My Military Experience – Part I, Subsection b

Training

Life got more interesting at my A school, which was the Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, California. I had enlisted as a Cryptologic Technician – Interpretive (CTI), and long before I got to Monterey, I had been enrolled in the Russian language program, which was fine by me (not everyone was so happy with their assigned languages, and there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about it, either). I spent a year in lovely Monterey, the first six months in a barracks room with a million dollar view of Monterey Bay. There was a lot of homework involved with learning Russian, but none of it was particularly hard – I had no serious difficulties learning the language. What I learned about myself here was that apparently I can only carry around one foreign language in my head at a time. I had taken two years of Spanish in high school, but after learning Russian for awhile, whenever I tried to recall a Spanish word, I would get the Russian word instead. I can occasionally read simple Spanish stuff nowadays, like on shampoo bottles and stuff – that’s about it. Hey, it’s not like Spanish is useful anyway, right?

I loved Monterey and pretty much the whole peninsula. The energy there is just amazing. I think that energy is due to some magical combination of the ocean and the active plate tectonics. My first experience of the ocean ever was Asilomar beach on a cold, windy night, with low clouds racing across the bright moon in the night sky overhead and waves crashing into the rocks below. It was exhilarating. The stupid guy I was on a date with, though, was from Los Angeles, and thought it was about as interesting as old bus schedules. A couple of awkward dates and the attempted relationship was over, but not the awkwardness – we were in the same class! Lesson learned – don’t date a guy just because he’s kind of cute and he has a car, especially if you are going to have to see him every weekday for the next ten months. I did get one positive thing from that relationship, though (besides a ride to Asilomar) – an introduction to Harry Connick, Jr., and his awesome swing music. I love singing his songs!

C school is where the going got tough for me. I transferred to Goodfellow AFB for my technical training, and NOTHING about what I needed to learn was familiar to me nor came to me easily. I’ve always been smart and capable of picking things up pretty easily, and I’d never really had to work hard in order to learn something, so the enormous challenge of the technical school material was overwhelming. And unlike college and the physics debacle, I had no easy way out. I was enlisted on a five year contract as a CTI; I had already been in the military for over a year, and the Navy had a lot invested in me. I could have chosen to drop out and get reassigned to a different rating, but that would have meant another and even worse humiliation and failure (in my view) than changing majors or dropping out of college. I just was not willing to quit this time; too much of my personal pride was at stake.

So I dug in and really had to throw myself at learning this new and very difficult material. For the first time in my life, I had to learn how to learn – and not to fulfill a senseless assignment from a teacher, either, that I could brain dump later – this was knowledge I would need to do my job. I and my five classmates were required by our instructor to spend 2-3 hours a night in the study hall whether we needed it or not – and I needed it. I would put a lot of time into memorizing a bunch of mind-numbingly boring stuff, and a little while later when I tried to recall it, I couldn’t. This was one of the most frustrating times of my life. I lived in constant fear of failing out of the program, a fear that for once in my life, was reasonable. I ended up doing pretty well academically, which surprised no one but me – nobody really knew how much I was struggling. The only good thing about this program was that since all of our study material was classified, we couldn’t do homework outside of the school building, so when I was done at the end of the day, I was done. And I learned that I really was capable of learning something for which I did not have a natural affinity, which it turned out was very useful information to have about myself.

CTI insignia - what I got to wear once I graduated Goodfellow

This lesson stood me in good stead at my first duty station in Hawaii, because my actual job was even more challenging than the training material at Goodfellow. I had to produce transcripts of Russian language material in near real time, produce time-sensitive tactical reports when necessary (often), learn how to do this on a clunky UNIX based computer system and while using ancient reel-to-reel recording equipment – and I had to learn how to do this while working a rotating shift schedule. Sleep deprivation and really stressful, difficult job tasks – two things that go together as well as peanut butter and sardines. I was on the job almost 18 months before I finally felt like I was really doing the job well. My shift supervisor, however, told me a few months after I started that I was a “shit-hot linguist” – but what did he know? He kinda had a crush on me, so I didn’t trust his judgment 100%. (And I had a serious crush on him. Thank God he transferred out when he did, because that lesson I learned earlier about not dating people I worked with didn’t sink in very well.)

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Subsequent subsection c – promotion and the headaches of becoming a supervisor

Tags: military

Uncategorized | Angel | September 11, 2011 10:13 pm

2 Comments

By Greg Tamblyn, September 11, 2011 @ 8:14 pm

Nothing in here about Hawaii and how great it is? Maybe it’s in the next section.

I gotta tell you, I love reading this stuff. Peanut butter and sardines. You just killed my appetite.
By Angel, September 21, 2011 @ 6:43 pm

Hawaii does have a magic all its own, doesn’t it? Every now and then I dream about Hawaii, and the colors are extremely vivid; I can’t recall any other dreams I’ve had that are like that. I’ll post something about Hawaii eventually. Thanks for the comment.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel