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, 1st or 2nd, 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 2nd
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.
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