I Hope It Was A Dream

Inspired by Halloween season and recently seeing Paranormal Activity 2, I was trying to remember the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. I drew a blank at first, thinking I've lived a pretty unscary life for the most part. I've grown up to be a pretty hard-headed rationalist who tends to scoff at the idea of ghosts, goblins, demons, or other monsters stalking humans. That side of me believes these things have no basis in reality are nothing but remnants of humankind's unenlightened, superstitious past. 

But another part of me is bored by skepticism and becomes rapt with fascination when it comes to things that go bump in the night, thrilled with the idea that the rational side of me is wrong, and that perhaps a supernatural world that follows different rules exists alongside the one we see in our everyday lives.

The closest I've ever come to perhaps having an encounter with that world occurred when I was only four or five years old. My mom, dad, and I lived in a trailer park in Valdosta, Georgia at the time. In my bedroom there, I was cursed with many bad dreams. Perhaps this was because I had only recently been weaned from sleeping with my parents. There were some nights when I would still try to sneak in their room, but these efforts consistently ended in failure when they forced me out again. My efforts were so persistent that they took to locking me out, and I would protest by carrying a pillow and a sheet down the hall, and laying down to sleep in front of their door. But this tactic ultimately proved unsuccessful because the discomfort of the location would soon outweigh my desire to sleep with my parents, and I would slink back to my room to try to make the best of things.

The worst nights were the ones when I was sent to bed while my parents stayed awake. I felt painfully excluded on these nights. I could hear them talking and laughing, and it bothered me that they could seem so happy without my presence. I would lie in bed determined to stay awake until they went to bed themselves so that the following morning I could tell my mother that there was no sense sending me to bed early. I could stay up as long as they could if I wanted. But invariably I would fall asleep before the house went dark, and would wake up hours later after a nightmare to a silent house. These were dreams that did not dissipate in the morning. Their effects would linger into the following day, and being the contemplative sort, even as a child, I spent a great deal of time thinking about them.

The nightmares were recurring, and of three different types. The first, and least terrifying although still oddly scary, was of a pack of miniature black puppies with beady red eyes. They would suddenly pour from my closet like a swarm of locusts and bound onto my bed. I would stand up and try my best to throw them off, but it was a hopeless cause. The ones I removed from the bed would only jump onto it again as soon as I set them down, and others would leap onto it as I did so. This would continue until my bed was completely infested with the things. Eventually I would wake up with my heart pounding, sweating and panting.

While this dream was disturbing, I did not feel threatened by the bounding puppies. It was only that I did not wish to share a bed with hundreds of them. I have sometimes tried to figure out if this dream held some sort of Freudian or symbolic message, but I have drawn a blank on what it might have been.

The second and more frightening recurring dream was of a hoboish looking overweight witch who would appear in the doorway of my room and come to stand at my bedside to peer down on me. She didn't speak, but I understood somehow that she wanted me to go with her back to wherever she came from. I would stare at her, paralyzed with fear as she placed a hand on me. As she did so, I would find myself transported to what I understood to be her world. I stood in a long hallway walking beside the witch who held my hand against my will. Against the walls on either side stood armless puppet-like creatures with sunken in cheeks and beady eyes. On their heads they wore hats of all types. The hallway was dimly lit, as if by candlelight, and I did not know where we were going, or what the puppets wanted from me, but I also did not want to find out. My fear would finally get the best of me, and I would flee from the witch. This would prompt a cacophony of noise from the witch and all the puppets surrounding me. The entire mob would chase me down the corridor as I fled. But running is hard in dreams, and within moments, the witch's gnarled hand would take hold of my arm. Then I would wake up, finding myself safe in bed, immensely relieved I had only been dreaming.

This dream was terrifying to me mostly because of how real it seemed in the moment and its linear nature. I wonder now if I've filled in the blanks after the fact, but I don't think that was the case. It was just an exceptionally scary dream that recurred more times than I care to recall.

But it still wasn't the scariest dream. There was a third one that, thankfully, didn't recur as often as the others. I believe it only happened three times, but the third one was the worst of all. It was the dream that seemed to end them all...if it was a dream at all.

In this dream, I would be laying in bed on the verge of sleep when I would hear something beating on the wall that my bed was pressed against. I would look to see what was there and see one of the witch's puppets banging its head against the wall and staring at me. It did nothing else...only stared and after a moment it would pound its head against my head and stare at me again. In the first two dreams of this type, there were two puppets. One appeared at the foot of my bed, and another at the middle. The one in the middle wore a derby hat while the other wore a straw one. For some reason, the middle one seemed the most sinister. I literally feared for my life when I had this dream, and dreaded its coming.

The third and final time that I had this "dream" is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, and I sometimes wonder if it was truly a dream at all although I have no other explanation for it. It happened on one of those nights when I was sent to bed early. For some reason, I was even more upset than usual about being forced to bed early. Feeling very angry, I attempted to stay awake until after my parents went to bed as usual. But, also as usual, I failed. I was rudely wakened sometime later by an awful racket of something hitting the wall the bed was pushed against. I already knew what was happening before I turned to see. The puppet thing had come to get me. I saw it glaring at me in the dim light of my nightlight--an armless figure pressed between the wall and the bed staring at me with beady eyes and a malevolent grin. It wore a crumpled derby hat and the remnants of a ragged shirt. For a moment, I could only stare at the thing, unable to move or speak. Then it slammed its upper body against the bed in two sharp motions. I heard the bed springs squeak from the impact, and screamed for my mother. The alarm in my voice must have been evident because she came running. She came to stand beside me and asked me what was wrong. Too terrified to speak, all I could do was point to the other side of the bed at the thing I could still see grinning at us.

She told me there was nothing there. Determined that she must be right, I turned away from the thing and begged her to let me sleep with her and Daddy. But she said my dad would simply not allow it, and I said there was no way I was staying in my room alone tonight with the scarecrow puppet thing. Finally, she agreed that she would sleep in my room and that I could sleep with my father. I worried that the thing would get her, but something told me it was only interested in me, and I left her there alone.

The next morning I was extremely relieved to see she had survived the night. Over breakfast, I told both of my parents about what I had seen, and also about the other two types of recurring nightmares I often had. My mother seemed concerned about my nightmares, but she assured me that the thing I'd seen against the wall had only been part of a dream and nothing more. I accepted this, but wasn't so sure she was right. My father believed that all my dreams were just an imaginative ploy to convince them to let me sleep with them.

In any case, I never had any of the dreams again after that. It wasn't long afterward that we moved out of the trailer park onto a piece of isolated land in the country. Although my room in the trailer remained the same, something about moving away from the trailer park made it less menacing, and I was no longer so afraid to sleep alone. But for many years afterward, I made it a point to never look to the wall side of my bed. I believed that if I did the scarecrow puppet thing might appear, and even now a ghost of that fear exists for me.

I've convinced myself now that it was only a dream, but every now and then there are nights when I'm not so sure.

Confessions of a Late Blooming Serial Monogamist

I was a late bloomer when it came to dating, and I'm not sure "blooming" would be the accurate term for how my evolution in that venture progressed. But somehow, my dating life had a happy ending considering I'm very satisfactorily married to someone I adore, and who appears to return the sentiment.

In high school, I did manage to bring a date to my junior and senior proms as well as a homecoming dance, but in all three cases, I was more of a convenient ride to the activity than an object of even the slightest romantic interest. I also can't blame my slow dating growth on lack of interest. Starting from about the sixth grade forward, I've found myself extremely interested in the opposite sex, but also extremely unwilling to let my interest be known. All through junior high and high school, I harbored secret crushes on various girls in my school that I did not dare disclose to anyone because I considered them out of my league, and felt I would be ridiculed if my interest in them was known. In hindsight, I might have been right to keep these feelings to myself because the truth was that I did march to a different drummer from most of my classmates. I felt like a zag among a school full of zigs, I existed so quietly and deeply inside my own head whereas it seemed that everyone around me seemed to be of quite the opposite nature. I was a pretty good athlete, a pretty good student, and not the ugliest guy around, and should have been fairly popular among my peers on the face of it, but because I was so shy and withdrawn I wasn't.

