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.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part III

Being in the Navy provided an introduction to discipline. What kind of person would I be if Bob and I weren't so exhausted that day driving down NW 27th Avenue in Miami that going into the Navy seemed like a good idea? Beats me, because that's the way it happened. Would I do it again? Hmm.

There was no one available to kiss your foot in boot camp. This startled some of the company then so I can't imagine what a lot of our modern youth would think of such demands to suddenly grow up. Even the need for cleanliness was a shock for some. We were taught all manner of hygiene and not just for our own health. After all, we were going to be jammed together in tight places for long periods of time and who wants to be near someone who stinks? 

We washed all our own clothes by hand and hung them out on lines in the courtyard or in the drying room and for some bizarre reason we were not allowed to use clothespins. We had to tie the wet clothes on the line with little strips of string called 'clothes-stops'. If the knots were tied wrong, the clothes were pulled down and thrown on the ground. I imagine we were being made familiar with tying knots since knots are very important in the Navy, what with the sails and all.

We marched everywhere to provide us an introduction to coordination and teach us how to respond to orders and we carried those rifles and performed lengthy rifle drills to build up our upper bodies. Of course, no one explained any of this, we just did as we were told. We even marched to meals, where the food was always good wherever I went. The signs were clear and blunt: Take all you want. Eat all you take. Not a bad slogan. 

The Navy provided a guidebook to everything 'Navy' named The Bluejacket's Manual. They started using them in 1902 and they're still in use. I recently acquired a copy of the edition that was current when I joined and sure enough, I recognized every image.  It contains all the basic information required to get along in the Navy: rankings, ratings, when to salute, how not to drown, you know, the basics. A lot of the classes we attended were to explain what was in this book.

Beside the marching and drill work and the classroom study, there were practical, hands-on education sessions. Growing up in Miami, I can't remember not knowing how to swim. So I was surprised when I found quite a few of my company couldn't swim. They joined the Navy and couldn't swim. Huh? A couple admitted they'd never even seen the ocean. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone! But it was good to learn how to surface for air when there's an oil fire burning for hundreds of yards around you. That part of swimming I was unfamiliar with.
 

We spent quite a while on fire-fighting because fires are bad on a ship not just because you have nowhere to run, but pretty much everything onboard can explode or burn. So we became firefighters. Along with that, we had to become comfortable wearing gas-masks as well. Not dying is a priority I easily bought into.

There was also hand-gun and rifle training, ship identification and terminology. It was cool to learn the origin of the terms still used on modern ships. And we had to learn the rules around standing watch. To train us, we had to stand watch over the garbage dumpsters in case someone came on base to steal our garbage. 

Along about the sixth week, each company had to provide 'services' to the command for a week. Depending upon where you were assigned for 'Service Week', it could be custodial work, food service, warehouse work or whatever else was required. Because I was First Platoon Leader, I was assigned as a mentor to a new company in their first week on base to help them with the transition. If we had one of these assigned to my company, I don't remember ever seeing him. Oddly, I found this task to be a lot of fun because they really seemed to appreciate the guidance I could provide. And since this new company spent a lot of time marching and drilling and in the classroom, I had that time to myself. So I wandered around the base exploring and going into all the old buildings. Benefits of rank.

A couple of weeks later, we were marching along and my Service Week company marched by and they all yelled "Hey, it's Service Week!" which was their title for me. They actually broke rank and ran over to me! Boy, there was a lot of yelling and screaming from the instructors. Good times.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part II

My daughter told me recently that, knowing the way I am, she couldn't really see me in boot camp. That I wasn't 'boot camp' material, you know? The circumstances exist that serious physical harm or at the very least, psychological warfare would have raged uncontrollably. Military prison or a very long hospital stay were some of the best possible outcomes. She was right, of course, but it depends dramatically on how one sees 'boot camp'.

You see, I did not go through the boot camp as characterized in the movie Full Metal Jacket. The boot camp the US Navy provided was a series of schools to produce a healthier, more compliant resource that would serve the interests of the Navy and who will not die the first week they were placed in a duty situation. 

As you begin this process, the crutches of the past, your 'self', your individualism, the control of your time for eating and sleeping, bathroom needs, the choices you made about clothes, hairstyles, jewelry, even eyeglasses, are all removed. You are left with nothing to worry about except conforming and complying.

