Abe's Misadventures 2

Four Tasks

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Abe had four tasks to clear his way to claiming his promised benefits. Each step was a filter to winnow out those who couldn’t fulfill their end of the bargain with Uncle Sam. The guarantees offered by the recruiter were conditional on passing all the challenges. The price of failure was being used as the government saw fit.

The First Task: Bootcamp

Recruits were split into groups called companies based on their arrival time at camp. Formed by pure randomness, Abe's company was unexceptional, bordering the underside of average. They would fulfill minimum requirements unspectacularly but manage to get by. Abe couldn't blame any other member of his company, he was a natural slacker.

Navy bootcamp was a noisy reorganizing apparatus in the 1980s. It wasn’t tempering the mettle of men. It simply peeled away the shallow differences, thin coats of multicolored paint, and replaced it with an even blue denim hue. Dungarees. White capped and black shoed. An ocean wave theme. Recruits had the same haircuts, the same uniforms, the same posture. Soon they would be marching to the same cadence, speaking the same vernacular. Floors became decks, walls became bulkheads, beds were racks, the toilet the head. Boots were boon dockers. The hat was a cover. Gig lines became a thing to be conscious of.

It was tougher for some, those whose identities were vested in the superficial wax and varnish stripped away by bootcamp. Those who never explored beneath the paint and primer of their own existence, their own identity.

Abe was somewhere in the middle. He had glimpsed the bare metal of his being in counseling at a young age and was disappointed at what he found. A terrified child. Conflict averse. Fearful. He hid his feelings under the skin of defiant coatings so as not to witness the truth. Out of sight, out of mind.

Deprived of independence and solitude, his early letters home tended toward the dramatic. Missing the freedom of empty fields and woods, denied the trappings of life as he knew it. Constantly in the company of other recruits he felt claustrophobic, crushed under the weight of inseparability. It lasted until he was too busy to dwell on anything but absorbing his new reality.

The physical demands were not onerous. There were no packs to hump twenty miles, no obstacle courses to run, no foxholes to dig. Priority was attention to detail, cleaning, polishing, folding and stowing. At times it was embarrassing. Particularly when physical training days coincided side-by-side with the marines in the next bootcamp over. Half the company was breathing hard and suffering cramps after the first quarter mile. A few couldn't manage ten pushups or ten sit-ups.

Abe's entire company passed in the end, receiving mild fanfare from family members invited to attend.

The Second Task: Basic Electricity and Electronics (B-double-E)

There were two forms of study in B-double-E, paper and practical, with two grades, pass or no-pass, and two end results, pass or dropped. It was a pulverizer that regulated the population of students. Too many upstream and the rules were tightened down, a tourniquet before an amputation.

Abe’s high school study paid off on the paper studies and tests. The practical studies were a new level of challenge. Circuit cards with built-in component failures were handed out with the strict rule of keeping the card component side up at all times. Any peek at the underside, where the imposed failure could be seen, was an instant no-pass and grounds for being dropped from school.

Abe passed with little trouble and no fanfare.

The Third Task: A-School

Depending on one’s experience A-School was an introduction to or refresher course in one’s job specialty, one’s ‘Rate’ in Navy jargon. It was a mix of new recruits and experienced sailors who earned a shot at the school. The hierarchy was ‘Boots’ at the bottom and ‘Fleets’ at the top, Abe’s first exposure to ‘real’ sailors. The answers to his many questions were as often, “Shut up Bootcamp,” as longwinded sailor tales, some of which may have been true.

This was closer to high school for Abe, but he passed despite his old study habits. No fanfare to be heard.

The Fourth Task: C-School

Abe cleared the challenge steadily with the narrowed focus and pressure to succeed. No need to delve into the murky past. Little did he know there was a biopsychological timer steadily counting down. The longest period he had spent at one activity since puberty and raging hormones was the four years of high school where he nearly cracked. Now he was headed for six years and was by no means ready.

He and a buddy made their own fanfare.

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