck sufficient edge under the top’s edges, then threw on a couple coats of the Leather Brown. If the Buick wasn’t ugly before, it was certainly ugly now, with the red having an even rougher texture than the destroyed clearcoat had, and even under the paint, one could clearly see the intricately latticed duct tape work on the landau section. Of course, I loved it, because I had done it all myself.

I needed the excitement and sense of accomplishment that re-painting my entire car by myself gave me, because around that same time, I called an end to my longest and most meaningful relationship, my relationship with Kirstie. Before kicking me out of the building, the NMITC special security officer gave me a copy of my complete investigation report, of which nearly a full page was the investigator’s opinion of my interest in furries, which Kirstie had described in detail. In hindsight, I knew it was not her fault because she couldn’t have known the damage that did to my career, but at the time I laid all the blame for everything that happened to me on her. Although I would continue to appreciate them, I also ended my active participation in the furry community. I kept my Anthrocon 2008 badge hanging from the rearview mirror as a token of the first big trip I took in the Buick. It was now the one companion I had left, and with my entire life in its trunk, I hit the road bound for my new future as a corpsman.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I headed north on I-55 and I-57, where the temperature fell as steadily as the miles clicked by on the odometer. The stories I had heard about the Great Lakes training commands from the engineering and gunnery ratings I met while on base hold, that the instructors were actually boot-camp company commanders who moved to the school side (true for most of those schools, they are called “SDCs”), along with the impression that corpsmen are basically just slightly-diluted Marines, made me look forward to my time there even less. There had also been a great deal of confusion as to whether or not I needed a secret security clearance to be a corpsman. Since I had lost my clearance eligibility entirely in the hullabaloo at Dam Neck, I fully anticipated another long-term hold at Great Lakes, under the corframs of a much less pleasant regime.

My anxiety levels through the roof after passing by boot camp and a Marine reserve command I thought was corps school, I arrived at the actual command late at night after some 13 hours on the road. I was chided by the chief petty officer on duty for not reporting in dress uniform, so I had to go back out to the parking lot several blocks away in the 15-degree cold to retrieve it. After waiting in the freezing lobby of another building to get linens, I was given a room with two other students in a decrepit barracks with squad showers, no Internet, and walls so thick no electronic signal could penetrate them. The big slap in the face would come when I was informed that, since I was an E-3, and even though I had come from another command and had been in the Navy for a year and a half, I would be stuck on Phase 1 liberty until two weeks after I classed up. That meant I was not allowed to wear civilian clothes, or drive or ride in a personally-owned motor vehicle. It may just be me bitching, having lived pretty softly for a year on hold and now exposed to a real military training command, but my motivation had hit a new low.

The world of corpsmen is substantially different from the rest of the Navy, not least because of its strong connection to the Marines, but also given that it is a rating that allows one to be everything from a desk clerk to a mortician. I felt that most of the instructors there were assholes, but they had earned everything they had, including the right to be complete assholes to students. It was immediately apparent that I did not fit in with this culture, and it showed. Even though I wasn’t technically allowed to, I would drive the Buick to the USO or the Exchange, mostly so I wouldn’t have to walk out there in service uniform in 15-degree weather. I eventually classed up by the end of the month, which felt like the longest month of my life. My instructors immediately seemed to dislike me. I made little attempt to hide the fact that I was wholly dissatisfied with my new environs, and my effortless grasp of the material at hand made me an idiosyncrasy that they could neither understand nor break. There was also the inconvenience of helping me get my car properly registered for base. In the entire year I was stationed at Dam Neck, I had never been able to get permanent base registration decals, since I was at a “temporary” command (I ended up getting five 90-day base passes while I was there). Their irritation was evident as they guided me through the necessary steps to get everything done.

Once I passed the second test and got my Phase 2 liberty, I found that having a car, even one as ugly as mine, made me a very appealing friend to have at corps school. My fee was significantly less than what the cabs charged, and my car was probably a lot more comfortable than the urban-warrior cabs that lined up at the Metra station across the street every Friday evening. Although weekend-long stints of barracks duty limited my Buick adventures, I spent as much time as possible in it and off base. Wanting to avoid the instructors and company commanders at the Gurnee Mills Mall, just up U.S. 41 from the base, I began broadening my horizons, offering trips out to the other suburbs, mostly to the substantial mall in Schaumburg or up 41 and 94 to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Buick offered a degree of anonymity, appearing to be just another ghetto hooptie while in the shady environs outside the base, or a winter beater that hadn’t been parked yet in the nicer areas to the west. After I removed my “UNITED STATES NAVY” window sticker and license plate frame, no one would have been able to tell that I or my passengers were military, even with my out-of-state plates. My MasterCraft Avenger tires (bought just as much for their 440 treadwear rating as their awesome redneck-chic raised white letters) never had a problem with the snow or the barely-improved roads around the area, and if my self-applied Rustoleum undercoating wasn’t doing the job I hoped it would, I wouldn’t find about it until much later anyway.

I maintained a high class average, always staying in or near the top 10 out of the roughly 60 students in my class. I never studied outside of class, simply paying attention to each instructor’s generic lecture style and reading ahead in the book was enough for me, although the brief wait between submitting my tests and receiving the grade was always a bit nerve-wracking. About two-thirds of the way through the course, it became time to pick orders. As a fleet returnee, I knew I would have a different pick of orders than the new students, so I was looking forward to a quiet clinic or small naval hospital in a decent area. Almost all the new male students in my class got orders to Marine divisions (infantry), and when the detailer segregated the actual fleet returnees from the school returnees like me, I got a bit nervous. My spirits sank when I got the list: Marine Logistics Group or Medical Battalion, 1^st or 2^nd, Camp Pendleton or Camp Lejeune, the absolute bottom of the barrel. Not really wanting to go to California, feeling that it was far too expensive, I went with 2^nd Medical Battalion at Camp Lejeune. This would also mean that I had to attend Field Medical Training Battalion, the actual watered-down version of Marine Corps boot camp for Navy sailors. The Navy had just gotten me with another big fuck-you. I would have rather been on hold for another year.

Although I was no longer looking forward to it, at the end of April 2010, I graduated corps school, seventh in my class of about 60. I had a little bit of pride that I finally had an actual rating in the Navy. Since I had no real reason to spend time there any more, I considered taking leave elsewhere before heading on to Camp Lejeune. A friend of mine had invited me to spend some time at his place in Massachusetts, but I ultimately decided to head back home anyway, packing up the Buick yet again and heading south. The rough winter in Chicago led my old Pontiac alloy wheels to again shed several weights, so shortly after arriving home I visited a used-tire shop and bought a set of late-90s Buick LeSabre alloys for $50, then took them to Wal-Mart to have a fresh set of MasterCrafts installed. I also kept myself busy by replacing the rotors and pads at all four corners. Soon enough, it was time to point the Buick east and head to my first real duty station, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.  

Part Six: Mountains Beyond Mountains

As spring turned into summer and summer began to turn into fall, it was becoming ever clearer that I would not be getting my clearance any time soon. I watched everyone from my class graduate their ‘C’ schools and hit the fleet, then watched friends I made who arrived at Dam Neck after me graduate, and I was still there. I did find out in a meeting with the command security officer and the executive officer of the school (a civilian and a Marine lieutenant colonel, guess who made more money?) that the investigation had been concerned with some of my habits in the past, particularly my enjoyment of and participation in the furry community. I was unrepentant about decisions I made back then and my personal tastes, feeling them irrelevant to my reliability, and I resented the fact that this of all things was holding me back. Meanwhile, kids failing out of three different ‘A’ school classes and going to mast for not showering or washing clothes were getting clearances and being pushed out to the fleet. I was falling through the cracks. Without much else to do after my days buffing floors at the schoolhouse were done, I always went back to my 1985 Buick Electra.

