Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 3

We spend most of the first day standing around and waiting for stuff to happen. There’s another medical inspection, a pair of doctors looking at an entire platoon, so it takes almost three hours for all of us to be examined. We get a quick scan and a blood check, to make sure we didn’t engage in any last-minute chemical excesses. Then we get a series of shots, six different injectors that are administered in quick succession. I suppose I should be curious about the kind of stuff they’re injecting into my system, but I find that I don’t care. It’s not like they’d let me refuse the shots, anyway.

After the medical examination, Sergeant Gau leads us over to another building, where we stand in formation and watch other platoons filing into the door one by one. The other platoons are wearing uniforms, baggy fatigues in a mottled green-blue pattern that looks it would stick out just about anywhere.

“Mealtime,” Sergeant Gau announces, and these words produce the first smiles I’ve seen on my fellow recruits since we got here early in the morning.

“We will enter the chow hall single file. You will grab a tray from the stack by the start of the chow line. You may help yourself to anything you see without asking permission. When you have finished loading up your tray, you will find a table and seat yourself. Once you are seated, you will eat your meal. You may converse with your fellow recruits while you are seated. When I call your platoon number, you will finish your meal, stop your conversations, return the trays to the collection racks by the door, and line up in front of the chow hall again.”

Most of us haven’t had anything to eat since we left for the in-processing stations back home. I’m hungry, and I can tell by the sudden eagerness in the ranks of the platoon that I’m not alone.

“A word to the wise,” Sergeant Gau says before leading us into the chow hall. “Don’t make it a habit to overeat. You’ll end up puking your guts out once the physical conditioning starts. I advise you to keep that appetite in check.”

The dining hall is already abuzz with muted conversation between the recruits who have claimed tables before Platoon 1066, but we keep our silence as we stand in line to fill our trays. Still, we can look around and make incredulous and excited faces at each other, and we do. There are big metal trays of food behind the glass partition between the chow hall and the kitchen, and I’ve never seen or smelled anything this good in my whole life.

The stuff on the trays in front of us is real. I can see mashed potatoes, sliced meat with gravy, noodles, and rice. I have to exert considerable self-control to not grab my tray and skip ahead to the end of the line, where I can see donuts, slices of pie, and some sort of fruit cobbler. It’s probably just the sudden olfactory overload, but I am sure I can smell the chocolate frosting on the donuts all the way at the front of the line.

We all load up our trays with too much food. I take a salad, a bowl of soup that has vegetables and chunks of chicken floating in it, a heaping serving of mashed potatoes, and two pieces of meat. At the end of the chow line, I have to shift the food on my tray around to make space for a pair of donuts and a slice of apple pie. When I look back at the line behind me, I see very few trays that are loaded up less than mine.

I find a seat on one of the long tables in the chow hall, and dig into my food as soon as my butt hits the chair. We’re permitted to talk now, but for the first few minutes, we’re all too busy filling our mouths with food.

“I could get used to this,” one of the recruits at the table finally says. He’s a reed-thin guy with acne scars and a scraggly chin beard.

“They’ll make you shave that off,” I say, indicating the location of his beard on my own chin, and he shrugs.

“They feed me like this every day, they can fucking shave off every hair on my body if they want.”

There are four other recruits at our table, all engaged in trying to figure out how much food they can squeeze into their mouths without dislocating their jaws. Our table has gender parity—three guys, three girls—and when I look around at the other tables, it seems that the same gender ratio is reflected throughout the platoons.

“That’s real meat,” someone else at the table says, a tall girl with short, dark hair. “It’s got texture and everything. I haven’t had a real piece of meat since I moved out of my parents’ place.”

“Beef,” her seat neighbor says, pointing at it with a fork. “That’s a hundred-dollar piece of beef right there.”

The girl slices off a healthy chunk of her beef, and stuffs it into her mouth.

“There goes ten dollars,” she says around the mouthful of food.

I’m sure they’ll make us sweat for every bite later on, but right now I am resolved to enjoy my meal, and stuff as many calories into myself as possible without throwing up. The food alone made the signing up worth the effort, and if all the meals in the military are like this, I’ll cheerfully jump through whatever hoops they put up.

After lunch, Sergeant Gau walks us over to a warehouse full of military clothes and gear. The equipment issue works much like the chow line. We file past the issuing stations in a single column.