Another reason I found myself stymied when it came to dating was because I became hopelessly enthralled with the girl who lived across the street from me. She was three years younger than me which would not have mattered in later years, but then it did considering the whole thing started when I was about fifteen and she was about twelve, and probably didn't completely end until my dad married her mother when I was a Freshman in college. Thankfully, by that time, she had moved in with her father, and we were never forced to co-exist in the same house. If that had happened, it would have been downright torturous for me, and I probably would have stayed away from home as much as possible.

To this day, I'm not sure how much my obsession with her was one-sided or how much she returned my feelings. It seemed to vary from day to day when I would come to see her at first on the pretense of visiting her little brother to play Nintendo games, but later without any pretense at all. We both went to the same private school, but she did not acknowledge me there, and seemed to become angry if I made any move to even speak to her. I found the situation hopelessly frustrating, but no matter what, I couldn't seem to change my feelings for her even though I knew it was highly unlikely that we would ever be the established boyfriend and girlfriend I dreamed of us becoming.

To truly delve into the dysfunctional dynamics that seemed to be in play when it came to she and I would be a separate entry in itself, and not one I'm willing to currently explore. Suffice to say that my hopeless infatuation with her put a damper on the possibilities of me having a more productive dating experience with someone else. 

In college, my dating woes continued for the most part except for a few isolated incidents when I could have and should have put my virginity to rest for good. One of these incidents occurred in my sophomore or junior year when I met a girl at a party named Sheila. Aided by alcohol, I broke out of my oppressive shyness for a bit, and wound up spending the night at her apartment. Things became very sexual, but I couldn't seem to get past my anxiety to follow through on what was asked for. It didn't help that the girl completely freaked me out by talking about meeting me as being a sign from God, and saying she was going to arrange a trip to Disney World for us. After that night, suffice to say, I did not seek out her company again. But the incident was very significant to me because it was the most sexual experience of my life, and made me long--or should I say lust--for more. Sometime during my Junior year, I ran into a girl named Stacey who halfway became my girlfriend for the better part of a month or so, but the truth was I wasn't enamored of her at all. I just found it thrilling that she was so willing to help me explore my sexuality for a short time. However, in this case as well, I was plagued with anxiety issues when it came right down to sex, and this fact no doubt led to my encounter with her being so brief.

In 1994, I joined the Navy, and was still pretty much a no-go when it came to women until my fateful meeting with a girl from West Virginia named--I kid you not--Bonnie Jean. I met her at a country bar in Virginia Beach on a night when I had gone out only out of sheer boredom, and told myself I would drink a single beer, and then return to exile myself to the ship that doubled as my home. Halfway through the beer, I was unexpectedly served another. The bartender told me that the drink was courtesy of the two girls sitting nearby. After a minute, I gathered the courage to speak with them, and was soon deep in conversation with Bonnie Jean whose sister had ordered the drink after Bonnie had apparently expressed a favorable opinion about my appearance. Things progressed and she invited me to her home where I promptly spent the night. I still had problems with anxiety on this occasion, but this time, Bonnie Jean had the patience to help me work through them. I was twenty-four years old, and the night marked a landmark for me.

I was hot and heavy with Bonnie Jean for a little over two months until my ship left Norfolk for a six month cruise. I never saw her again after that, but she did write me a few letters during the first couple of months I was gone. When the cruise ended, and my ship returned to Virginia, I called her number, and reached her sister who informed me Bonnie had gotten married to a Marine while I had been gone. I was neither surprised or particularly heartbroken by this news, and was actually somewhat relieved. She hadn't exactly been my soul-mate. But being with her and sleeping at her house had certainly been better than flying solo all the time. I suppose the experience with Bonnie should have given me the confidence to propel me into a woman chasing frenzy, but it did not. In fact, I had nothing resembling a girlfriend again until after I finished with the Navy in 1998 although I was guilty of engaging in a random hook-up or two along the way. Not becoming involved with a girl was also somewhat by design as I didn't want anyone or anything to prevent me from returning home to finish college when my enlistment was over.

I was only out of the Navy two months before running into Carrie, a friend of the much younger girl my uncle--Super Bob-- was dating. One thing led to another, and I wound up being in a relationship with her for the better part of a year. Delving into this thing too could also be its separate entry, but in the final analysis, I can't say it was a negative experience. Carrie was pretty nuts with her over-dramatic presentations and extreme possessiveness, but she was also kind and fun in her way. She only broke up with me after honesty finally compelled me to admit I didn't see myself ever marrying her. We were living together at the time, and about three days after that revelation she moved away to parts unknown, and I have never seen or heard from her again.

It was during my post Navy time that I became what my wife terms a "serial monogamist." After Carrie came Angie who I dated for three years, and became engaged to, but in the end we went our separate ways, and I moved to Savannah for a job after graduating from grad school. There I met Karen, who I had an awesomely fun time with drinking in half the bars in Savannah, and spending almost every weekend at the beach. This lasted for a little over a year before she suddenly moved back to her home state of Connecticut after being offered a job there.

Shortly after that, I ran into she who shall not be named except for the appelation of Crazypants. Of all my relationships this was the only one that could accurately be described as unhealthy. Poor Crazypants was madly jealous and irrational on many levels. She seemed to have no limits in what she would do to keep me with her. Things with her dragged on for the better part of three years before I finally disentangled myself from her. I assume she is living in Savannah now, but I have no idea where she is or what she is doing, and am happy and relieved that that is the case.

Shortly after she was mercifully gone, I met my wife, and knew early on that I didn't ever want to date anyone else ever. Thankfully she felt the same way, and now we are happily married and living happily ever after. Prior to meeting her, I used to spend a lot of time analyzing the reasons for my rocky and hit and miss dating life. I suppose it happened just because it was how my life has played itself out. I'm just glad I don't have to be a serial monogamist any longer although except for the experience with Crazypants, I don't really regret dating any of my former relationships although I certainly stayed in some of them much longer than I should have. In the final analysis, I'm happy that the very winding road I took led me to where I am now.

I'd Rather Drink Coffee.

I keep asking myself if this Tea Party thing is only a passing fad we're going to see rehashed someday on VH-1's Remember the 2010s, or if it is a truly enduring political movement whose impact will be felt for many years to come. History will tell the story, but the influence this group appears to have had in recent elections makes me wonder how it came about, and what these white middle-class Americans, not so seemingly different from myself, are so angry about.

They profess to be angry about the increasing encroachment of the federal government onto their basic freedoms and object to what they consider to be the government spending too much money without working out where it is going to come from. They say they feel the middle-class bears too much of the financial burden for our country already, and asking more of them will only serve to finally break their back. Their name is actually an acronym that spells out their purpose: Taxed Enough Already.

Their objectives do not sound overly sinister, and I find that I can even relate to their mission. The middle-class of America certainly shoulders more than their share of  the burden of paying for our government's operation. It has always been that way, and probably always will be. If I truly believed this was what the Tea Party movement was actually about, perhaps I could join them. I certainly wouldn't mind paying less taxes. I don't particularly enjoy the idea of having an all-controlling central government determined to inject its influence ever more intrusively into my daily life, and the truth is that I would probably fit in at a Tea Party rally as easily as anyone. After all, I'm pretty much as white, middle-class, and conservative-raised as anyone could be. Why then do I find myself so viscerally disgusted by even seeing snippets of their gatherings on the news in the moments before I can reach for the remote to change the channel? Of course the media does tend to focus on the nuttiest attendees: angry white people holding signs declaring President Obama as a Nazi wannabe birth certificateless Moslem just this side of the anti-Christ, and at the same time paying homage to their unofficial queen: Sarah Palin, a woman who seems to have little interest in governing, but a lot in being as famous and rich as possible.

