It has been 10 days since I finished Navy bootcamp. While I was in, I thought about why I had decided to enlist and leave my family while starting my journey into a completely new world of the United States military. I’m 38 years old, 20 years older than most of the recruits I was surrounded by during my time at Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois. I didn’t know what to expect despite all of the research I did beforehand, and just hoped that my age wasn’t an issue. What ended up happening to me was unexpected personal growth and a much needed attention to detail that I had been sorely lacking. Beginning a military career later in life presents a unique set of challenges mostly due to the fact that you’ve already lived so many years of adulthood and have so much waiting on the outside. Closing yourself off utterly from your family, friends, job, and everything else that we are constantly connected to is a shocking change to dive in to but that is exactly what I ended up doing. In the weeks leading up to when I shipped out to bootcamp, there were a lot of things I had to take care of before it was my time to disconnect from the real world. The final 48 hours I spent with my wife and daughter in Mobile were surreal and I kept asking myself, “Are you absolutely sure you can take yourself away from them?”.
Bootcamp can be a cold and cruel place. If it weren’t for the friendships I formed with my fellow recruits I am sure my experience would have been far different as we were cut off from our families while scrambling to adjust. The first month and a half were the hardest since we weren’t given a phone call and mail was slow to come in. Your concept of time is distorted and it is hard to grasp that life on the outside has gone on while your own existence has been confined to a bubble. I wrote my wife and daughter every day while day dreaming of what they were doing without me. I’d check my watch around the time that my daughter would be going through track practice and I tried to remember the dates that she had meets. Each time a letter did come through the morale boost it gave me was a feeling comparable to receiving a Christmas present when I was a child.
Our Recruit Division Commanders (RDC’s) demanded excellence from us in all aspects of our training. In the moments, we all probably resented this fact but by the end of bootcamp I found myself pushing harder and harder to accomplish the impossible task of living up to their standards. In bootcamp you will never receive positive feedback, never be told that you are doing a good job or that you have completed the task correctly. It will simply be time to move on to the next evolution unless you have made a mistake, in which case you will be strongly if not brutally corrected. The verbal and emotional abuse was always said to not be taken personally and that definitely played a part in how I handled myself at RTC. I took nothing personal, never even batted an eye when I was being screamed at. The trauma I have experienced as an adult oddly served me well in the rigid environment of basic training.
Not once was my age ever a factor and it was rarely brought up by either the RDC’s or the other recruits, except when it was an opportunity to give advice on certain aspects of life that I’ve experienced. I wanted to make sure I was able to help guide them in the right direction when they came to me with questions about everything from finance to relationships. There were a few that I opened up to about alcoholism and tried to preface the discussions with the fact that I could distinctly remember when I was their age and how I set myself on the path of ruin. When I decided to enlist I had a random thought come through my mind that I was going to help young people when I joined the Navy, and I was glad I was able to act on this during bootcamp.
When we got close to the end of bootcamp, I picked up my intensity during our workouts and runs with the goal of hitting the maximum scores on the final Physical Fitness Assessment. The scores varied according to your age, and I was determined to get the highest possible. I was already safely above the standards that I had to meet in order to finish bootcamp but I was at the point where manifesting challenges was getting me through each week. The uniform and rack inspections, reciting the chain of command from memory, and outpacing recruits that I was old enough to be fathers to became my personal challenges that consumed my mind each day. I told myself that if I could just get to the point where I was confident enough to try and get a perfect score on each event, I’d be OK. This repeated itself over and over. I brought my best effort every single rep during PT and ran my absolute hardest every time we were given an opportunity to run. Those were when I felt the most free and normal, and it reminded me of who I was before I arrived at bootcamp.
On the final Sunday before graduation, one of our RDC’s who shares the same rating as me said we had 4 candidates in our division who had finished in the top 3% of the training group. I was one of the candidates. To be honest, I was stunned. I’d gone into bootcamp thinking that I could blend in and just get through the experience without incident but my RDC’s noticed my potential and pulled from me every ounce of effort and skill that I possessed and forged me into the best version of myself that I have ever been. When the time came for the top 3% to be interviewed by the ships LCPO and several chiefs, I was ready. Still, when one of our RDC’s came into the compartment to announce in front of our division that I had won the Military Excellence Award which goes to the top recruit in the training group, I thought I was imagining things. My name with the words military excellence beside it? I thought back to the years leading up to this moment and it just does not seem possible. All of the failures I experienced as an adult and setbacks that I had to overcome were in fact turning points that were guiding me towards where I was supposed to be: the beginning stages of my military career on which I was being rewarded with the highest honor that a recruit can receive.
The reason I joined the Navy was because I believed that I could do more. I wasn’t content sitting behind a desk for the majority of my career, and I knew that my education in digital media and the passion I have for creating could be put to use professionally. As a Mass Communication Specialist in the United States Navy I will be afforded a grand opportunity to just that while assisting the warfighter in ways that I just could not envision through my civilian job. The time I get to spend as EHG’s web designer always keeps my fire for digital media content creation burning and I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to keep improving my skills. I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this if it weren’t for them! The sports journalism role that I began last year with West Coast College Football was also a dream of mine for quite some time and the chance to practice my writing skills made me a stronger prospect to become an MC. I hope that my skills in each of the fields that mass communications encompass will be useful as I begin my training here at my “A” School and I’m looking forward to learning how to use equipment in a professional capacity.
As I take the next step on this journey, I realize in the most basic terms why I decided to enlist and go to bootcamp. I am here because I wasn’t comfortable being comfortable. This is the path I was meant to be on, the road less traveled will always be the direction I take because that is how I can grow as a person. The Navy is getting the best version of myself and all of my life experiences made me ready for this moment.
