A guy collapsed from heat exhaustion on one of the first runs. But now I had printed orders in my hands.
![hardest night lovell songs reddit hardest night lovell songs reddit](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/cc/61/3a/cc613a314550bb5a60e043813ca354c1.jpg)
Paratrooping! At one point during the school year, I had added my name to a “wish list” to go. You will fly from here and start immediately.” Though I had not planned for it, the last three weeks of my summer would be spent learning to jump out of airplanes. Plus, I had been through five weeks of misery for what felt like naught.īut the guy also said, “You have received orders to continue to Fort Benning, Georgia, to attend the U.S. I was profoundly upset and dreaded returning for my senior year. It was a mediocre grade, and that would never be good enough. All in preparation to become United States Army officers.Ī week before camp ended, the evaluator called me in and gave me a score that, while not technically a failing one, would amount to as much to the cadets and staff back at school. We built a bridge out of rope to cross what one guy memorably called “the butt-cold Nisqually River.” We attacked while firing machine guns, threw grenades, called in artillery-the whole bit. We went on long patrols all night through the dark. We crept in a wedge formation right past the massive base of the mountain. Sadly, his girlfriend was killed in a car accident halfway through camp, and he was shipped home on compassionate leave. Then he called the two of us into his office and yelled at us so loud that even his officer sidekick was cowed. He threw our bunks over and scattered our gear across the barracks. Finally, the wrinkly drill sergeant, at the end of a career that had seen him parachuting into Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, got sick of it one morning. My bunkmate was a slob-even worse than me. The instructors preyed on me because I was intimidated and broadcasted a lack of confidence. My fellow cadets, particularly the ones in my platoon, disliked me. But I was too green to understand there were other ways. I had never been through anything like it.Įveryone there was trying so hard to “take charge,” to stand out. Every single other cadet of the three hundred or so I was training with had been told the same thing. So right away there was unbelievable pressure to excel. How you score there, they said, will determine your future in the Army. This was going to be my life for the next five weeks, or so I thought.įor three years in ROTC at college, they had rammed into our skulls the crucial importance of doing well at boot camp. I got off the bus, and people started yelling at me immediately. Someone said the only time we’d see that field again was when we graduated.
![hardest night lovell songs reddit hardest night lovell songs reddit](https://i0.wp.com/www.wilsonsmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/reddit-revamped-its-block-feature-so-blocking-actually-works.png)
Later, a yellow school bus carried me and a bunch of other unhappy youths into a dirt lot next to a huge parade field, complete with a review grandstand, in the middle of nowhere. Riding a shuttle out of the Seattle-Tacoma airport, I gaped at Mount Rainier because I had never seen a mountain big enough to have snow on its peak. My heart was sitting in my mouth, but I raised my fist like I’d just taken the gold in the Seoul Summer Olympics. I can still see my parents as I walked down the long terminal, waving goodbye to me proudly. I would be away from my five siblings, including my twin brother, and all my friends for five weeks. As a United States Army ROTC cadet on scholarship, I was required to attend boot camp at Fort Lewis. Three days later my mother and father together ferried me alone to Newark Airport with two canvas Army bags and stuck me on a plane to Seattle, Washington. On the way home, I lay unsafely in the back of that truck with my two other brothers and maybe my little sister and watched people roaming the streets and sidewalks with sparklers and the like. We lay down on blankets in the grass of a ballfield like Americans do, and we laughed and howled and ribbed each other like siblings do. He drove us to see the fireworks a few towns away. Having been raised in the comfy New Jersey suburbs by a neuroscientist and a busy working mom, we were not exactly a pickup-truck sort of family. The summer of 1991, my big brother was visiting from the Midwest with this crappy, brown pickup truck that he was rather proud of.