Should I trust my gut in finding this movement distasteful like former President Bush might, or do my negative reactions deserve to be more closely scrutinized? Being a proponent of Socrates' statement that an unexamined life is not worth living, I feel obligated to delve into the thing.

After reviewing web site after web site proclaiming the virtues of The Tea Party and the fine patriotic views it purports to stand for, I discovered my original opinion to be reinforced rather than refuted. It isn't the basic principles of the Tea Party I find objectionable although I do believe their choice of targets are misguided. Obama, Health Care, Pelosi, The Stimulus, and Bailouts appear to be buzzwords for mad as Hell Tea Partiers to throw punches at rather than the real culprits for the fundamental misfortunes of middle class Americans. My intuition tells me these issues run much deeper and are more complex than these good patriots care to ponder. These problems have also been around much longer than any of us care to think about. In my reading, I discovered this article that addresses these issues in a way that made a lot of sense to me.

But what truly bothers me about the Tea Party movement isn't what they profess to stand for. All of the rhetoric about smaller government and anger about taxes and spending is a flimsy, halfhearted attempt to disguise what it's truly about: The middle-class, white, properly God-fearing, salt-of-the-Earth types sense they are losing ground in America. Minorities of every sort are gaining power. Blacks and Hispanics are becoming more numerous, educated, and wealthy. Gay people are rapidly being accepted into the mainstream of American society. Our culture is shifting to a gradually more secular place where fundamentalist Christianity does not hold as much influence as it once did. The typical Tea Partier, who has always considered him or herself "the real Americans" our founding fathers had in mind when they put our nation together wants to fight back. They see this as their last stand--their final chance to turn America around to change it back to the country they wish it to be--a place where the can feel comfortably superior, where minorities know their place, where gay people are marginalized, and where a black man would know better than to have the audacity to run for President.

I am also convinced the Tea Party only exists because the perfect combination of variables fell into place for them. Most importantly, the economy tanked. There would be no fuel for such a movement to exist if this were not the case. Then Sarah Palin was named John McCain's running mate. The Tea Party may lack a true leader, but in her they have a perfect figurehead. She seems to voice their cause so perfectly that it makes you wonder if the Tea Party was somehow conceived because of her, or perhaps the whole thing was her secret brain child. It becomes a chicken or the egg question. She is their perfect ambassador, and they give her the perfect platform to spread her seemingly simple-minded message that nonetheless obviously resonates with this segment of the population. In Barack Obama, the Tea Partiers also have the perfect foil--a black, cerebral, liberal-leaning President with a suspiciously Muslim sounding name. No Hollywood writer could have invented a better arch-villain.

Over and over, I ask myself if I am being needlessly  prejudiced and judgmental in having such an uncharitable opinion of this group. Am I being short-sighted and unfair to these people who, demographically at least, are so like me. They seem to be a group that thrives and prospers on emotion--chiefly anger--while I am a person who tends to purposefully put my emotions aside in favor of logic and rationality. Perhaps this is what truly repels me. But logic also tells me that while the Tea Party may be able to exert considerable influence in the here and now because of the power of their emotion, they will not be an enduring force in American politics. How could such extreme Tea Party based candidates such as Carl Palladino and Christine O'Donnell be anything but flash fires that burn white-hot, but also quickly extinguish themselves? If I was to return five years from now to read this post, would I say to myself--'I can't believe the Tea Party was such a big deal I put this much energy into writing about them,' or will I think that this was just the tip of the iceberg for them as I try to ignore the television as it plays Sarah Palin's State of the Union Address filled with cutesy winks and references to Mama Grizzlies.

For the sake of our country, I hope not, and my gut says it could never happen...

Doesn't it?

"Slip" Splish Splash

A view of the St. John's River

When I was five or maybe six years old, I went on a fishing trip to the St. John's River in Florida with my dad and uncle. Prior to the trip, I remember asking my dad if we would be swimming in the St. John's like we went swimming in the Flint River whenever we went there on weekends during the summer. My dad said that we would not be doing this. The St. John's, unlike the Flint was too dirty to go swimming in, he told me. We would only be fishing.

In spite of this explanation, I couldn't get the idea of swimming in the St. John's out of my mind. If you could swim in one river, why couldn't you swim in the other? It didn't make sense to me. I remember a lot of details of the trip in spite of it being so long ago. Besides my uncle--Super Bob, and my dad, Uncle Ben also accompanied us. He was actually my great uncle. I remember how thin and dry he looked, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. He loved to talk and he entertained us constantly with tales of fishing trips past. We fished all day on the St. John's from our john boat, and it seems like all we caught was a single fish. I remember seeing a giant eagle's nest with an eagle perched inside of it and being filled with a sense of awe at the sight. Uncle Ben said the bird was actually an osprey, but that was close enough to an eagle for me. I couldn't wait to tell my mom about it when we got home.

I also couldn't see the supposed difference between the St. John's and the Flint. As far as I could tell, they were both large bodies of fresh water where people fished. It was the dead of summer time, and the heat was oppressive. All I could think about all day besides the magical eagle, and the fact that no fish were biting was how cool and refreshing it would be to jump in the water. Late that afternoon, after we were done fishing and relaxing at Uncle Ben's cabin, I had an idea. I told my dad that I wanted to try my hand at fishing on the pier for awhile because I was so disappointed at not catching a fish all day on the boat. I was wearing jeans and a baseball cap as I had not been allowed to bring my swim trunks. My mother hadn't let me pack them because, knowing how much I wanted to swim in the St. John's, she felt it would be too tempting.

But that was really okay with me because I'd always wondered what it would be like to swim in jeans anyway. I thought of it as having two fun new experiences at once: swimming in a new river and in jeans instead of swim trunks. I was excited walking towards the pier with a fishing rod and a small container of crickets. It was like setting out on an adventure. I fished for awhile contemplating my plan as I did so. No fish were biting off the pier either and boredom set in. It wasn't a long drop from the pier to the water and it looked so cool and inviting. My plan was to accidentally fall in. That way I wasn't breaking any rules. It would just be an accident. I was just a little boy, and everyone knew little boys often had accidents. I thought if I fell in with the pole in my hand, it would be more believable. So I took a deep breath and casually stepped off the end of the pier into the water.

I remember that it seemed a further drop from the pier than it had appeared, but the water was as nice and cool as I had imagined. I still couldn't understand my parents' swimming prohibition. Swimming in jeans, however, turned out to be a mistake. They were so heavy that kicking my feet to stay afloat was difficult. I also saw, to my chagrin, that the pole I had jumped in with had escaped my grip. It was beyond my reach and floating steadily away on the river's current. All I could do was watch it go. That wasn't good. Losing the fishing pole, I knew, meant there was a spanking in my future.

Apparently my dad had seen me "slip" because he came outside the cabin and yelled at me.

"What the hell are you doing, Charlie?" he asked.

"I fell in," I replied. "I accidentally dropped the pole."

"Get your ass out of that water!" he told me.

Unhappily, I swam the short distance to the shore, struggling to do so in my water-logged jeans. My dad quickly untied the boat and motored right past me on his way to retrieve the dropped fishing pole. I went inside dripping water on the floor and faced Super Bob and Uncle Ben.

"I fell in," I explained. Both of them laughed like I'd told a particularly funny joke. I went to the bathroom to shed the jeans.

