I Have Arrived

Bumpity – bumpity – bump, the eagle has landed, deep in the heart of Texas. The first thing I noticed as I walked out the plane door and down the movable stairs to the tarmac was that it was about 40 degrees warmer here than Baltimore. There was no snow – wow! On the advice of my recruiting Sergeant, my luggage was limited to a few personal items, toothbrush and shaving supplies. He assured me I would be provided with the latest in fashion for today’s military personnel. I waited in the terminal while other recruits were arriving from across the country. When all were present and accounted for, we were herded into an old school bus for transport to our new home. Not much chit-chat on the way, mostly “where y’all from?” “Pittsburg,” “Wheeling,” “Milwaukee,” “Balmor.” – that was me, “Where?” they persisted. Scuse me: “Ball-tee-more” “Oh.” Geez.
We finally arrive at the base and are waved in through the gate by the Air Policemen (my future job) who I think look pretty snazzy in their white hats. Even as we “de-bus” our guides have begun to explain to us that as newbies we are at a rank that is somewhere beneath the scum of the earth. As if that wasn’t bad enough, during the assignments to our barracks it is discovered (by virtue of my serial number beginning with “AH” rather than “AF”) that I am a RESERVIST (God forbid).
The barracks were two-story wooden structures that looked like they were built just after the siege of the Alamo. Inside were the latrine, a small private room for our drill instructor and two rows of bunk beds with an aisle down the middle. I grabbed a top bunk because I was afraid if I was on the bottom, the top one would come crashing down on me in the middle of the night. Turned out, my downstairs neighbor was also a reservist, one Richard Rackowitz from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. We had arrived late (7 or 8 o’clock) in the evening so we were advised to get some sleep because morning came early. Sleep? I spent the whole night re-running in my mind all the depictions of “basic training” I had read about or seen in the movies. How would I survive such humiliating autrocities?
Dum de dum dum…