The men of Division 012 were incredibly cold and even more tired as they stood in formation outside of Galley 928, the Navy’s largest dining facility anywhere. They were in week four of their training and still weren’t used to the icy cold wind that seemed never to cease flowing in their direction from the Great Lakes, a present for the men from Mother Nature. But despite the harsh climate they would be going nowhere anytime soon.
One man was missing from formation and Chief Price was beyond livid. The head RDC of Division 012 marched up and down the ranks of his recruit division, counting heads and trying very hard to determine which man was missing from formation. According to the count, he was down one man but for the life of him he couldn’t put his finger on the recruit’s name.
“Why am I counting you bugs at minus one? Which one of your sorry ass shipmates is missing from my formation?” The recruits were silent. “You mean to tell me that out of the entire lot of you, not one man can come forward and tell me who is missing?” Heads swiveled amongst the men as they too tried to determine who was missing, and yet not a single one spoke up. This infuriated BMC Price. “Half right, face! Drop!”
The men let out a pained sigh for they knew very well what that order meant. They were about to be cycled. This typically meant that they would be cycled through a series of pushups, sit-ups, and eight-count body builders until the lesson being taught by the RDC who gave the order to drop had been given ample time to “sink in.” On that morning Chief Price intended to cycle his recruits either until they were all doing pushups in pools of their own vomit, or until his missing man was found.
“Michaels! Front and center.”
“Aye, aye, Chief!” Hunter rose back up to stand at attention while the rest of the division waited with arms fully extended, bearing most of their body weight. This was known around RTC as waiting in the “ready position.” Chief Price was shaking his head in disgust.
“Michaels. You’re being given the opportunity to rescue a shipmate who is in bad, bad trouble. As far as we know, he has fallen overboard. While I take muster you are to go back into the galley and attempt to locate our missing man.” The RDC pulled a list of names from out of a folder that he always carried with him, and then slowly and deliberately began to slide a ballpoint pen from out of his breast pocket. “What in the fuck are you waiting for, recruit? I’m halfway finished here already. If I can identify our missing man before you locate him I’m going to nominate the entire division to attend Extra Military Instruction tonight. How would you feel about that, Seaman Recruit Michaels?”
But before BMC Price could finish his sentence Hunter had already executed a perfect about face and marched straight back into the galley. The harsh nature of Chief Price’s behavior towards his men was offset, if only momentarily, by an honest smile. He was beginning to like Seaman Recruit Michaels. Of course this was a condition that rarely lasted very long, and he knew it. Chief Price turned back to his men, who were still waiting in the ready position, and began to take muster.
Hunter all but ran back into the galley. For the first time since his arrival at RTC he was thankful that his division’s berthing happened to be the farthest from the galley of them all. This meant that most of the rest of the galley’s patrons, all recruits like himself, had already finished their meals, formed up outside, and marched off to begin their daily instruction. Only three divisions remained, and most of their personnel were sitting on the far end of the eatery.
Michaels spotted his missing man almost immediately, slumped over his tray and sound asleep. It was the cowboy who had caused the division some considerable pain just two weeks prior by answering a question for which the RDC wanted no response. Hunter wondered for a moment if this kid from Montana even knew what a rhetorical question was. Snapping back to the present moment, Michaels realized that he was running out of time. He grabbed the cowboy by the shoulder and gave him a stiff shake.
“What the hell?” The cowboy was clearly shocked to find himself face down in his waffle, and all by himself to boot.
“Wake the hell up! The rest of the division is waiting outside. Chief Price is pissed. He’s talking about sending the entire division to EMI tonight, and all because you’re not in formation.”
“What?” The kid was still a bit groggy, not entirely awake.
“Damn it all! Stand up and lets go!” Hunter was growing impatient.
“What about my tray?”
“Forget that fucking tray or you’ll find yourself on the division shit list. Let’s go!” Hunter tugged on the man’s shoulder to impart upon him a sense of urgency, but the cowboy tugged back, clearly unhappy about being touched by another recruit.
“Get your fucking hands off of me, buddy. I don’t like to be touched.”
