Where were you four years ago? College? High school? Work? Previous duty station? Trying to figure where you’d be in four years? Think about that. Where you were, what you were doing, you friends, hobbies, favorite foods and bands… How much has your life changed from four years ago? Four years ago. On this day in 2002 my time in boot camp started. After our last meal on the 911th Air Force Reserve Base, a gaggle of us soon-to-be service members groggily stepped onto a commercial bus, carrying gobs of paperwork, some of us with hygiene supplies for our perspective boot camps, others with photos of our loved ones and addresses, “I love you” written in the eyes of the chap across from me as he looked at his girlfriend’s eternally-captured smiling face…and “I love you” reflecting in the tears of the gent next me, as he looked at a photo of his grandmother. The orange in the sky told us that dawn had begun…and to me…there was no turning back. No escape. I was on a one-way street to my future, whether the military was permanent or a phase In my life was unknown to me… After waiting in the Pittsburgh airport and holding a folder that would later turn into something called a “service record”, followed by a nap as I flew to the Chicago-O’Hare airport… I realized I might have made a mistake. Maybe those were the nerves from an 18-year-old boy who felt the world in his heart…and wanted to be in that world. Eh, maybe it was because I was flat out SCARED. There’s a bit of a blur, where we…the Navy’s newest collection of junior enlisted goof-offs…waited. We (and everybody who’s ever dealt with the military in one shape or form of SOME description know what I’m about to say…) hurried up to wait. To this day…I still fucking hate that. The next thing I knew, we were all being screamed at to run off the bus…then told to move faster…and eventually we found the area where we had to stand still and were ordered to stand at attention, complete with a description of what this “attention” was and how to do it. A man (whom I recognize at a BM1 today) but was a bald, loud, sharply-dresses (in uniform) asshole shouted in my ear…because I happened to be standing next to him. We were learned to take orders. Orders usually accompanied by a scowl and much yelling, along with name-calling (such as “Ricky”, “dumb-ass”, “dumb-dumb”, “Chuck”,… you get the picture.) Victim of circumstance, I tells ya. After being marched into a room filled to the brim with blue sweats, sneakers and socks…we were ordered to strip naked as the day we were born. The oddest part of this, in my mind, was the female Chief Petty Officer watching us guys standing in the corner watching us get naked. After being told how and when to dress ourselves (I had no clue pants go on my LEGS…) and grabbing some supplies (shaving cream, toothpaste, stamps…) we had to box our old civilian clothes and unnecessary personal items and tape them shut, addressing them to home. After I wrote “Smithton, PA” on that box…I realized it may be YEARS before I see and smell my quiet, boring little valley again. Seven of us (including me) were ordered to stack (or “lump”, as my father’s trucking lingo taught me) these boxes, which contained the final traces of hundreds of people’s lives, and get them put into these trucks as quickly as possible. One guy, rather non-descript, with light brown hair and black glasses, obviously in better shape than most people with us, asked me what my name was. “Erick,” I replied unsteadily. “I’m Loren Hord. Welcome to boot camp, shipmate.” Loren became my best friend in boot camp, but that’s over two months in the making…as well as a different story. Next we quietly stood in a line with sounds of viscous buzzing echoing in front of us. I knew what this was. My long, wavy, bushy hair was about to leave. And as I sat there…that mop I used to wear was replaced by a sporadically-fuzzy, mostly bald and even in some spots bleeding scalp. We were ordered grab these black jackets…because it rained and snowed in the winter time of Illinois…and then to pee in a cup. A final drug screening prior to training. Some guys couldn’t take that little leak, another man dropped his cup into a pool or urine and a final chap…well…it smelled like he crapped his new, blue sweat pants… Ew… After delivering that bottle of bodily fluid (that SOMEBODY wants to see…don’t know why…) and being yelled at to stand someplace else…I thought about being scared and the wrong choice and all that jazz. A pair of black men, one was a slightly-portly black man with an artificial scowl, who called himself “OS1 Thibou” and the other, lanky, older and with a face that budged like a statue’s and told us in a slow, booming, Panama-accent that he was “Chief Hinds. Everything in Division 027 belonged to him. We were in division 027. MOVE!” After running across the base in the dark, we stood in a run-down open barracks with blue, metal bunk beds that looked like they needed to be retired from use in 1986, and we stood as those two black men and a short, mustached white guy all yelled at us. I heard “meat wagon”, “fuck-ups” and other words. We were made to do push-ups , eight-count body-builders and slew of other exercises before being ordered (remember what tagged along with ordered?) to go to bed. As I pulled myself up to my top rack, the blue bar on the side broke off and I fell to the cold, stone floor (or “deck”, as the Navy calls it) with this blue bar busting my face open. I was then yelled at and ordered to learn how to get in bed by that “Chief”. So, with these blue sweats that didn’t fit, blood and hair hanging off of an ear, a fully-drained bladder, staring at this red ceiling light above me (all my Navy cohorts know what I’m talking about) and out-of-place craving for a gilled Reuben Sandwich… I realized I had made the right choice for myself. Where were you four years ago? College? High school? Work? Previous duty station? Trying to figure where you’d be in four years? Think about that. Where you were, what you were doing, you friends, hobbies, favorite foods and bands… How much has your life changed from four years ago? Now I’m at my second, soon to be at my third, duty station. I’ve spent almost three years living overseas. I’ve traveled across Europe and through Muslim nations and been on four separate continents. I’m a non-commissioned officer, an MC2, now. I’m happily married. I’ve discovered my taste for sheesha, Belgian white beer and pata negro jamón. I’ve made some of the best friends of my life. The places I’ve seen, been and photographed along with the people I’ve met still can’t be explained unless you stood beside me at that moment in time. So long as you embrace the changes life tosses at you…so long as you seek that change…your life will change for the best. Or so I believe. Where were you four years ago? Where are you today? Is it where you expected yourself to be? Want to be? Are you happy to be there? | 
