WAVES

This past week I talked with two women who also served in the Navy, one served during the Second World War, and the other went to boot camp just 3 or 4 years before I did. Before I started running, I truly rarely talked about my experience in the military, or even thought about it. But I have been rewarded by talking with other veterans, it is a shared experience that reaches across the decades, across race and gender lines, and even across branch of service lines.

In talking with the woman who had also been to boot camp in Orlando, we had a laugh about being so old even our boot camp has been decommissioned. She remembered things I had forgotten about, the grinder, which was the huge ashphalt marching ground, Starboard Leading Petty Officers, Company Comanders, phrases that I used in boot camp and pretty much never again. When I was talking to her I could feel the heat on the grinder again, remembered the rhymes of cadence marching and the guides who set the marching pace. When we were in boot camp, it lasted nine weeks, and they gauged it by week and day, 1-1 was week one, day one. Truth be told, I sort of liked marching around, it was fun. The firefighting, where you entered a room that was on fire, was terrifying. I hauled my "Bluejacket's Manual" the paperback textbook that was issed, around for years, although I never looked at it again after boot camp.

Boot camp was all about the Navy that used to exist. The Navy I served in was about technology and the cold war, and the beginning of Americans overseas being killed by terrorists.