At the start of it all was uniformity. I'm sure you've all seen the movies of the head shaving, the issuing of clothing and bedding, medical and dental testing, all of that. There was no concern about what to wear and no one had to worry about combing their hair in the morning and shampooing was irrelevant. Naturally, some of us had to go above and beyond by shaving our heads right down to the skin. For those who had fairly long hair, there's some awfully white skin under there. Some people were made temporarily blind by the reflected light. 

There were several rounds of inoculations, but there were no needles, the fluids were pneumatically blasted into our arms (or rear ends) with air guns, it was all very efficient. Some guys had to see the dentist quite a bit. I was FINE because I had just had all my own work done on my own dime. It's called 'timing' people, look it up. 

So, after the 'induction' process was over, we were assigned to our units. Bob Deeter and I had joined together, but we were told there was no guarantee where we would end up. After all this, we were both made part of Company 555. We were the first company to use a brand new building in the new section of the Recruit Training Command. We were on the ground floor right where that red arrow is pointing.

As you can see, this was a large facility. Each of those buildings held twelve companies and there were a lot of buildings.  They had to have an efficient process to get us in and get us out.

I don't have an actual photo of what the interior of the barracks looked like, but this is a pretty good approximation. Rows of two level bunk beds with lockers in the center dividing the room. The bathroom, shower room, laundry room and drying room were all at one end, the rest of it was just one big open room.

One of the first creation steps of the new company was the assignment of leadership roles within the recruit population. There were regular naval personnel assigned to us, but this was a hierarchy within the recruits themselves. There wasn't any discussion of who would do which role and no one revealed what the selection process was. It was simply announced that Bob was Company Commander and I was First Platoon Leader. And that concluded our training. Company 555 consisted of perhaps 80 or 90 men and I was suddenly responsible for half of them. I can't recall if Bob and I ever discussed the odds of the two people who knew each other ending up in the top two positions in the company, but there it was.

Someone along the line secreted in a Polaroid camera, and I'm very glad he did since this is the only photo I have of the uniforms we wore as recruits. So here is Bob Deeter on the right and me on the left in front of the World War II-era rifles we carried everywhere. Notice that on our right shoulders we are displaying our recruit rank, Bob with four stripes and me with three.

The Navy did produce a Company 555 'Yearbook' for us with actual photos, but that was lost a long time ago. Perhaps they sent someone in the dark of night to steal it because it had such sensitive information. 

Or not. 
 

Navy Boot Camp Part I

 
About a thousand years ago (OK, it was February and March of 2009), I broached the subject of my being in the Navy. I didn't continue the story because, frankly, the whole topic makes me a little nervous. I'll explain why, but it may not make any sense to you. Here to the right is our callow hero himself in the official photo taken in boot camp. I thought about drawing in a mustache, but you can do that yourself.

It's still remarkable to me that so many, practically all, of my relatives going back generations were in the Navy and even though I was completely ignorant of that... there I ended up. If you're actually bored enough to learn how that happened, well, go back to 2009 in this thing and read all about it.

We're going to pick the story up as I entered the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. At that point, there were only two Navy 'boot camps'. One in San Diego for the western half of the country and Great Lakes, a bit north of Chicago, for the eastern half. Just a few years later, they opened a new one in Orlando, but that would have been too easy and convenient for me and no one wants that.

This is the official insignia of the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command which was only one of the schools in the Great Lakes Center. I don't remember any lightning bolts zooming through the place, but maybe I was there at the wrong time of the year.

With the passing and mellowing effects of time, I'm glad I got to see the historical nature of the place. When I was there, the facility had already existed for nearly a hundred years, so it's a hundred and fifty now. I got to go into buildings in use during World War I and II and it made me appreciate new construction even then.

Here, seen for the first time in fifty years, is the map of the place that I sent home to my parents so they could visualize where I was. I was not in a position to take 800 photos a day on my phone to instantaneously show them what I was doing every passing minute like people can today, so they had to use their imagination.

If you click on the image, you can zoom in on the details. Please note that true North is off to the left.

In this aerial photograph, taken October 26, 1972 just a few years later, you may get a better perspective of the building layout. I have kindly turned it to the same orientation as the map. See what a nice guy I am?

When we first arrived in our dopey civilian clothes with our cardboard suitcases looking like extras from a high school production of 42nd Street, the first thing they had us do was ship our suitcases home with everything we had brought. We were now conformists of the highest degree, the whole 'individuality' thing was over.

Couldn't they just have told us, "Don't bring anything with you, nitwit, we'll supply some new baggy underwear, just calm down." Or would that have made too much sense?

The adventure begins.