The Army It Is

I left the recruiter office with every intention of becoming an infantry soldier. I ran a 7-minute mile, and my recruiter pushed infantry hard. How- ever, at MEPS, as I sat across from the officer listing off bonuses for different jobs, I heard him say $35,000. This caught my attention, as it was more money than I had ever had in my life. The downside — it was to enlist as a cook. I thought about it for a minute, never having even boiled rice. But $35k sounded like redemption. The unfortunate truth about money is it can not only change your path but change what you tell yourself about what your life is worth.

MEPS was like navigating a bureaucratic nightmare full of nerds and psychopaths. Needles, duck walks, coughs, Shame. The welcome party was an old man with cold hands telling you to cough. The secret handshake if you will. Some guys were wide-eyed, terrified. Some tried to act tough. I just kept my mouth shut and did what I was told. I’d learned by then that survival wasn’t about volume — it was about timing. It was about adapting. If rehab after rehab had done anything for me — it taught me how to adapt. I didn’t get better. I got better at shape-shifting, disappearing.

We were herded like livestock. Shaved down, stripped bare, broken into numbers. I was no longer the kid from the cabin, the burnout, the disappointment — I was a body in uniform. I was Private Stone. And I liked the anonymity of that. I had no clue I was, so I welcomed being told. Identity was a burden, but for now I was simply Private Stone.

My recruiter was quite surprised. I was also quite surprised when I got sent to basic training at Fort Benning, instead of Fort Jackson. I was told cooks got to be “relaxin’ in Jackson.” Instead, I got to suck dick at Fort Benning or whatever they say. Life has a way of saying “fuck your plans, here’s a new uniform.”

Benning was the home of the infantry. Fort Jackson was co-ed and said to be much more chill — hence the moniker “Relaxin’ in Jackson.”

As I asked the guys on the van what their MOS’ were, I was surprised to hear “infantry, infantry, 18x, etc…” because these were all combat arms. I was supposed to just be a cook, with other cooks, yet here I was with all these infantry and special forces candidates. This was not the fuck- ing deal. I signed up to flip burgers and was getting thrown directly into the meatgrinder.

We got to Benning and the screaming began before we got off the bus. We all got yelled at and verbally beaten down in between sets of pushups, sit-ups, and bear crawls. I remember watching “We were Sol- diers” at one point. It didn’t really motivate us much, but the indoctri- nation had begun. My head was shaved, and I became another cog in the machine of the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen. I was luckily only stuck at in-processing for a few days.

The Army didn’t care about your past. Not really. It cared about uniformity, repetition, obedience. We marched. We cleaned. We ran in cadence like we believed it. I wanna be an airborne ranger, live a life of sex and danger…wasn’t the sex or the danger I wanted.

I didn’t believe it. But I liked pretending. It felt like rehearsal for a life I might one day live. And for a while, the structure worked. It held me up. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t have to feel. I just had to move.

I don’t remember much about in-processing, but when we got to Charlie company, 2/47, things turned up a notch. One of the drill in- structors immediately threw a weight bar across the room that nearly hit a recruit in the head. Drill Sergeant Thompson was one I will never forget.

He was always talking about his 10 kills in Iraq and how it gets numb after the first one. Always the loudest, the toughest, but he was not the head Platoon Sergeant. No, that title was for the legendary Sergeant First Class Beck — a mechanic that ended up being a damn good Army Ranger. A man who woke up in the morning and pissed excellence. You did not want to fuck up with him watching you. One other drill sergeant we had was a giant Dominican guy named Staff Sergeant Cabrerra—he was not my biggest fan. He kind of fucking hated me actually.

I decided to just keep my head down in basic training. I did not want to be noticed, especially in the shower line with 60 other naked dudes standing nut-to-butt. I have never seen that many dicks in my life. There were so many dicks. Other than evading the gauntlet of swinging dicks, I just wanted to have my bunk and equipment squared away, pass the PT tests, shoot straight, not be noticed, and not fall asleep on fire guard. This plan went to shit quickly.

On our first field training exercise, we were instructed to secure our weapons to our kits as we slept in our foxholes overnight. I decided I wouldn’t need to do that; I would be aware if anyone was near me. I would damn sure know if someone snuck up and took my rifle. Fast forward a few hours, and I wake up to a missing M4.

I look around, under, behind—my weapon is fucking gone. Several other soldiers are nearby rustling around, and I can hear them coming to the same realization. The fuckery was upon us.

Upon realizing we were fucked either way, I decided the only op- tion was to steal the drill sergeants’ weapons back. I came up with a plan to steal the rifles of our drill sergeants, so we would at least have some type of bargaining chip in the morning. It was crazy, but one of the oth- er guys was an officer candidate, and he backed my plan. My skills in de- generacy were not lost on this operation, as I had developed and pulled off similar “heists” in the past. I used to steal my mother’s pills from right under her nose.

When I was 15, and in a full-blown relationship with benzodiazepines, I had to get clever with how I retrieved them. My mother had caught on and began locking her pocketbook in her closet at night, and then locking the door to her room. I got home first every day, so I would go and unlock one of her bedroom windows.

Each night my mother worked out on her exercise bike for exactly thirty minutes. I knew this gave me a thirty-minute window to get in and out of her room and closet before she got done. Under the guise of skateboarding outside, I would go behind the house and watch for my mother to get on the exercise bike. As soon as she did, I sprang into action. I opened the window, climbed through, and slid into the closet and stocked up on clonazepam, lorazepam, and xanax—whatev- er there was. I would then put everything as I found it and then jump back through the window, closing it like I was never there.

I had to get those rifles. If we got their rifles, we reasoned that our punishment would likely be less severe if we had to exchange with them. Or the embarrassment would cause them to make our lives a living hell. It was 50/50.

The drill sergeants were playing grab ass and laughing around the fire as drill sergeants do, so they were preoccupied. Some quick recon- naissance revealed the drill sergeants had placed their weapons in the back of one of their personal trucks. I had two guys pull security for me to my left and right flanks, while I slowly crawled to the vehicles on my belly. Slowly, deliberately, as if I was Carlos Hathcock crawling for miles just to get that perfect shot to take out a Vietcong general. Or so the story goes.

After the longest crawl of my life, I reached the trucks, and I saw their rifles just sitting in the back of the truck bed. I took all three of the rifles and just strolled my ass out of there while the drills were still sucking each other off around the fire. After distributing the other rifles to the two other guys, we returned to our foxholes and went to sleep. Degeneracy is a transferable skill.

Morning came and the yelling started. I expected to be smoked for hours. Instead, Drill Sergeant Thompson asked for his rifle back, gave us ours, then yelled at me to “Stop doing ninja shit!” After that he dropped it and never brought it up again.

The rest of basic training was uneventful. I ran fast and kept my head down. Land navigation ended up being one of my strongest skills. After getting pneumonia during a field exercise, I was forced to go to quarantine until I was better. Being quarantined was against my will, but I did what I was told.

I ended up being the honor graduate during basic training. I also received a ranger contract to try out for the infamous 75th Ranger regiment, which also meant an airborne contract. Staff sergeant Cabrerra made sure I knew if it was up to him, I never would have gotten it. I just thanked him and said, “hooah!”

As my mom and sister stood in the crowd, I finally felt like I made them proud. A year before, I was strung out and in jail. Sometimes redemption does not even feel like victory, it just feels like not fucking everything up for once. Now I was the honor graduate of Army basic training, on my way to a life I never could have imagined — for better or worse.