Navy Boot Camp Part IV

One of the things Boot Camp spends an inordinate amount of time on was polishing shoes. We polished the hell out of our shoes. We used a technique called 'spit-shining'. It was the diluting of the polish with, well... spit or... water if you wished. The combination allowed the polish to get deeper into the pores of the leather and fill them to create the desired reflection. And reflect they did, I got mine to the point you could easily see your facial features.

Then, above the boots, all day, every day, we wore leggings. No, not the skin-tight, girly 'leggings' of today but the same kind of canvas leggings used during World War II. You may recall seeing this image from a couple of blog posts ago. They held your pant legs tightly around your ankles and in our instance, kept our new bell bottomed pants from flapping in the breeze. 

Perhaps you remember that Navy uniforms are different during different times of the year. In warm weather, the uniforms are cool white cotton. In colder weather, they are dark blue ('navy') wool. Wool as in Wool. One hundred percent wool. Killer wool. To wear the leggings, you had to wrap the woolen pant legs tightly around your leg and when the leggings were added, they kept that wool tight. Yesss, as in 'tight'. So tight in fact that as we marched along the movement sandpapered the hair off our legs creating unusual patterns. There would be a normal hairy area, then suddenly, a crescent-shaped area of red hairless skin. For all the world, it looked like we had been stricken with mange. 

Now ask me if it ever completely returned to normal. Go ahead! Ask me!

There was also a lot of energy put into shaving. All the time we had gained by not having to comb our hair was redirected to shaving. And since the length of our sideburns was such a concern, those of us not shaving our whole heads were shaving our sideburns up to the level of the top of of ears.

The guys with really heavy beards were always getting screwed because their face could be just as smooth as a baby's butt and they'd still get hit with demerits for their shave because it looked blue.

We redirected all that pent-up angst, of course. Because the shower room was just a room with no individual shower stalls and had a high lip on the threshold, we would block the drains with towels and build a swimming pool and kick water at each other. Don't judge, we didn't have any TV.

Toward the end of this grand experiment, they allowed us 'liberty' to go either to Milwaukee or Chicago since Great Lakes is right in the middle. I chose Chicago, not knowing that many of my relatives had lived there. In fact, my great-grandfather John Pawlak had married Bronislawa Lewandowska there and my grandfather Roman Pawlak was born in Chicago. It was probably different from when I was there. 

What it was, was cold! This was the middle of November and it was the coldest and windiest this Miami-boy had ever experienced. Just the week before I had seen snow for the first time in my life and now I was ready to never see it again. Keep it, you can have my share.

The week before we graduated, our orders came through. I was assigned to a Destroyer, the USS Eugene A. Greene DD-711. Two other guys from my company were going to the same ship.

A week later we graduated with great pomp and circumstance, marching around with flags and loud military music. Some parents actually made the trip to see the graduation. This was another culture shock for me. There were families who actually did things like that!

   

The Navy had paid for my flight to Great Lakes, but I had to pay my own way home, so I took the bus. But it was OK, because I didn't have to report to my ship for 24 days! It was still at sea on the way back from Vietnam so I didn't have to get to Norfolk, Virginia until it did.

Another great adventure begins.