In The Navy (Boot Camp), Part 3.

Boot camp wound up being a lot of cleaning, running, marching, eating and classes. In that order. Cleaning was priority #1. Everything had to be spotless, including the bathrooms and our racks. No “dust bunnies” allowed. Dust bunnies are little loose balls of wool that collect together when you make the bed (rack) that had a cheap mattress on it. They all have cheap gray wool blankets and dust bunnies were abundant.

Making the bed was a meticulous task. You had to have the sheets tight with nurse corners. The Chief actually bounced a quarter off of one that was perfect and it bounced up a few feet into the air. The beds were checked every morning, to make sure the corners were neat and tight. If one was found under-par, the sheets and blanket were ripped off and thrown on the floor. Do it again.

We were perpetually sweeping, dusting, polishing (belt buckles, shoes, the fake projectiles in front of HQ, anything shiny). Polishing shoes was actually an art form. If you were good, others would come ask you for help. If your cheap black leather shoes or boots (we wore the boots more often) had a scuff, you were called on the carpet and reprimanded. “Suck on those shoes like you suck cock and they’ll sparkle!” was typical. The “suck cock” theme seemed to be the Chief’s favorite, but he had others.

Scrubbing the bathrooms was left to the slowest of the slow. Last out of Mess Hall, clean the toilets. Last finishing a class test, clean the toilets. I only had to do that a few times.

We took up marching right away. We had an order that we always stayed in so the people in front were used to that and same with those in back. Occasionally we were re-ordered so come graduation, those on the right were the ones performing best. I will explain why later. We marched all over the base, pretty much daily. We had a chant to keep time with, but I can’t recall what it was. We were encouraged to chant loudly while marching though, so we would drown out the other companies we might pass and always upped the volume when passing. By the end of boot camp we had a damn good march down pat. Most of the companies did.

A few times a week we would get to march over to the base commissary (more like a dollar store) where we could get replacement stencil pens, smokes, belt buckles or other uniform supporting items. No candy, no news papers, no magazines, nothing fun. As we were marched over we would have to under a road, through a tunnel. The Chief liked the acoustics in the tunnel, so we always sang Anchors Away as we transcended the tunnel, loudly and each way, there and back. It did sound pretty cool. During that march we would pass an A-6 Intruder Jet that was setup like a monument (it’s typical to have planes or mock missiles laying around on a base like that). It was my first time being that close to a real plane and it always caught my gaze. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/a-6e-dvic149.jpg


This was also my first time being in a group shower/bathroom environment since middle school (which I avoided as much as possible then). It was uncomfortable to be around a bunch of naked guys, but you get used to ignoring it and just enjoy washing off the sweat and getting to bed. Some of the talk in the showers got pretty vile. Some of the guys in my company had very salty tales and spewed them in the shower, but I always wondered how true those were. I expect most were fables. Still, I would nod and listen, laugh.

The first few weeks in Great Lakes were miserable as far as the weather went. Windy, bitterly cold and snowing non stop. It got better as time went on and spring sprung. The barracks were drafty and the noise from the wind at night was relentless. In those first weeks, the lone wool blankets we were issued became our best friends, like Linus (from Charlie Brown) had his blanket. It was not always enough to keep you really warm though. Once you were outside in the cold weather, the coat you were issued is certainly not enough to keep you warm. We couldn’t wait for spring…