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.
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