A few minutes later, my dad returned. He hadn't seen the humor in my stunt, and didn't believe for a moment that I had slipped. He gave me three licks with his belt for almost losing his fishing pole, and I was hurt that my own father thought I was lying. I appealed to Super Bob.

"I was walking toward the end of the pier," I told him, "and a shadow went across my head. I thought it was that eagle about swoop down on me, and I slipped and fell in."

He laughed. "Yeah, right," he said. "You expect me to believe that when all you've been talking about is how it's not fair you can't swim in the St. John's like you do the Flint?"

"Yes," I said. "Because I'm telling the truth."

But he didn't believe me and I was heartbroken. The only person whose sympathy I successfully appealed to was my mother after we got home. "Your dad should have been more concerned with you than his fishing pole," she said. "He can always get another rod and reel, but he'll never get another Charlie."

"That's right," I said, vindicated. "That pier was slippery and I thought an eagle was going to get me."

Daddy just smirked, but I could tell from his half smile that he was finally seeing the humor in the situation.

"So was it really an eagle flying over you?" he asked.

"No. Just a cloud passing over the sun," I said.

He shook his head and walked away smiling.

I was in the Navy Then.

U.S.S. Hawes FFG-53--The ship I served on for three and a half years in the Navy.

Eleven years have passed now since I've completed my enlistment in the Navy and fifteen years since I originally joined. In some ways it seems odd that so much time has passed, and in another way, it seems it happened in an entirely different lifetime. When I signed up for the Navy in the Winter of 1993, it was both an impulse decision and the most thought out thing I had ever done.

It came about in large part because of a late night conversation I had with my roommate. I was confiding in him about my frustration with being nearly finished with college, and still having no idea about what I really wanted to do with my life. The degree I was pursuing--English--was not exactly going to set me up for lucrative job opportunities. I had majored in the subject simply because it was what I made the best grades in in high school, and because I knew I wanted to be a writer, but didn't know exactly how to go about becoming such a thing.

My roommate, Scott, who had no doubt what he wanted to become once he graduated--a trainer for a professional football team which he promptly became, suggested that the military might be a good option for me because it would give me some more time to figure out what the heck I wanted to with myself, and would also give me some tools I needed to develop such as becoming more organized and self-disciplined. He also felt I possessed qualities that would make me a good soldier such as being a pretty steady, level-headed guy who was in physically outstanding shape.

I had never seriously considered joining the military before that night although in the back of my mind I'd always wondered if I had what it took to become a soldier, and had always considered it a very honorable thing to be. Besides that, I'd always idolized my uncle who retired from the Marine Corps as a Lieutenant Colonel, and won various awards in combat in Vietnam when he was a part of a Marine Recon division, including the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Almost since the time I could talk, I referred to him as Super Bob because that's how I felt about him.

I thought that if I was going to join the military, I should really become a warrior for it to be worth my time. I talked about it with my uncle when I went home the following weekend. He told me the toughest, most elite special forces unit in the military were the U.S. Navy SEALs, and that if I really wanted to become one of the best, then they were the group to become a part of. Taking this to heart, I began to read heavily about the SEALs--their history, their purpose, and what was involved in becoming one. All of it appealed to me, and I decided to pursue it.

I went to the Navy recruiter's office with my friend, Jim Hayes, who embraced the idea completely as soon as I mentioned it to him. The recruiter signed us up for the ASVAB. Jim scored in the 99 percentile which was good enough to qualify him to enroll in the nuclear program, and I scored in the 95 percentile, which was good enough for me to go to almost any Naval "A school" I wanted after Basic to learn a job to do in the Navy. I chose Operations Specialist simply because the recruiter told me that it was a rate a Navy SEAL could have. To this day, I'm disappointed I didn't choose the journalist rate. If I had, maybe my time in the Navy wouldn't have been the total career wash that it became. I think I knew even before I joined the Navy that in spite my interest in becoming a SEAL, it wasn't something I truly wanted to do down deep in my heart.

