My Military Experience – The Terrible Tour Two, part a

—

Courage allows the successful person to fail -

and to learn powerful lessons from the failure –

so that in the end, it was not a failure at all.

Maya Angelou

—

I previously stated in other blog entries that I did not plan on writing about my second tour of duty, in part because I had talked about it to a certain limited extent in my first military experience series, but also mostly because it sucked – it could easily be called the worst three years of my life (and that’s saying something). I also do not like discussing any of my negative experiences because I really hate coming across as a whiner. The truth is, though, that my second tour could have gone much differently if I had been more willing to take some responsibility for my part in how people treated me, and if I also had made an effort to recognize reality and cope with it appropriately instead of attempting to view my situation (which was difficult and a bit complicated) through an uncompromising, martyr-like lens. The powerful lessons I learned then, as painful as they were, do inform my decisions and self-understanding now though, and much for the better – so I thought I’d share, and perhaps exorcise a few remaining personal demons from that time period in the process. Fair warning: this “tour two” series is not going to be nearly as entertaining as my previous military experience posts. This was the tour from hell, and my primary focus is on some very unpleasant experiences, how poorly I handled them, and, of course, what I learned in the process.

~o~o~o~o~

At the end of my first tour of duty, I knew enlisting had been one of the smartest things I’d done. I had worked a lot of different jobs prior to my Navy service – fast food, waitressing, print shop and camp counselor, to name the main ones – but none of those jobs really pushed me to explore my capabilities. My Navy job had done that, and as a result I felt much better about myself – so I was feeling pretty positive about my Navy experience in general. During my exit interview with the command master chief at Kunia, I pointed out that the pluses and minuses of being in the Navy were no different than any other job – every job had its ups and downs, so I had no serious complaints. He cracked a big smile and asked me, “Would you please get on the 1MC (loudspeaker) and say that?” He had to listen to a lot of first term sailors whine about how much the Navy sucked. I knew better – it was really no different than any other job.

I flew home to Quincy in October 1997 with about 45 days of terminal leave. (I never again managed to accumulate that much leave. A big part of why I had accumulated it in the first place was the limited opportunities to take leave during my first year and a half of service, due to training. I also wish now that I had used up a lot more of that leave in Hawai’i, but I was just too much of a worker bee to recognize my need for it then.) I had applied for college at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb to study geology, been in contact with the geology department, and was really looking forward to starting classes. Then reality hit – I couldn’t afford it. The GI Bill in 1997/1998 was paltry compared to what it is today, and I didn’t qualify for federal financial aid because they based my financial need on my Navy salary (I still don’t understand that!). So I worked a couple of part-time jobs at the post office and waitressing, and reluctantly decided to re-enlist, because nothing nearly as lucrative and challenging as my Navy job was going to come my way in Quincy. I wanted to go back to Hawai’i, too, but I didn’t want to go to Kunia, because of the bad social situation I left behind there. However, the only way I could go back to Hawai’i was to Kunia. It still amazes me sometimes that I did so. This decision alone is all the proof I need that I had a deeply masochistic streak, although I certainly could not have recognized that at the time.

One mistake I made upon returning to Kunia was to be deeply bitter about my previous social problems there, so much so that I pushed away a few people who, to my surprise, treated me kindly upon my return. I didn’t trust them – I couldn’t imagine anyone who had previously been unkind now being kind to me for any reason. I wasn’t willing to recognize that people and situations always have the potential to change for the better. I had also been gone for eight months; it could have been an opportunity to soften my own character enough that some bridges could be mended, but it never occurred to me to do so.

Another mistake was to pass on a few different opportunities to get put on the straight day watch shift (5:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.). The day shift was not glamorous; it generally had a very slow optempo and was usually where they put the less capable linguists. I was a good linguist, and I wanted to do my duty and earn my paycheck (I was so serious about accomplishing the mission!) and I wanted to be where the action and recognition were. I also wasn’t willing to take seriously the toll that my previous three years of rotating shift work had taken on my health (in addition to the stress, and crappy diet and lifestyle). My body did remember how hard that had been, though, and my health declined even more quickly this time around. I finally faced the reality that my healthy was suffering, and moved to day shift about halfway through my tour. I never adapted to it really well, though; getting up at 3:30 a.m. never agreed with me, and I still had a crappy diet and lifestyle, and I was always pretty stressed out about something or other at work, so my health didn’t improve much.

In another health-related development, about two-thirds of the way through my tour, I got put on mandatory physical fitness training (PT) due to a marginal score on the semi-annual physical readiness test (PRT). I’d always loathed PRTs. I’ve never been an athlete, and I was so scared whenever I took one that I could actually feel my fear sapping my strength, rather than enhancing it. I always just barely passed, and also usually barely made it under the maximum allowed weight requirements. (I’d never had to engage in a regular physical fitness routine, not even at boot camp – we hardly ever went, because our company commander hated taking us to PT! I didn’t even technically pass my boot camp PRT – I was a few sit-ups shy of the minimum passing score – but my monitor just passed me anyway. Other people weren’t so lucky and were stuck at boot camp an extra two weeks, just to bring their PRT score up a few points. I freely admit I would have cried buckets if I had been forced to stay at boot camp for another two weeks, especially just because of a few sit-ups.)

So I was put on mandatory PT in the spring of 2001, and had to run regularly as part of my exercise routine, for the first time in my life. A few weeks after I started running regularly, I started having numbness, tingling, and a sense of pressure in my left ankle and foot while running (which went away about a minute after I stopped running). Long story short – I was diagnosed with compartment syndrome and put on a temporary no-running chit. Some people are just not built for running, and I am one of those people. I found out much later that running is actually really bad for many people, and that running injuries are very common, especially in people who are overweight – which I was. (This injury never entirely cleared up; I still avoid running (no problem!) and I have to be careful about standing around on hard surfaces for long periods of time. Amazingly, though, I can walk for over an hour and have no problems. It’s the repetitive high-impact stress of running, and the unnatural stress of just standing around, that aggravate the old injury. And thanks to this problem, I also got a 10% disability rating from the VA after I got discharged, so technically any place that hires me can claim me as a disabled veteran for their EEO numbers.)

Divine Mind

musings by Angel