“Get off your ass and let’s move, buddy. We, meaning the rest of the division and I, don’t like being fucked over for your stupidity. You’re about to put the rest of us into some serious shit, and I’m getting the impression that you don’t really give a flying fuck. Is that about right?”
“Fuck you.” The cowboy shoved Michaels back, not quite to the ground, but with enough force to get the point across. Here was a young man who was used to telling folks the way things were. He wasn’t about to let Hunter, who was nothing more than some city slicker punk as far as he was concerned, play the role of RDC with him. They were both recruits after all.
“Listen up, ass hole. Clearly you think you’re something special. But if you think getting physical with me is a good way to display your cup size, you better think again.” Hunter grabbed the cowboy by the back of his shirt, a hand for each shoulder. With teeth clenched tight, he yanked that cowboy straight up out of his chair.
The cowboy from Montana was clearly not happy about this. He swung around with a haymaker that would have caused any trained fighter to burst into laughter. Hunter easily ducked under it, using the momentum and body weight of his assailant to launch him into the table behind them, scattering the chairs. This action caused a bit of noise, as one might expect, and suddenly every eye in the building was on Hunter and the cowboy. They were circling each other, preparing to engage in serious combat.
“You fucked up, city boy.” With that the kid from Montana grabbed a chair and reeled back as if he intended to knock Hunter’s head off at the waist. But for some reason he couldn’t swing the chair forward.
“What the fuck were you planning to do with this chair, recruit?” BMC Price had a firm grip on the chair. Seeing this caused the cowboy to let go and snap to attention. Hunter was already there. “Looks like you two have some EMI in you futures.”
On Sundays, the rumor went, recruits were granted a day of relative freedom. Ricky Sunday it was called, which of course was Navy slang for Recruit Sunday. But again, this was just a rumor as far as the men of Division 012 were concerned. They’d been at RTC for three weeks and hadn’t been given a minute of free time that wasn’t carefully planned out for them. Fingers were crossed as Chief Price’s men, or “Soup Sandwiches” as he liked to call them, heaved out and triced up for their third Sunday in Illinois.
They hadn’t even been awake for twenty minutes before their friendly Division Chief shattered all hopes of freedom for the day. As he crashed through the door at the rear of the compartment, every last man snapped to attention at General Quarters. At RTC this just meant that they were back in their neat little lines down port and starboard sides. Chief Price Wasted no time, “Forward IG, now.”
The men rushed to the front of the compartment, each finding their predesignated spot on the tile and sitting cross-legged, and yet somehow still at attention. They sat in neat rows, just before a table that the RDCs used as a desk when teaching new skills to the division. On top of the table was a special platform that would allow the RDCs to swing its surface up to a forty-five degree angle and thereby allow the seated recruits to better see what they were doing.
“Somebody from the back row run and get me their perfectly folded blanket.” BMC Price was going to teach them something all right. But Seaman Recruit Hunter Michaels was pretty sure that there was no such thing as a perfectly folded blanket. He was also fairly certain that whichever recruit had been unlucky enough to fetch his blanket was about to find that out. A hand shot over the top of the heads of the seated young men, yielding a wool blanket. Chief Price quickly snatched it up.
“Recruit, what the fuck is this? I said to get me your blanket, this looks like a pile of dog shit.”
“What Chief?” The response came from a clearly perplexed young man, the next to serve as victim of the Chief.
“What Chief? This chief, asshole! Is there any other Chief in this room? Do we really need to have another discussion about paying attention to detail?”
“No Chief.” Fear encompassed the young man’s response like dark in a cave. Chief Price, upon spotting the weakness that made itself evident on the young recruit’s wavering voice, flew off the handle.
“Drop! Now you’re telling me that I’m not a Chief? What are you waiting for? You can begin.” And with that the recruit began pushing. “Anybody else want to tell me that I’m not a Chief?”
BMC Price looked out at his audience-now completely captive-and released a small, but noticeable grin. His men were genuinely afraid of him, and he liked it that way. He was a skinny man, not very physically imposing. His thick Navy mustache made him look a bit scarier than he really was, but for the most part the man was a stick. It had taken him weeks of training to master the intimidation factor necessary for any hopeful RDC. Now he had the box next to ‘Scaring the hell out of the recruits.’ checked off on his resume for sure.
