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.