Rushing down I-44, traveling from St. Louis to Fort Leonard Wood, I never expected to see a People magazine or hear a conversation about hand moisturizer on that bus, but I saw and heard both coming from the girls in the seats around me. The closer we got to the gate of Leonard Wood, the more nervous I became.
It was after midnight when we reached the interstate exit. On the final approach we passed various lighted signs, of strip joints, churches, and neon lights from roadside bars.
The bus approached the gate. I saw the guards. Underneath their caps and burning cigarettes, they waved at the bus driver to stop. In the guard shack stood four MPs, sleeves rolled up. Two men and two women took turns dipping their hands into a supersized bag of Doritos, their hands like snack-backhoes. One of the male guards climbed into the bus, mumbled to the driver, and disappeared again. The bus surged forward, past the perimeter of the fort, where my term of legendary service to the United States of America was set to begin.
A girl sitting one row ahead said, "I hope they have Caress body wash at the PX."
"I like Suave Herbal Care," said the girl sitting next to her, "or Neutrogena."
"Oh, yeah, Neutrogena is good, too."
Hair on my neck stood up - just thinking about the big Drill Sergeant getting on the bus to spread hellfire excited me. He would spout off, with sayings that would be both frightening and humorous, just like in Full Metal Jacket.
The bus rolled to its final stop in front of a brown brick building. Several shadows moved underneath an awning. Atop those shadows were hats, the famous Drill Sergeant hats. The venerable brown rounds. Seeing these brought me to the edge of my seat. I couldn't wait to get yelled at. I was eager to get off the bus, rush through basic training, graduate from Ranger school, and then, God willing, be strapped with a thousand rounds of ammo and radioing for an air-strike of ten tons of napalm while a helicopter evacuated casualties and I rescued a malnourished child villager. I didn't much care who the war was against, just as long as there was a war. The Army and Marine Corps ads had showed me a life that I wanted. That life was me in a high-speed low-drag United States Army battalion, with land, sea, and air capabilities, and heat-seeking missiles and drones and canisters popping up from underground and robot bomb squads and bearded special-ops soldiers rappelling into underground heroin factories. If the Army told me to charge into Ohio or Frodo's shire, I was ready. I was a third generation military brat and the greatest player of Mortal Kombat in all of Wisconsin.
The door on the bus opened and we heard the bootsteps of a Drill Sergeant coming up the staircase. All I could see was the outline of a hat - a real Drill Sergeant. Everyone quieted as they braced for him to erupt.
But he was a she.
And she spoke quietly.
"Now we can do this easy if you want," she said, "but if you want to act all crazy and screw around, I'll make it last all night."
A black woman, with cheekbones that jutted out like the fenders on Grandpa's old Mercury, stepped down the aisle and then I saw her eyes flash at me like the Predator's did to Apollo Creed in that one movie.
I waited for her to shout at the people in the front row.
"I want you all to go inside and line up along the yellow line," she said, "set your bag down on your right side and stand at the position of attention, and then we will get started with what we need to get done tonight. We have about an hour of business to take care of, and it can go quickly if y'all want it to."
We filed off the bus in silence, entered a building, and lined up along the yellow line. Two other female Drill Sergeants walked around and barked a bit, but not loud. So far, the event seemed all too civilized.
We filled out some forms with our personal information. Forms and forms, all requesting the same information. One form turned out to be rather important because it asked me to write down what I wanted on my dog-tags. For my name, I put, "Private Chips Dubbo," just like the character on one of the best games ever, HALO on Xbox.
A guy with glasses sat next to me. He started to whine about the religion slot on the form.
"Just put down Baptist," I said, adding, "Damn, I want to put HALO for mine, but I don't see it on the list."
"But I'm not a Baptist," he said, "I'm agnostic, and there's no slot for it."
"What's the difference? What's this one? Atheist. Put down atheist then. Who cares?"
"Who cares?" he whispered with a scoff that made him appear to have lockjaw. "There's a huge difference. It would be like making a Baptist write down Catholic."
I said, "You can always put down Baptist."
The Drill Sergeant started to collect the forms, and the geek next to me hastily selected 'Atheist.'
A little Drill Sergeant came over and snapped at us. "Is there any reason that you're talking, Privates?"
