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.
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