Originally, Hunter hadn’t been impressed with the Chief at all. He had mistaken the man’s wiry frame for laziness with his naive young man’s expectation for all military leadership to be “buff.” He had grown up watching General Swartzkoff on the television, a man with the visage of the Titanic riding atop an A1-Abrams tank. At least, that’s what Hunter had always thought of him.
But then, the General wasn’t a Sailor, and here Hunter found himself at the Navy’s Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois. Why he had gone and joined the Navy rather than the Army was still a mystery to him. Perhaps he had simply watched Tora! Tora! Tora! one too many times as a child. All he knew for sure was that he wanted to work in intelligence, but many people had told him that this was ultimately up to the Navy.
By entering as an undesignated seaman recruit, he had guaranteed himself an even shot at making it to the intelligence community. The problem was that he also had an even shot at becoming every other job in the Navy, and many of those he knew flat out that he would not like. He wasn’t a wrench turning kind of guy. This isn’t to say that he didn’t like hard work. When asked to do so he would “put out” at exhausting levels doing some of the dirtiest work that could be found. But if you were to ask him if he felt more at home behind a wrench or a computer, he’d pick the silicon every time.
“Seaman Recruit Michaels, would you care to repeat what the fuck I just said?” BMC Price was glaring at him as he snapped out of a daydream involving spies and gorgeous Russian women with curvy bodies.
“Chief, you said that we should fold the top corner of our blanket at a forty-five degree angle, aligning the edges of the fold exactly with the hind quarter of the blanket, Chief.” Hunter may have been daydreaming, but he had always been good at listening to his environment even when he wasn’t seemingly otherwise cognizant of reality. It was a trick he had picked up in high school to avoid nuking his brain with boring curriculum that he had already taught himself by middle school out of pure curiosity for the world. Hunter Michaels was officially something of a geek, though he was more overtly masculine than the average computer nerd so he was often overlooked as a jock.
“Son of a bitch, Michaels. I bet you were a teacher’s favorite in high school, weren’t you? How in the hell did you do that, recruit?”
“Chief, what did I do, Chief?” Hunter was playing innocent, and gambling big. He knew that by pulling the wrong string with Chief Price he could very well cause himself, and more importantly the division, some serious physical pain. If he succeeded, he would have a new tool at his disposal for the duration of his stay at RTC.
“Recruit, I’m not stupid. Your head was pointed this way, but your eyes were in the back of your skull. I’ll bet you were humping old Mary Likestosquat from back home in that noodle of yours. You were looking pretty happy with that stupid grin on your face. Look, you guys are my fifth division. I know when I’ve caught someone daydreaming, son. But somehow you managed to record what I was saying on that magnetic tape up in your head.”
“Chief, I apologize, Chief.” Hunter was almost angry at the thought that he had pushed too far. Certainly, he felt, a good cycling session was about to be delivered to him.
This time though, it didn’t come. Hunter had somehow legitimately impressed BMC Price with that stunt. He thought it odd that the laziest tool in his repertoire had been the first to score him points with an RDC. But as Chief Price continued with his lesson on blanket folding, Hunter realized that impressing the Chief hadn’t been worth it. He had previously been flying “low on the radar” with BMC. Not anymore.
Caveat: The format of this blog is not the most conducive to fiction. The column width is very narrow, creating strange line breaks where they should not be. Italicized items appear in red, looking almost as if they are in bold. I assure you, they are not. This caveat is written in bold type. With that said, what follows is the beginning of a character’s story. This character will appear in my first novel and will likely be the primary actor in a long series of books. This is the story of the beginning of his Naval career. There will be other characters to come. Each installment will be no longer than two pages, typed and single-spaced, in Microsoft Word. Please enjoy, and feel free to comment.
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“Atten-hut!”
Seaman Recruit Hunter Michaels hated it when the RDCs said it that way. The word was attention, not some strange codeword for a lean-to. Recruit Division Commanders were supposed to be the best of the best; the most squared away sailors in the entire U.S. Navy. His Division Chief had even gone so far as to call himself a “breed apart,” but Hunter couldn’t have disagreed more.
