My Military Experience – Part I, Subsection d

To Stay or Not to Stay

As the end of my first tour neared, I knew that enlisting had been one of the greatest decisions I had ever made. I had learned much about my capabilities that I could barely have guessed at prior to enlisting – significant but largely untapped potential had been transformed into solid professional achievements. I never seriously considered staying in for twenty years, though. The Navy had mostly just been a job to me and I wanted to move on to something that I was really passionate about – geology! I decided to get out of the Navy and go back to school to study geology. I had the GI Bill, after all, to pay for my schooling, and I guess my professional success gave me the confidence to face the physics mountain once again. I flew out of Hawaii about 7 weeks prior to my EAOS (end of active obligated service), because yeah, I was such a workaholic, I had accumulated that much leave (we were allowed 30 days a year of paid leave). I was so happy to be out and living the civilian life again – I didn’t miss the Navy much at all.

Something I felt, though, as I was preparing to leave Hawaii, was that I would be back. I didn’t feel like I was done with Hawaii. I had no idea when I would be back or why, but I knew I would be. And as it turned out, I did go back to Hawaii, a mere eight months after I left. The GI Bill was grossly inadequate at that time to cover college costs, and I didn’t even qualify for financial aid because they based my eligibility on my Navy income – which I was no longer pulling in (duh!). So I never made it back to college. I worked a couple of different part-time, unsatisfying jobs, and made the reluctant decision to re-enlist.

View of the Ko'olau Mountains from Laie Point, O'ahu. (photo credit: me. Click on pic to embiggen)

And based on how badly that second tour went – I foolishly returned to the same duty station, where I was so very unpopular – I could have easily said at the time that the decision to re-enlist was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made. A lot of crap happened that I either already wrote about in my initial military experience blog entries, or that I don’t care to write about further. Suffice to say that I had a metaphysical epiphany one day at work during that miserable second tour – this is hell. Not in the metaphorical sense, either. I had decided previously that hell as advertised in conventional Christianity doesn’t exist, but I had a real, visceral sense at that moment that I was in hell. Whatever hell was, it was real, and it could be experienced – no dying or evil acts necessary. And I didn’t achieve escape velocity from that hellhole until I transferred out of that duty station. The last few months of that second tour, that I mentioned at the beginning of this post (when I got counseling) were just limbo. The four months I spent at Goodfellow afterwards were a desperately needed detox. I felt like I had spent the previous three years of my life stewing in a cesspool surrounded by hungry crocodiles, who occasionally closed in and took a bite (usually out of my back). That tour was extraordinarily stressful; several times during my detox at Goodfellow I had a visual in my mind’s eye of large amounts of poison emptying out of my heart.

And my third duty station? Mostly awesome. My fourth and final duty station in England? Totally awesome. I’ll write more about them later, I promise.

What The Finest Linguists Can Do

Good military linguists don’t usually know their target language well – in fact, good linguists tend to not have good global language skills, since their focus need be only on the very limited vocabulary of military communications. Good linguists do, however, have a certain quality of mind coupled with a desire to do well that help them put everything together – the technical requirements, a strategic and tactical understanding of the target, and how to prioritize when the optempo steps up and some things just can’t get done. Great linguists have an aural sensitivity that enables them to hear target audio that other linguists simply cannot pull out of the ever-present radio static. I was one of those great linguists, and so was Adam. He was my go-to guy whenever I had to confirm something that no one else could hear. He was one of those people I’ve always felt lucky to have known, not just for his professional talent and dedication but also because underneath all the cynicism he was a great guy of considerable integrity and intelligence. And no, I did not have a crush on him – he was gay (and really snarky, and there is such a thing as too much snark). Adam, if you ever find this post and read it, I just thought I’d let you know I’m still proud of making up the word “ceramicry” for you. Just go ahead and put it in your spell check dictionary, because you know it’s awesome too.

It amazes me sometimes, when I think back about where I started on the linguist journey, and how far I managed to develop a talent that took me a long time to discover and build. I can justifiably say that I got so good, I could do the job in my sleep. It wasn’t unusual to lightly doze off during the night watch, especially around 3:00 or 4:00 am when I could not keep my eyes open. Naturally my coworkers didn’t like that (as if they didn’t have their moments when they dozed off too), and after a period of time, they would often wake me with, “Did you hear that?” So I’d spin back on the audio and listen to the stuff that didn’t wake me up. Invariably, it was Russian that I didn’t need to copy. But I’d always wake up for the target audio.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel