My Army Recruiter - The Big Fat Liar

The first significant thing I learned when I got to AIT was that I could wear makeup again. Oh happy day! The second thing I learned was that my new roommate was a witch…Wiccan. I’d never heard of such a religion, but this very sweet girl, who I still keep in touch with, would get up at all hours of the night to do naked, moonlight ritual dances. The drill sergeants (yes, they were there too) absolutely hated her because they were forced to respect her religious views and they were sure she was behaving this way to torment them. This shifted the attention away from me. I had learned my lesson. Low profile.

Unfortunately for me, my class drew the ‘mid shift.’ My schedule went like this: Wake up at 10 p.m.; get dressed and go to the dining facility for breakfast. Classes started at midnight and went until 6:30 a.m. Then we raced back to the base to eat ‘lunch’ and then haul ass back to the barracks to change clothes so that we could do PT with everyone else…most of whom hadn’t been awake and eaten twice in the last nine hours. After exercise, we had random duties which included cleaning bathrooms, buffing floors, mowing the lawn, etc. I broke one measly lawn mower and never got that detail again. Then free time, where a group of us would sneak off and smoke cigarettes. Yes – I started smoking again – peer pressure and all. On the left is one of our super secret spots. 3 p.m. was lights out. I grew quite addicted to Nyquil during this time. It was the only way I could fall asleep.

The classes I took were computer networking and telephone switching-related. My recruiter was a big fat liar. He told me over ice cream sundaes at Friendly’s that a ‘Network Switching Systems Operator/Maintainer’s job consisted of sitting in an air conditioned room and working on a computer. I quickly learned that this was not the case. The position I was legally contracted to perform was one where I was to drive a Hum-V with a million dollar mobile switching center on the back to wherever the infantry unit we supported was set up…usually in the middle of the woods. When we got there, we had to pull and bury cables, put up huge antennas and sometimes satellite dishes, put camouflage netting over our whole site, hook up a big smelly generator, pound grounding rods into the ground with a sledge hammer, carry huge jugs to the potable water source (usually ¼ mile away) and carry them back full, do the same with the giant fuel jugs, and only after that was there any sitting in air conditioning and pushing buttons. But I digress.

School was meant to teach us the button pushing button parts. We learned about soldering, how telephones work and top secret security codes. That lasted four months. During that time I learned I was going to be stationed in Hawaii, thanks to an officer friend I managed to make in the station-assigning administrative office. This was amazing – not just for the whole tropical paradise part, but my brother, from whom I’d been separated for 11 years, was stationed at the naval base there. But first, I got to go home and hang out with my friends for a month. What a strange feeling…to feel like I was changing profoundly and to find life going on at home as though I’d never left.