At the first station, the surly-looking attendant pulls a large rucksack and an even larger duffel bag from a stack and tosses them both onto the counter in front of me. There are scuff marks on the heavy canvas, the olive drab color is faded in spots, and I can see the rectangular line of pulled-up stitching where the previous owner’s name tag was removed from the outer flap of the rucksack.

The rest of the gear is used as well, ranging in condition from merely scuffed to nearly unserviceable. At one of the stations, they hand me a folding shovel and a utility knife. The blade of the knife shows the marks of hundreds of sharpenings. The folding shovel used to have a blade coated in olive drab paint, but most of the paint has come off, and the edges of the shovel blade are nicked. It seems like they’re issuing us mostly stuff that’s good enough for one more issue cycle before being scrapped.

They measure us for our uniforms, and then give each of us several sets of fatigues. Those are used, as well, but I am happy to see that at least the underwear and socks seem to be brand new. I guess there are limits even to government frugality.

“Those are yours to keep,” Sergeant Gau says when he sees me inspecting the new pairs of knee-high gray socks, checking them off on my “Received Equipment” list, and stowing them in my duffel bag.

“When you wash out, you get to take your socks and underwear with you. Nobody would want to wear them after you, anyway. Consider those a souvenir of your short life in the military.”

We spend the afternoon filling our rucksacks and duffel bags: uniforms, rain gear, equipment pouches, helmets, combat boots, chemical warfare protection kits, running shoes, shower sandals, sewing kits, and a bunch of other articles of unknown purpose. When we have finally cleared the last station, it’s late in the afternoon, and we are each weighed down with a rucksack and a bag that probably weigh a hundred pounds together. Some of the smaller members of our platoon are swaying under the load as we assemble again in front of the building. Marching us to our quarters with a hundred pounds of gear seems the perfect opportunity for a conditioning exercise, but Sergeant Gau has a bus waiting for us.

We are quartered in a large, flat-roofed building that stands in a long row of identical buildings. The only way to tell them apart is to look at the signs over each entrance, where a large screen lists the numbers of the platoons housed within. We share our building with five other platoons. The central staircase splits the building in half; each floor has a large room to each side of the staircase. When Sergeant Gau leads us into our platoon bay, we see two rows of bunk beds, one on each side of the room. There are two lockers in front of each bunk bed, facing out into the center aisle.

“There are name tags on your bunks,” Sergeant Gau says as we file into the squad bay. “You will find your bunk, and place your equipment bags on top of the mattress. Execute.”

There’s a bit of disorder as forty recruits fan out to find their respective bunks, but we find that the order is alphabetical. There is a small stack of sheets, a blanket, and a pillow at the head of each bunk.

My bunkmate turns out to be the dark-haired girl from our lunch table. We give each other encouraging smiles as we haul our gear onto our beds. She has the top bunk, purely by alphabetic proximity—she’s HALLEY D, I’m GRAYSON A.

We spend another hour unpacking our gear and putting everything into our lockers according to Sergeant Gau’s direction. He stands in the middle of the squad bay, with one recruit’s bags emptied on the floor in front of him. He holds up one item at a time, calls out its designation, and waits for us to find the same item in our own piles of stuff. When he is satisfied that we’re all holding up the same thing, he tells us where to place it into our lockers.

When all our gear is stowed, Sergeant Gau has us open our lockers again and take out our issue sweatsuits and running shoes. We change into the suits, and for the first time, the platoon looks uniform in appearance.

“Take your civilian clothes and stow them away in the bottom drawer on the right side of your locker. Most of you will need them again soon.”

When all our equipment is stowed in our lockers, Sergeant Gau leads us to the chow hall. Dinner is no less overwhelming than lunch, and we eat ourselves into a stupor once more: grilled cheese sandwiches, beef stew, three different kinds of fruit.

After dinner, we’re back in our quarters, where we find personal data pads on our bunks. Each of them has a label above the top of the screen, bearing the last name of its new owner. The PDPs are of a kind I’ve never seen. They’re large and clunky, with monochrome screens that look like a throwback to a bygone century. They have translucent polymer covers that fold over the screen for field use, and the whole thing is perfectly sized for the side pocket of the fatigues they issued us earlier today.

“Not exactly the latest technology,” my bunk mate muses in a low voice as she inspects her own data pad. “I’ve had better stuff in elementary school.”

