boot_camp
avian classified 2-C during one of my brief vacations from my "other business" i let myself get talked into joining the army.

i was looking for a purpose at the time.
(this was before i discovered that being a progfessional nuisance was a good enough purpose to have)

it all started when some recruiter came to class to administer the ever popular ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery) test

as he was walking around the room, my bookbag fell open and he saw my cheat sheet for an exam i had the next day...he saw that the lettering i had used on the sheet was Russian Cyrillic and decided that he needed to talk to me after the test was over

he had me come down to the central recruit processing station to take a language aptitude test where i scored in the upper five percent

i was declared a top candidate for the greatest oxymoron of all:
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

but then the security interviews started and by this time it was a few months into my sex drugs and rock and roll phase (part one)

i BS'ed the first couple of low level interviews, not figuring what kind of trouble i could get into for not admitting to being a pill-popping fiend who was sleeping with everybody
(apparently, Leavenworth, on perjury and fraud charges,making big rocks into little rocks and all the psychotherapy one can handle in between was the warning i got from someone later one)

i arrived on a base in a midwestern forest in the dead of winter during which time i endured the worst of any and all things that every other recruit endures, anyone who's been knows what i mean

the interviews got deeper and tougher
and at this same time, news from home said that my father didn't have much time left

so i deliberately tanked a big PT test and started behaving erratically and when forced to retake the PT test i tanked it again to get myself recycled into the fitness training unit and a quick set of interviews with the post shrink, a pleasant tempered full bird colonel in her late forties who reminded me of one of my aunts

i put on a good show for her, she was convinced that i was bipolar, dead serious one interview, robin williams the next and utterly (but subtly) morose the time after that just for a lttle variety

apparently it worked, i was declared just sane enough to be a grunt, but too shaky to be an intelligence recruit and by tanking the right PT tests at the right time i was released from training by default

i got home a month before my dad died on a warm april evening, i spent my eighteenth birthday a couple of weeks before that taking care of the broken frame that had once been my father, changing the bandages on a series of wounds that would never heal

the day it happened, his nose looked beaky and his face looked skeletal
for the last two days, his body shut down organ by organ, system by system

and then he was gone. 		010502
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Dafremen Rough do0d, rough. Glad you managed that last month with yer dad.

It's hard to know what to say or do when you read something like that. I prefer to wish you the best, and (I know this is gunna sound stupid...but it isn't) I hope that you cherish that GRIEF and the loss that you felt. I hope that you embrace it and never let it go. It's a way of improving the quality of love that you give to the loved ones that you STILL have.
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erin War......huh....yeah.....what is it good for? Absolutely nothing 030208
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Azz Why is it called boot camp?
Sounds silly, like a place people go to make shoes. Is it because you start from the ground up? I'm sure it wasn't us brits who called it that first! 		040117
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battle flag blues Because sometimes it's like a camping trip run by sadists and there are combat boots involved.

Of all the things in my military career I miss, Boot Camp was never one of them.

Salvadoran food is the thing I miss, actually... 		040117
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Or is it? Because only those currently in a military career may enjoy Salvadoran food, which is so very radically different than Honduran, Guatemalan or Nicaraguan food. 060120
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It is. Put a bunch of clunky footwear into several tents, arranged in a circle, and light a bonfire in the middle of the circle.

I hope you enjoyed doing so, but that does not constitute boot_camp. After all, clunky footwear is not synonymous with boots, nor with booties. However, clunky footwear may, under certain circumstances which I'm prohibited from exhibiting, constitute "booty".

Sheer pointlessness, in the scheme of things. Both this and that, I mean. You know. 		060120
what's it to you?
who go 		blather
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