This was the first meeting of many that I had with Drill Sergeant Pint, soon afterward known as Half-Pint, Pinto, Pinto Bean, Beanie, Little Beanbag, Chief Chihuahua and several nicknames not related to his name, such as Rear-Admiral and Douchebag. His mere presence in uniform told me that the Army did not adhere to its own height standards, because if he was fifty-eight inches tall, the Army minimum, then I was Optimus Prime in bot-mode. Even sitting down, I was at eye-level with Drill Sergeant Pint.
Pint provoked a response. "Do y'all have something important to say? Need to say something?"
The atheist said, "No."
"What?"
"No, Drill Sergeant."
Pint said, "Something wrong with what we've asked you to do?"
"Actually," the guy said, "I would like to see Agnostic added to the list of religions, Drill Sergeant."
"What the heck do you think this is, Burger King?" Then louder, he added, "You cannot have it your way!"
I laughed.
The little Drill looked at me. "That's funny?"
"Sorry, Drill Sergeant."
"You callin' me a sorry Drill Sergeant? You're the one that's sorry, Private. Looks like you came straight from Burger King."
That was our first meeting.
A few minutes later, I saw Pint dragging a rubber barrel into the middle of the room and I thought he might use it to stand on so that he could see us all, but this was the 'amnesty barrel,' the barrel that the USO Sergeant at the airport had warned me about.
Pint's voice could really boom, out of necessity I imagine, since he might have been stepped on early in life without a good warning system.
"If you have anything that you know you shouldn't have, this is where it goes." He kicked the barrel and it skidded toward us. "You will have two minutes to put all unauthorized items inside this barrel. Unauthorized items include the following: cigarettes, lighters, drugs, drug paraphernalia, books, magazines, alcohol, chewing tobacco, chewing gum, candy, electronics, weapons, and anything else that you know you shouldn't have in basic training. I strongly suggest that you dispose of any item that you have a question about, and if you have prescription drugs, come talk to me right now about them so I can inform you about what to do."
The list sounded like the inventory of my backpack, but there was no way I was throwing out my goods. If he expected me to throw out my GameBoy and the thirty batteries I had brought, he was crazy. My cell phone and my iPod? Forget it. My carton of cigarettes wasn't even opened yet. While the Privates around me dumped objects into the barrel, I chose to stay seated.
The guy sitting next to me had a complaint about this list, too. But he worried about the one thing that I would have gladly thrown out.
"What does he mean, books?"
"By books," I said, "I think he means those things with pages, and on those pages, words."
"Why should we have to get rid of them?"
The guy turned out to be a real activist. He fished some terrible book out of his backpack, clutched it in his hand, and walked up to this Drill Sergeant Pint to make inquiries. I couldn't help but laugh when P
int snatched the book, flipped through the pages, and slam-dunked it into the amnesty barrel. The guy came back to his seat with his tail between his legs.
I covered my mouth and snickered. "How'd it go?"
"The Drill Sergeant asked if the book was for my religion, and I said no. Then he threw it away and told me that the only authorized book in basic training is the Bible. Or the Koran."
"That was really dumb to go ask him."
"You know, you are really starting to..." He paused. "What...what's your name?"
"Paul Sprungli."
"I'm Erik Waters. Can you please try to be less condescending when you speak, Paul?"
"Can you be less of a bitch?"
He looked away.
"Dawg," I said, "I'm jokin', dawg."
He searched in his bag. "At least I managed to keep one book." Then he showed me his paperback book with the title, The Divine Comedy. But judging by his actions so far, I doubted that the book made anyone but him laugh. He began another rant about books, showing me the three tiny Gideon's Bibles he had received on his journey to St. Louis, and he just wouldn't shut up about it. So I showed him my Gideon's Bible, the one I'd received in the airport, opening it up for him to view. "Do you want my Bible?" I asked.
"Didn't you just hear what I said? I already have three of them." He showed me his trio of little green Bibles.
"Well, you seem to like them." The thin paper of the tiny Bible reminded me of rolling papers.
"Ok," Private Waters said, "I think you and I should stop talking before we get in trouble."
Thank God.