My love of the Buick and love of working on it, not to mention my reluctance to let some dealer parts manager pour sodium silicate down its throat so I could get $3000 in trade-in value on a Cobalt, had saved it from the Cash for Clunkers madness. However, in the summer of 2009, after nearly three years of ownership and two years after installing an unknown-mileage junkyard-sourced LN3 3800 in a trailer park, the Buick started to really show its age. A couple weeks after the original transmission failed, necessitating an emergency swap in the parking lot of the base officer’s club, the alternator decided to join it, although it was courteous enough to give me a two weeks’ notice by making a lot of noise whenever I had the headlamps on or the radio turned up. I put my AutoZone rewards card to good use and replaced it in their parking lot. My door panels had been rattling ever since the Concert Sound installation at an “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” radio shop. I discovered that almost all of the cheap plastic clips that help the various screws hold the panels into place had disappeared (this would not entirely be the shop’s fault, these clips are meant to go in one time and one time only), so I visited the As Seen on TV section at Wal-Mart and picked up some Mighty Putty. Hey, if it can tow a 747, surely it can hold 1985 Buick Electra door panels in place, right? After that, the rattling stopped.

I had taken a bit of a break from my roadgeeking while at Dam Neck, mostly because I found the various highways around Hampton Roads a bit confusing with their constantly changing designations and discontinuities. I found U.S. Highway 58, which constituted the last big leg of my drives between Dam Neck and home, immensely interesting given that all but about half a mile of it is in Virginia, running along the longest part of the state from the mountains in Lee County to the ocean. So, one weekend, I arose at 7:00 AM, drove to the eastern terminus at Pacific Avenue (U.S. 60) on the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, and stayed on U.S. 58 for all of its 508 miles, my longest single clinch ever. It was a bit hard to follow through Norfolk and Portsmouth as it shifted alignments several times in only a few blocks, but into and past Suffolk it was a straight, easy shot.

I found that my old Buick, probably nearing 200000 miles on the chassis by this point, was not an ideal U.S 58 clinching vehicle, especially on the roller coaster sections between I-85 and I-95 (where at one point I actually had to pull over because I was getting a little motion-sick), and even more so once I got into the tight hairpins and steep climbs in the Appalachians. Although it was a massive upgrade compared to the LK9 my car originally came with, the LN3 quickly ran out of breath as I heeled it hard up steep grades and popped the column shifter into “3” or even “2” to apply manual engine braking down them. The temperature gauge in the LeSabre T-Type cluster began to point at the horizontal part of the dial, past 200 degrees. At a fuel stop, I found more water drips than there should be coming from the underside of my engine. Putting half my body into the roomy engine bay revealed that my old water pump was dripping in places it shouldn’t be, not a good thing trying to climb 30 percent grades in a balmy Virginia summer. I nursed it to the nearest town and replaced the pump in the parking lot. Exhausted and filthy, I decided to spend the night in that town (Abingdon, I think) before finishing the clinch and heading back to Dam Neck the next day. With as much love as I can give to my old Buick, next time I decide to do the mountains-to-ocean clinch (maybe a Murphy to Manteo run on U.S. 64, which is almost 100 miles longer, all in North Carolina!) I will have to take a slightly better handling and less-hooptie vehicle.

In September, not too long after Labor Day, I got the news that my grandfather passed away. He went to the hospital complaining of a bad cough and didn’t leave there alive. I was in a state of shock, although I had talked to him a time or two in asking him to help me diagnose problems with my car when I first got it and with my successful completion of boot camp, I never knew much about him and I never knew how proud of me he was until after his death. Although I could have gotten an emergency loan to get a quick flight home, I decided it was most appropriate to drive my Electra home to the funeral, taking the 16-hour drive in one manic shot. His military funeral was the first and only time I ever wore my dress uniform in my hometown. He never knew the story about the shitshow my military career was becoming by that point. At my grandparents’ house after the funeral, I spent a long time examining the award citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross, wondering if I would ever accomplish something of that caliber in my own career, or if my future in uniform would be spent buffing floors.