I didn't tell my dad about my plans to join the Navy until just before I was scheduled to go to Jacksonville for MEPs, where you're prodded and poked by various indifferent doctors and are formally sworn into the armed forces. I knew he wouldn't think it was the best idea, and also had some idea he would be offended that I didn't consult with him beforehand about it. It also occurred to me that he would feel he'd wasted all the money he'd saved for most of my life to send me to college, and here I was choosing to leave school before I'd graduated. I was less than a year away from graduating, and if I had graduated before joining the military, I would have been eligible to become an officer rather than joining as enlisted. It seems foolish that I joined so rashly when I could have put myself in a much better position by graduating first, but I know that I didn't wait because if I had, I wouldn't have joined the Navy at all. Actually, after I was sworn into the Navy in Jacksonville, I began to rethink my whole decision. I joined in January of 1994, and was not scheduled to leave for Basic until July 17th. I learned that a person could back out without penalty before they had gone through six weeks of Basic training, and the truth was, that after MEPS, I felt I had made a mistake, but my pride would not let me back out of it. I decided I had made a decision and would follow through with it regardless of anything.

The day finally came, and it was a hard one. My grandmother, sister, and uncle drove me to Valdosta where I would ride a bus to Jacksonville from where I would catch a plane to Great Lakes, Illinois for Basic training. My dad was struck by a migraine headache that day and couldn't come. I have no doubt that the headache was completely stress-induced. He didn't want me to join the Navy, and couldn't bear to see me off to do it.

I remember the surrealness of the whole experience that day--arriving in O'Hare airport in Chicago, and taking a shuttle to the Great Lakes Naval base late that evening. We were kept up the entire night being processed and screamed at like so much cattle. My company and I were led to barracks and allowed to lay in our racks for no more than a couple of hours before the Company Commander, an utter asshole of a human being my company came to know as BT1 Keith, woke us with the obligatory trashcan banging and Full Metal Jacket type profanity. It was enough of a shock to me that I had a full blown panic attack that morning that I've never experienced before or since. But I got control of myself by thinking that the whole situation seemed so cliched that it bordered on the ridiculous.

I never made a serious run at becoming a Navy SEAL. I went to try out for it one morning in Basic, and was told to get out of the pool after about half a lap. They said I wasn't doing the breast stroke right. I hadn't thought about learning proper swimming strokes as a prerequisite to becoming a SEAL beforehand. But I also thought it was just as well because from that first day in Basic, my sights became set on enduring the four years required of me, and getting out when it was over. All my former thoughts of becoming a warrior suddenly seemed very silly. I literally counted the days I was in the Navy and still feel to some degree that it was lost time. I'm 38 years old now, but sometimes think I should actually be 34 because the four years I spent in the Navy were so lost they really shouldn't count.

They were, without a doubt, the loneliest, most miserable years of my life, and yet when I think back on them now, it's now without nostalgia. I have to admit that I went through a great deal of personal growth while I was in the Navy. I always knew the world was a much a wider, larger place than it seemed growing up in small town Camilla, GA, but it was good to see that confirmed beyond all doubt while I was in the Navy. I went to tons of places in Europe that I would have never seen otherwise, and I'm glad to have seen those places. It was such an intense time for me, and I spent so much of it inside my own head. It seems that my memories of things I did and saw during that time period are so much clearer and detailed than of almost any other time in my life.

When I finally got out, it felt like I'd pressed a reset button for myself, and I was able to be much more focused when I returned to college. I often wonder how my life would have been different if I hadn't joined the Navy. Would it have been better or worse? In what ways would I have been personally different? I probably would have had an entirely different life. I will never know of course, and it makes no sense to dwell on it. Thankfully, I'm happy with my life now, and I suppose that all the decisions I'm made beforehand have had a part in shaping it.

For better or worse.