Hollywood expectations fell apart. The Drill Sergeants walked us to a barracks - walked, not marched. The cicadas buzzed like a thousand weed-whackers. Those noisy insects were the first of many Jurassic-sized bugs I witnessed in Missouri, including horseflies that justified the name. In the humid air, I started to sweat, but smiled when I heard the soothing hum of air conditioners coming from the barracks where we would sleep that night.
In a mass formation outside, the Drill Sergeants transferred us to a group of Barracks Sergeants who would help us locate our beds for the night. Another Sergeant took charge and started to speak loudly.
"We are going to separate you now. Male gender over here in front of me. Female gender over there in front of Sergeant Sykes."
Being in the correct group, I stood like a Ranger and waited for the others to move. A girl standing next to me did not move. Thinking that she didn't hear, I said, "Female gender goes over there."
Her response surprised me. She said, "There's no such thing as gender," and she did not move, but instead swore at me as if I called the command. I double-checked to make sure she was a she, and although her short, uneven hair looked like she had laid down and let a lawnmower run over it, she appeared female. I stared for a bit, perhaps an ounce too long. For some time actually, I inspected her. And when I looked up at her face, she yelled sharply at me:
"Get out of my head!"
No one had ever accused me of that before. Her voice drew the attention of the nearest Sergeant, who rushed over like a hunchback, teetering to and fro as he dodged Privates, pointing his flashlight in faces and shouting, "Who said that? Who said that?" He stuck the bill of his cap - a regular cap, not a brown round - into the face of a recruit.
"Who said that?"
The recruit pointed behind him, not at the girl, but at me.
The Sergeant asked the girl, "What did he say?" Before she could answer, the Sergeant interrupted by shouting into my ear, with great gusto:
"PUSH!"
When the word flew out of him, so did a little slobber, which dappled my ear.
That's how I got dropped for the first time, and I have to admit, I enjoyed it. This was fine, because I expected this type of treatment, as seen on TV. Without letting him see my enjoyment, I did three push-ups and stopped when another noise drew his attention elsewhere.
When I stood up, the Sergeant returned and asked the girl why she hadn't moved to the female side.
She said, "There is no such thing as gender, sir."
The Sergeant's eyes bulged like marshmallows. His voice dropped an octave and he sounded like Clint Eastwood. "Don't you ever call me sir, Private. Don't you ever call me sir again. Listen to me, Private: I work for a living. Do you see a dag-gum copper bar or a black bar on my collar? Do you see on my collar railroad tracks or a maple leaf or a bird or stars?"
"No," the genderless Private said.
"No what?"
"No...Sergeant?"
"Now move to the female formation right now or I'll get a hickory smoke southern-style barbecue going with you two yet tonight." Then he said to me, "What are you smiling at tons-of-fun? I don't remember telling you to get up?"
I shrugged.
He pointed at the ground and said, "Then push, Krispy Kreme."
On the ground, I did another push-up. My nose was close to my backpack. I could smell the hotdog inside and I was comforted by knowing that it would soon be eaten.
The girl picked up her bag and ran away. The Sergeant laughed.
"No such thing as gender." He adjusted his crotch. "Is that what she really said to you, Private?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Is that what she said?"
"It is."
"It is, what?"
"It's what she said."
"It is, Sergeant," he said with hostility, but then he laughed. "No such thing as gender. Dag-gum, Privates and their ideas. Y'all got some good ones. She must've thought she was gonna stand here and grow a pair. Hey, keep pushing! Did I tell you to stop? Do twenty more push-ups and get up. Is she your girlfriend or something?"
"No, Sergeant."
"She'd better not be. Ain't no girlfriends here, Private." He watched me. "Dag-gum, Private. Can you even do ten push-ups? What McDonald's did the bus pick you up from? What the heck do you call that, silly?"
Silly? That was a major disappointment for me. Anything but silly would have been fine: maggot, knucklehead, idiot, fairy - whatever. But silly? That word actually hurt my feelings. If he had kicked me in the gut or choked me like they did in the movies, or if he had rolled me up in carpet and tossed me down the stairs, I could accept that - that would make sense.
But silly?
It hardly seemed fair.
As I reeled from the underwhelming insult, the Sergeants separated the boys from the girls by sex, or gender, I can't be sure. The Sergeant walked away mumbling to himself about his Privates and soon he found another Private who he called crazy, which hardly seemed an improvement over silly.
Chapter 3. Breakfast