The Navy It Is
The hot, muggy summer of 1966 was just like all other summers in New Madrid, Missouri, except I had just graduated from high school and was facing an uncertain future. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I only knew what I didn’t want to be — an abusive drunk who worked on the river, like the person I despised and was the most fearful of, my father. Calvin had an explosive temper, and I’d been on the receiving end of his fists for much of my life. I knew the only way to not turn into him was to escape.
My entire life, New Madrid had been my world. It was a small town, with a population of around three to four thousand at the time. Its only purpose seemed to be to cater to the needs of the farmers in the county — some place to come and buy groceries, clothes, and such. It was right on the Mississippi River, halfway between Memphis and St. Louis on old Highway 61. Today, the big Interstate 55 has cut it off from trying to make it as a bus stop.
The 1950’s had been as bucolic as many remember them to be. I could ride my Schwinn bicycle around town, anywhere really. I frequently went out to the backwater dam, with my fishing pole and carrying my .22 rifle to shoot snakes. The Mississippi made many pools in the backcountry during the spring floods, and when the water receded a lot of fish were trapped in the pools, along with a lot of water moccasins. It was a life that seems unreal to people now. But back then you could own guns and openly carry them as long as you were hunting. Rifles hanging in the back window of pickup trucks were as common as those stick figure family car stickers you see today. Arguments were settled by hammering hands against the hard skull of the other person, not gunning them down. You faced your bully in the hallway of the high school, and either fought it out or cried (or suppressed it), but you didn’t shoot up your school. You couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, it just didn’t make sense.
For a while, life was great, but eventually it became suffocating. I knew nothing of how the outside world worked. I didn’t know how to do much, if anything really. I never asked for or received instructions on how to be an adult. Job? Work? Money? I was a millennial before there were millenials.
Outside my small town it seemed the nation was on fire in the 1960's — race riots, cities burning, freedom marchers being killed and buried in levies, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Vietnam and even more on the nightly news. And yet, that was all distant to me, just black and white images on the TV and black and white pictures in the paper, along with the narratives. My high school was the first to desegregate in the county, and no one protested or had any problems with it as far as I knew. I didn’t understand the magnitude of the changes that were coming.
I only felt some selfish desire to escape this town and see and do something. Couldn’t play cowboys and Indians anymore, couldn’t ride off into the sunset.I needed a real goal and had no vision of how to do it. The possibilities eluded me. It wasn’t easy imagining a future outside of my town, since few people, if any, ever left.
From the war in Vietnam to the Cold War at home, fear was pervasive. It wasn’t hard to see the world was changing, but there was no telling if it was for better or for worse. We were on the tipping point, only no one knew which direction things would go. Now that I write this, the world doesn’t seem so different now than it did then.
A few days after graduation, on a day when the air was so thick with humidity it was hard to breathe, I was outside staying out of Calvin’s way and sobering up from another beer filled night of doing nothing, when he called me into the house and very matter-of-factly said: “I’m not pissing my money off sending you to college.” My father then proceeded to ask me which branch of the service I wanted to join. Not whether I wanted to join the military, mind you, but which one. No one argued with Dear Ole Dad. He would steam roll you by yelling and pushing you. It wasn’t fun seeing him riled up.
I never could take orders well, but in this instance I felt relieved that I didn’t have to make the biggest life decision staring me in the face. In my head, I ran through the choices: Army, no, too many people join or are drafted into that one; Marine Corps, no way I was going to live up to that legend; Navy, my uncle Rudolph had great sea stories from when he served on a destroyer during the Korean War. So the Navy it is. Did I mention I was seventeen when I came to this rational, life-changing decision?
The next day, Calvin took me to see the military recruiter in Cape Girardeau, the nearest bigger town to New Madrid after Sikeston, with my older sister in tow. I was being enlisted, while she was getting a new dress. The recruiter was one of those stereotypical, crusty ole Navy Chiefs with submarine dolphins on his uniform chest. Tall and lean, he fit the profile of a hard working, profane seaman. He sized me up, and glanced at my test scores. “What do you want to do in the Navy?” He asked me. I shrugged my shoulders, praying I was only shaking on the inside. “I have no idea. The hardest thing I’ve ever done is mow a yard.” He laughed and said, “You’re going to fit into the Navy very well. The Navy is always looking for people like you.” Later, I’d figure out that by people like me, he meant people who were too stupid to ask the Navy for anything, which meant we could be sent anywhere. The Navy is always looking for a deck seaman. Little did I know I could’ve requested to receive specialized training.
After enlisting, the only thing standing in the way of getting out of my town was time and a physical. On July 18, 1966, I took a Greyhound bus to St. Louis where I spent the night in a rustic, old, bare bones hotel room with three strangers all heading to the same place I was, but for all different reasons. One guy who had been drafted walked in, dropped his bag on a bed and walked out never to be seen after that. The two others were friends from the same kind of town as me, married to girls back home. They figured the Navy was a good way to avoid being drafted into the Army where you would have no choice but to be what they wanted you to be, which was usually infantry. Any branch of the military will use unsuspecting people to fill whatever jobs are needed the most, whether infantry, deck seaman, or airplane washers.
One thing I quickly discovered was that to make it in the military, you have to be literate enough to fill out paperwork, and it never ends. Once they collected our medical history, we were led into another room where a nameless man instructed us to, “Strip to your skivvies.” That word would be my first exposure to Navy slang. There I joined the medical assembly line through various doors leading to chest x-rays, blood tests, and an old man I’d hoped was a doctor who told me to turn and cough, checked my ear drums and made sure I had a heartbeat.
I had just finished the physical and gotten dressed when a sailor came over to talk to me. Another nameless person in a day full of nameless people. All I can recall is that he was an E-6, First Class Petty Officer, a Boiler Technician if I remember correctly the patch he wore on his left sleeve. He was dressed in an immaculate white uniform, his half-wellington boots shined to a high gloss. He put his foot up on the bench in front of me and said, “I’m sorry to let you know kid, but you failed the physical portion. Minimum weight is 124, and you only weigh 118 pounds. Go home and put on some weight and you can come back in a few months and try again.” (At six feet tall, I was pretty scrawny back then.)
I felt as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I was breathless, and my eyes filled with tears. I was so mortified at the thought of going back home. Finally, I stammered that I couldn’t go back, that it would be another failure to my father in a long list of failures that I felt I had left back in that town. He stood there for a moment, obviously sensing that there was more to my worries than I had wanted to admit. Then, after what seemed like a day, he blurted, “If you promise to be the best sailor you can be, I’m going to let you go to boot camp. But you had better be a good one and come out of boot camp at the minimum weight.”
I quickly promised all of it, like Ralphie from a Christmas Story who was determined to get that Red Ryder air rifle no matter what. As far as I was concerned, once I’d left my one-street town, there was no going back. I finished boot camp weighing 124 pounds with only one demerit. I worked my ass off, and I didn’t have to go back home unemployed.
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