A Dumbass In Love
“I’ll do whatever it takes to see you again.”
We were standing in the back of the largest room of Recruit Memorial Chapel at RTC Great Lakes when I told her that, looking up at her with her hands in mine, just after the Catholic service had ended. I’d been raised and confirmed within the Church (although my actual faith had gone thoroughly pagan in the half-dozen years before I enlisted), but she — despite her Irish last name — hadn’t been to Mass in the nearly two months that we’d been in the US Navy’s version of basic training. I was 19 years old then, wide-eyed, with all of my determination intact from those two-a-day high school soccer practices, not yet broken by the pummeling that my life would have in store; she was the same age, tall and blonde, still carrying herself like the Texas-raised cheerleader that she’d mentioned once being…and she was the first person I really fell in love with.
I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week at that point, despite our having been in the same division before then…I’d been sent to the FIT division the previous Monday morning after my third failure to run 1.5 miles in under 12:15, which meant that while she and 62 other recruits who had survived the previous 7 weeks went through Battle Stations, Pass-In-Review, and their Liberty Weekend, I (and a handful of other recruits who were either in my situation or still trying to pass their swim qualifications) were sent to another building (“ship”, in RTC parlance) to attempt to get that time down with an actually-decent level of fitness training.
(Y’all, they had yoga in FIT, and an exercise bike that I rode the hell out of…only had group workouts in the main division, plus whatever individual “beatings” the RDCs handed out, like the one I’d taken from a second-class the day before reporting to FIT because our Chief had changed the watch schedule after seeing how desperate I was to switch with someone so I could go to chapel. Yeah, I was a True Believer during those months, that wasn’t the first or last time that I’d turned in that direction when I didn’t have anywhere else to turn to.)
By the time Sunday came around, I’d had two more attempts and had gotten my time down to 12:21, so I was feeling pretty decent about myself when I got to chapel…and there she was, looking like the absolute royalty that I’d come to see her as (you know, “queen of my heart” and all that sappy stuff…I’d been raised on 90’s country music). I was actually able to restrain myself for the hour or so of Mass, and when it ended I made a damn beeline towards her to find out how her Liberty Weekend was going (fine, and she mentioned something about a load of brand-new Nintendo DSi’s being confiscated the night before…they’d come out in the US while we were all but cut off from the world, and everyone in that division had at least three paychecks to spend).
I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “I love you”, just in case I didn’t see her again…but I did promise her that I’d see her again, and I was ready to do whatever I needed to in order to keep it. (The irony here is that I would’ve actually been able to spend some real time with her if I’d waited to pass…I’ll get to that later.)
The next day was PFT Attempt #6, and…I didn’t quite pass it. You see, an unwritten rule at boot camp is that during the warmup jog around the 1/8 mile indoor track, you tell your partner which category you’re part of: Alpha (17–19), Bravo (20–24), Charlie (25–29), Delta (30–34), or Echo (35–39, reservists only). The older you are, the easier your requirements are (I’d spent a half-hour crying on the phone with my mom after the third failure, because I was 6 months away from Bravo status and 30 seconds of slack on the run requirement), and the rest of the unwritten rule is that your partner covers your ass if your pushup or curlup numbers are anywhere close to the cut line. My partner’s sense of honor was a bit different than mine, and he counted 44 for me…my Alpha ass needed 46, which meant I went into the run knowing that it wouldn’t matter all that much, so…absolutely no pressure at all, which turned out to be exactly what I needed.
I knew something was going right when I was able to stretch my stride out in the last lap and a half and leave the pace Chief in the dust, and I found out a couple of minutes later that I’d finally done it: 12 minutes and 13 seconds, and a couple of minutes after that was when they told me that I’d get a waiver to cover my partner’s membership in the Bravo Foxtrot Club. (Another Navy term, although I think other branches use it as well…that’s “BF Club” in straight English, short for “Buddy Fucker Club”. In Civvy World, he’d probably just be called That Guy. You never want to be That Guy.)
Onward and upward, that night was Battle Stations…there were 6 of us from FIT (actually, 5 FIT and an LTS, but we were all living together anyways), and we all got through pretty much just fine, although there were a few snags when none of the people in my team would listen to what I was saying (which cost us a team strike when I was the only one to recognize that watertight integrity matters more than getting the last couple of rounds out of a flooding compartment)…of course I cried during the Capping Ceremony, although I was able to pass it off at the time as pure pride. (And yeah, surviving Great Lakes actually is still the thing I’m most proud of, it’s still the only thing that I’ve put more than a few days’ worth of effort into and actually finished.)
Tuesday, May 12…well, I managed to stay awake long enough to pack my things, take a shower, and bring it all back to my old division — which was leaving the next day — to keep that promise. I did see her again…but apparently the monkey’s paw curled, and I wasn’t actually able to talk to her. I didn’t see her the next day, as it turned out that she was staying at RTC for a few weeks while her White House Ceremonial Guard division was forming up, and I was on my way to Charleston, SC for a nuclear power program that I suddenly had a reason to try to get out of…and I spent the next couple of weeks figuring out just how to do that and where I could go to be closer to her.
The “where” ended up being the Intelligence Specialist “A” School in Dam Neck, VA…the how, however, would send my life down a detour that it really never did recover from. My oh-so-brilliant idea was (since I was too damn honorable to intentionally fail out of the program) to tell my Chief that my issues with studying and focusing — which were real enough, since nobody had ever bothered to teach me — were because of what was called Asperger’s Syndrome at the time. I’d actually been diagnosed with that in 2003, with paperwork going back to the mid-90s showing that my dad had let his anti-labeling stance get in the way of actually being a decent parent, but there was definitely more than that going on (plenty of PTSD, more than a little ADHD, and a handful of other things that I wasn’t about to tell anyone about then).
Turns out, being on the autism spectrum makes you medically ineligible for military service…they put me on a Greyhound to Duluth, MN at the end of July with a General Discharge (Under Honorable Conditions), and I never did see her again. As far as I can tell, she ended up with some guy (may have already been with him before RTC, and she never really thought of me as more than a friend — in fact, she told me that I reminded her of her brother), and is doing just fine for herself back in Houston.
I promised myself then that I’d never let that kind of thing happen again…I really should’ve known better, because it turns out that I really didn’t change that much as the years did their work. Here I am, just less than a decade later, with the same problem as I had then: get to DC by any means necessary, because it might be the last chance for God only knows how long to see the person who gave me a reason to live…as of when I put this on Medium, I was a couple dozen dollars short of getting a one-way Greyhound ticket out there for Labor Day weekend 2018 (that veteran discount is carrying a lot of weight this week, I’ll figure out how to get back later), and I’m starting to hope again that it’ll be different this time.
Update, 1:25pm CDT: HOLY CRAP I GOT THE MONEY FOR A ROUND-TRIP TICKET IT’S HAPPENING Y’ALL
If you have a couple of bucks laying around and you liked this article, maybe toss them Morgan’s way through her Ko-fi page? It’s about the only thing this side of surviving a job interview that’ll keep DHS off her back about work requirements…The Firefly Project’s Patreon page is currently under construction, and will open for business whenever Morgan gets around to finishing up the reward tiers. She did promise to not shove it off on Brianna, after all…and she still does everything within her ability — a bit beyond it, at times — to keep her promises.