He and his fellow shipmates were constantly being reminded of the need for attention to detail, but the Petty Officers and Chiefs who had been charged with training them couldn’t even say the word “attention” correctly. It was all part of the game at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois and even though he didn’t like it, Hunter had gotten very good at playing along.
Michaels was standing at attention along the starboard side row of bunks, with all of his starboard side shipmates, staring intently at a similar line of recruits along the port side of the compartment. This was the berthing of Division 012, one of the last to enter RTC for the year, and now Chief Petty Officer Mitchell Price was walking the entire length of the berthing slowly, deliberately. In the Chief’s left hand, held close to his waistline, was a little brown paper sack.
“Recruits. How long have you been under my command?” It was intended as a rhetorical question, but as per the norm some idiot kid from the Midwest chose to make the mistake of attempting an answer.
“Two weeks, Chief!”
Chief Price’s fury had an extremely low flash point, and this kid had just gone and cranked up the heat. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” The Chief stomped over to the young man who was now quivering with fear. “If I had wanted a response from you Seaman Recruit Dickweed, I would have asked the question with my nose so close yours that you could have discerned what I ate for breakfast by licking it off the tip of my neatly trimmed mustache! Now drop!”
The frightened young man, an eighteen-year-old cowboy from Montana, was on the floor in the pushup position before his Chief even pronounced the last letter of the word. He began pumping out pushups like they were going out of style, allowing the Chief to return to business.
“Anybody else want to interrupt my motivational speech?” The compartment was silent, and every eye in the room was looking at that of the man across from him-Chief Price being the only exception. “Seaman Recruit Dickweed was correct. It has been two weeks now that I’ve had the misfortune of calling you my own. I’d have turned every last one of you lazy maggots over to the Chair Force by day two if I’d had my druthers. But one of the things we learn to do in this here Navy is to follow orders!”
Hunter didn’t miss the meaning behind his Chief’s decision to scream those last two words. Someone in that room had been caught disobeying a direct order. It had been happening a lot lately, and Michaels had already resolved to organize a blanket party for the next man who caused the division such unwanted scrutiny from their all too friendly RDCs. Chief Price continued to pace up and down the compartment with anger looming in his eyes.
“I assume that you children are aware of what an order is, are you not? An order is something that you do because I fucking tell you to do it! If I were to give the order right this instant for each and every one of you to cut off his left testicle, then by God I’d have myself a nice collection of portside pudwhackers! Am I right?” The recruits weren’t sure if they should respond. “I said, am I right?”
“Aye, aye, Chief.” The report came in near perfect unison.
“Then would somebody like to tell me what the fuck this is?” With that Chief Price raised the brown paper sack up so that every man in the room could see it. Slowly, almost ceremoniously, the angry RDC pulled out a candy bar. “Chocolate.”
Most of the recruits didn’t even dare to shift their gaze towards the candy for fear of being accused of trying to eat it. But for a reason that he couldn’t quite explain afterward, Hunter had an uncontrollable urge to see it. It was as if he didn’t believe there was a chocolate bar at all. But there had been, and once Hunter’s eyes had locked onto it, his Division Chief had locked onto him. Within seconds Hunter knew for sure that Chief Price had eaten pancakes for breakfast, with a whole lot of maple syrup drizzled on top.
“What in the hell are you doing, Seaman Shitbag? Are you looking at my candy bar?” Chief Price was clearly not pleased by Hunter’s silence. “I asked you a question, recruit. Are…you…looking…at…my…fucking…candy…bar?”
“No Chief!”
With that the Chief Petty Officer of Division 012 flew off the handle. “Don’t you fucking lie to me, recruit! I just saw you staring at my chocolate as though you somehow felt entitled to it. Is that it you little bug? Do you feel that you are somehow entitled to my candy bar?”
Michaels knew what was coming. He could already smell the tile that he felt certain was going to be mere inches beneath his nose in the next three seconds. But before Chief Price could issue the order to drop, the exchange was interrupted by the unmistakable smacking sound that accompanied the kid from Montana’s chin smacking directly onto the tiled deck. The cowboy had been pushing out his meted punishment in silence all the while, and had finally reached the end of his physical strength. Not wanting to draw any further attention from the Chief he’d decided to allow his arms to collapse beneath him rather than request permission to stop what he was doing.
