James Thomas Hazard
One
day
I was attending First Lutheran and the next day, it seemed, I was in
the Navy. I awakened from a deep sleep, wondering why my face felt so
fuzzy.
“Get up,” my mother bellowed, knocking on my door. “You’re going to San
Diego today, remember?”
“Shouldn’t I have gone to high school first?” I thought. But then it
came to me. I had not only gone to high school but had somehow managed
to come away from it with a diploma. Dang! Where had the time
gone?
I wasn’t looking forward to going to boot camp but my back was against
the wall, since it was either the Navy or being drafted by the Army and
going to Vietnam. Fleeing to Canada was an option; but I had spent my
whole life speaking American and didn’t know if I would understand
Canadian.
This was going to be my first solo venture into the world of adulthood,
and while it could have felt like a fantasy come true at the moment it
seemed to me more like a nightmare. After taking the oath to defend the
Constitution I nervously sat on the bus to San Diego, praying that the
ride would take forever.
It didn’t. The bus rolled to a stop, the doors opened and we
filed out, looking at signs that might as well have proclaimed,
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here!”
I have come to think about boot camp as a process that might be
compared to a kind of assembly line in a meat processing plant.
Everything is done very systematically. First you are stripped and
given uniforms that foster the necessary group identity ; then you are
stuck with enough needles to turn you into a porcupine; and after that
your entire personality is taken apart piece by piece so as to be
rebuilt according to military specifications.
Who says the government can’t be efficient?
At the heart of this operation is the chief petty officer, those top
ranked enlisted men and women who are the middle management of the
Navy. It is the khaki wearing chief who introduces the seaman recruit
to the awesome reality of military authority; and with good reason,
since for most enlisted personnel it’s the chief who gives the orders.
When the chief says jump, you jump.
The chief who was in charge of our company was named Obo. It was
rumored that his first name was Bob. He was in his 40s and had,
according to him, joined the Navy before he could shave. His parents
had to give their consent. They were probably relieved to get rid of
him.
Obo was the first man who taught me swearing as an elevated art form.
His speech was coarse and vulgar to the point of being truly
mind-bending. When provoked, which was often, he could eloquently and
in rapid order string together what sounded like descriptions, in a
tongue like ancient Aztec, of every moral depravity known to humanity
since the beginning of time. The very air coming out of his mouth
seemed to glow and color with depictions of sex one might find in a
text book about psychological abnormality: incest, murder, monkeys
committing indecent acts on playground equipment, fornication coupled
with bad hygiene, diseased organs, whore houses for the insane,
impossible acts of intercourse done to oneself and suggestions of the
entire company’s illegitimacy going back several generations.
I was in awe of the man. He made my father, who had practiced swearing
as soon as he could talk, sound like a beginner.
At some ridiculous hour, while every rooster on the planet was still
asleep, we marched. After marching we stopped and then marched some
more. We stood at attention while he berated us and then we marched
again. My body began to feel as if it had done nothing but march. For a
few split seconds at a time I fell asleep but my legs kept marching. We
learned to march while chanting lewd songs about Eskimo women and
having a good home that we left, we left, we left.
I thought that the physical torture was the worst but I was wrong about
that. The chief didn’t want to merely wreck our muscles and spinal
columns. No, a good chief wants to do more than that. Much more. The
chief, probably like every chief that came before him and that would
come after him, had to instill in us, and in me in particular, what I
can only describe as radical existential doubt.
“Hazard,” he said to me one day. His face looked like a melting rubber
mask. Tiny flames erupted in his eyes. He had the expression of a man
who found everything in the universe contemptible; and at the moment I
was the most contemptible of all.
“I hear that there are only two things that come from California.
Steers and queers. Are you a queer or are you a steer?”
How was I to answer such a question? If he had asked me if I was queer
I could have said, “Sir, I am queer, meaning odd or eccentric, sir.”
But he hadn’t asked me if I was queer. He had asked me if I was a
queer. A queer. Since I wasn’t homosexual or bovine I couldn’t think of
a way to answer him. I felt trapped. What was I supposed to say? Mind
racing and heart thumping like a drum about to break, I kept my mouth
shut.
“Are you saying,” he shouted, “no, I refuse to say?”
“Sir, no sir,” I said.
“You just said no to me, Hazard,” he said. “Is that right? Did you just
say no to me?”
“Sir, no sir,” I said.
“You just said no again you maggot stupid sonofabitch,” he screamed.
“Sir, yes sir,” I tried.
“So you did say no to me,” the enraged chief shot back.
“Sir, yes, I mean no sir,” I said, feeling as if I were on fire.
“Hazard,” he said, looking straight into my huge eyes. “Are you some
kind of nut?”
I felt nuts at the moment. The only thing I wanted to do was please my
chief. But for some reason I couldn’t. Everything I did was wrong. I
was a nut, a misfit, a goof, a weakling, an idiot who couldn’t answer a
simple question. Worst of all, I was a disappointment to my chief.
Later my fellow recruits talked about what had happened.
“Hey, you did okay,” some of them said as I sat trembling on my bunk.
“I thought you were going to crack.”
So had I.
James Thomas Hazard, La
Verne,
California, 2014 © Used with the permission of the author.
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