“Those are your new companions,” Sergeant Gau says from the center aisle of the platoon bay. “They may not look like much, but they’re tough and reliable. Familiarize yourselves with your PDPs, and call up lesson 1.001, titled ‘Enlisted and Officer Ranks.’”

We sit in two rows along the center aisle, calling up the lesson as directed, and Sergeant Gau has us repeat the rank structure of the Armed Forces from top to bottom. When we have prayed the litany a few dozen times, Sergeant Gau has us turn off our PDPs and repeat the process from memory another few dozen times. When he is satisfied that we have the rank structure memorized, he makes us stow our PDPs.

“Now,” he says. “Let’s see which one of you people actually listened to me earlier today. Assemble in front of the building, in three rows. Execute.”

We look at each other with budding dread. We’ve all stuffed ourselves at both lunch and dinner—more so at dinner, since we didn’t have to exercise all day—and my stomach is still uncomfortably full. Just the thought of running or doing push-ups is making me nauseous.

“That means now, people,” Sergeant Gau shouts, and we all rush to file out of the platoon bay.

When we’re all assembled in three untidy rows, Sergeant Gau leads us down the road. We start out walking, but after a few steps, Sergeant Gau falls into a trot.

“You want to keep up,” he says. The way he words the statement makes clear that it’s not a suggestion.

Sergeant Gau’s pace is not particularly fast, but after ten minutes, my sides are hurting, and my stomach bounces up and down like a badly balanced counterweight. We’re groaning and coughing as we try to keep pace with Sergeant Gau. He’s running in fatigues and combat boots, and not even breathing hard.

After thirty minutes, the first members of the platoon stagger to the side of the road and puke out their dinners in hot chunks. I can feel the bile in the back of my throat as my stomach wants to follow suit, but I manage to keep a lid on things.

Then Sergeant Gau slows down to a walk once more. He gestures for the platoon to turn around, and then he has us gather around the three recruits who are now standing doubled over by the curb, straddling puddles of puke. The smell of fresh vomit triggers a new wave of nausea in my head, and I fall out to barf the contents of my stomach into the gutter.

As I finish retching, I notice that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take the smell. Half the platoon is busy adding to the stinking soup that’s now filling the gutter by the side of the road.

“Lesson learned, I trust,” Sergeant Gau says, without any mirth.

Back in the platoon bay, Sergeant Gau has us stand at attention in front of our lockers once more. It’s hard to look dignified with vomit on your clothing.

“Good enough for today,” he says. “If you’re wondering why none of you have washed out yet, the answer is simple. You have not begun your training yet, so we have not given you much of a chance to screw up. That will change tomorrow morning, precisely at 0430 hours. Right now, you have ten minutes for personal maintenance in the head at the end of the platoon bay. At precisely 2100 hours, you will line up before your lockers again, and you will be wearing your issued sleepwear. Execute.”

The bathroom is one large room, with toilets on one wall, shower bays on the other, and a circular arrangement of stainless steel sinks in the middle of the room. There isn’t much space for privacy. Neither toilets nor showers have doors or partitions.

We wash up and change into our issue pajamas as ordered. The male and female versions look exactly alike, shapeless blue things that don’t look martial at all. When everyone is assembled in the center aisle as directed by Sergeant Gau, we look like a bunch of overgrown orphans lining up for a bowl of soup.

“Rack time,” Sergeant Gau announces after giving the platoon a cursory inspection.

“You will climb into your bunks. There will be no conversation once the lights are out. If there is an emergency, one of you will knock on the door of the Senior Drill Instructor, where I will be sleeping tonight instead of in my quarters with my wife. Don’t bother me unless one of you is bleeding from the eyes.”

When we’re in our bunks, the scratchy military-issue blankets wrapped around us, the LEDs on the ceiling dim slowly until they are extinguished. The room is dark, and all I can hear is the breathing of my fellow recruits, and the humming of the environmental system that keeps the room at sixty-eight degrees and filters out all the junk in the atmosphere. We’re a long way from any of the Metroplexes, but with Chicagoland, Los Angeles-San Diego-Tijuana and Greater New York all topping fifty million these days, there are few parts of the country where you don’t need environmental conditioning.

My bunkmate leans over the edge of her bed, and I can just barely see the outline of her head in the near-total darkness.

“This is not so bad,” she whispers.

“Except for the puking part,” I whisper back, and she chuckles softly.