For no apparent reason the anger in Chief Price’s face had gone. Left in its place was an odd sort of serenity. If Hunter wasn’t mistaken, it almost looked as though the RDC was happy. It was a thought that was quickly backed up by a grin that spread across the Chief’s face like wildfire.
“Looks like portside loses! I want every last person on Seaman Recruit Dickweed’s side of the berthing to get into their PT gear and head for the Grinder. His weakness has just cost you a mile and a half.”
With that they snapped to like greased lightning. Chief Price barely even had enough time to consume his candy bar and toss the wrapper in the trash before the line of recruits on the starboard side of the compartment -Hunter’s side-found themselves staring at the empty bunks of their portside shipmates. But Chief Price wasn’t finished, and they all knew it.
“Now, let’s see if your shipmates have followed my order to pay attention to detail. I’m going to walk the length of their side of my compartment, and for every hit I can find you will each give me two eight-count body builders.” He paused at the first bunk, clearly displeased with what he saw. His eyes made a cursory glance towards the remaining bunks. He had already seen enough. “I will set the pace, you will count them off. Ready? Begin.”
Even though we weren’t able to get tickets to see the first presidential candidate to campaign in Grand Junction, Colorado in some 40 years, we’re planning to show up at Cross Orchards today regardless. Actually, I’ve read that Bob Dole stopped in at our airport during his campaign in 1996, though he didn’t schedule an event like Obama’s and rumor is that he only stopped here because his father-in-law was born here.
Having grown up on the Western Slope I was worried that the valley was too conservative to provide a good turnout for Senator Obama—boy, oh boy, was I ever wrong! The line for tickets stretched around the block from the Obama headquarters at 844 Grand Avenue. It looked almost like the lines for the release of the latest Star Wars movies looked, replete with camping chairs and coolers full of refreshments, except that the patrons that were waiting for their tickets here weren’t dressed up like aliens or Jedi Knights.
Though I knew right away that I had arrived too late even to hope for a ticket, I was overtaken by a sort of giddiness to see so many supporters for the Democratic nominee right here in traditionally conservative GJ. My wife suggested that I stop the car and at least ask about tickets, even though it looked less than likely that any would be available. Sure enough they were all out, in fact they were out of yard signs and bumper stickers as well.
Luckily for me (and for the fellow manning the table) there was an independent entrepreneur selling pins, shirts, and stickers next door to the Obama headquarters building. I bought a bumper sticker for my vehicle so that I could proudly display both my U.S. Navy decal and my Obama sticker. I am so sick of people assuming that just because I was in the military I am supposed to be a staunch and die-hard Republican voter. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As a Navy veteran I am here to tell you that the concept of a “weak” Democrat is not only a misconception, but a childish one at that. As a military man and a Democrat alike, I would proudly serve again under Obama and Biden, in fact I would be much happier to serve again for them than I ever would under a McCain Palin ticket. Franky, Palin scares me with her lack of working knowledge regarding foreign policy, and McCain seems only interested in staying the course.
The trouble is, even with the current deployment posture of our military, if something major were to happen like a conflict with Russia over the Georgia dilemma and/or the ensuing chaos (like two Russian, long-range bombers landing in Venezuela), we simply would not have the manpower or the resources to defend ourselves because most of our military presently sits in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, and Germany. Under McCain’s leadership we would be further stretched to include occupation of Iran, North Korea, and Syria at the very least. If you can do simple math, you can see that this would leave very little here at home. Without instituting a draft, such a posture simply could not safely be maintained.
How are we supposed to be “strong at home” if we have nothing left here with which to defend ourselves? Is it “weak” to want to maintain the ability to defend our homeland rather than hemorrhage Trillions of dollars on the largest welfare program since the rebuilding of Germany after WWII—i.e. Iraq? The popular phraseology of the Republican party is, “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” Except that if we continue to spread our forces around the globe, we’ll wind up fighting them here and there, which means that we will be able to do neither effectively.
Anyway, long story short: Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!
