The Interview continued…
“Your resume says that you were appointed to the Air Force Academy,” Blanchett said. “Why didn’t you go?”
“I did everything I could to get in, including graduating from high school in three years, and going to college in what would have been my senior year. I even enlisted in the Marine Corps to get some enlisted experience and toughen up before starting at the Academy….”
***********************
Grand Forks, Fall 1987…
He was tall for a Midget. Standing 6’3”, he was big enough to be a star Dickinson High School Midget’s basketball player, but he was too short for serious college ball.
Yes, you read that right, dear reader. My junior high and high school both had the same school team name and mascot – The Midgets! We were the Dickinson Midgets, and so proud of it that we even converted the old Notre Dame fight song into our own anthem celebrating the Midgets. How or why that name was chosen, I do not know. The most plausible story I heard was that when the nickname was given, people in the southwest part of North Dakota were shorter than everywhere else in the State. Generally speaking, it was true for my time there, so why not?
The high school basketball star I am referring to is my first college roommate, I’ll call him Brad Green. Brad was in the class that I moved into when I became a Sunior, the class of ‘87. We got to know each other through a few classes and because our girlfriends were friends who were also both part of a larger friend circle (it really just consisted of the hottest chicks in school flocking together occasionally). By the spring before I graduated, Greeny and I started kicking around the idea of rooming together in the dorms at the University of North Dakota for our first semester. We were both easy-going and comfortable around each other and neither of us wanted to risk rooming with an unknown. He knew I was set to leave for the Marine Corps in the second semester, and he was going to check out the frat situation, so it worked out and we committed to it.
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(STILL FREE THROUGH CHAPTER 13 - SUBSCRIBE NOW!)
—
On our high school basketball team, Brad got to witness the frequent rowdy antics of our team’s very enthusiastic and totally unofficial cheer squad. There was a small group of guys in the classes of ’87 and ’86 who got the crowds riled up by starting the Wave going through the bleachers after ripping their shirts off and screaming for the crowd’s attention. Even small crowds tended to get into it, at least for a few rounds. The other ploy these guy had was to start the two sides of the basketball court bleachers yelling back and forth to each other, “LESS FILLING!” from one side, then “TASTE’S GREAT!” from the other side, just like the old Miller Lite commercials of the day. These clowns loved to get the administration’s ire up to the point of being genuinely pissed off, and we all loved watching it! They got our school into the Rodney Dangerfield “Less filling” debate so much that it would shut out speakers at prep rallies. The Principal (same guy who objected to my early graduation) couldn’t stop them, so instead he banned pep rallies for several months in retaliation and “to establish order.” My defiant fellow students got right back into it at the next opportunity as a big “fuck you” to the Principal, making it even more enjoyable.
Ah, shared memories of stupid times…they help to build bonds. And we did.
Brad was easy to live with. We got along just fine, probably because we didn’t entirely share the same interests or pastimes. Brad played some ball and learned about the frat scene while going to class and being a regular freshman. He wasn’t a big partier like I could be when time permitted, but he would have a few drinks on occasion (I never saw him drunk). His main stress came from trying to salvage the doomed high school sweetheart situation he found himself. That we had in common all the way. Beyond Tami, my focus was on an aggressive class schedule, getting in shape for Marine Corps boot camp and the physical fitness test for the Air Force Academy. So when we were hanging around, we could easily either relate or commiserate.
Entering the University of North Dakota at a young-looking age 17, I immediately felt the uncomfortable looks of other students wondering to themselves how the hell I wound up there. I could tell other students in classes or in the dorms were critical of me or otherwise judged me in some way. It was alienating and probably would have been more of an issue for me if I hadn’t had a familiar roommate and established girlfriend. And a shitload of confidence.
During the delayed entry part of my enlistment before commencing recruit training, the Marine Corps acted like a jealous mistress toward me. My original recruiter, Sgt. Bates, was stationed in Dickinson, so he had to hand me off to the Grand Forks recruiter to babysit me and make sure I didn’t wander away from their tribe. That was accomplished with weekly check-ins, including weekly PT sessions with three-mile runs to get the recruits ready for boot camp. These were no problem for me since I had been going on three to five mile runs every other day for well over a year by then.
My only concern was that I needed to wear orthotic arch supports for the extremely high arches on my feet. The arches of my feet are the highest I’ve ever seen - so high that you can pass a pencil under my foot if I’m standing barefoot on a flat surface. I first became aware that my arches were very high when I played basketball in the fifth grade. Soon after practices began, I had unexplained knee pain that was later revealed to be a result of my high arches. After getting arch supports, it became a manageable problem and did not interfere with me playing sports or running at the level I had been. There was a manifestation of the problem, however, that resulted in an altered stride making for slower than average run times, despite being in good shape. The recruiters all assured me that the orthotics weren’t a concern if I could make the required time, which I could.
So we ran…with Marine Corps cadences to sing along to while we ran, like this hit:
My girl’s a vegetable,
She’s in the hospital,
But I’d give her anything,
To keep her A-live!
She’s got no arms or legs,
All she’s got are hooks and pegs,
But I’d give her anything,
To keep her A-live.
She’s got a new TV,
It’s called an EKG,
But I’d give her anything,
To keep her A-live.
One day, I played a joke,
I pulled the plug and watched her choke,
But I’d give her anything,
To keep her A-live!...
I made the mistake of telling Tami about that cadence and she freaked out in a gasm of feminist outrage. She didn’t get the joke or appreciate the dark humor that came with the Marine Corps. In fact, she didn’t like anything about the Corps, especially my growing cockiness flowing from my increased attachment to it. My confidence had increasingly transcended into arrogance, with the Marine Corps attitude foremost in how I spoke and presented myself. I was shit-hot twisted steel and sex appeal, and my foolish young self wasn’t shy to display that attitude. By early in that first semester, the Marines were in competition with Tami – at least that’s how she took it – and it became one of the primary sources of our fights.
Before the Fall turned to Winter, our regional Marine Corps recruiters had arranged a mini boot camp to take place over three days. Attendance was required, or so they said, and I missed a few days of classes for it. The recruits were bussed from several regional city-hubs of the recruiters, with about forty-five recruits altogether, to a military base in Minnesota (I don’t remember the name).
It felt like real boot camp, at least at first. We had two genuine Marine Corps drill instructors providing the experience, including all the in-your-face yelling everyone had come to expect. I had seen the movie Full Metal Jacket over the previous summer, and these drill instructors sounded like a PG-rated version Gunnery Sergeant Hartman - it was funny as long as they weren’t yelling at you. They were tough and mean, as expected, but they never touched a recruit or got too personally verbally abusive. To me, it was more “proof” that the Marine Corps had indeed evolved since the Vietnam era. In just a few months, I would find out just how incredibly different the mini boot camp really was from the real thing.
The first big difference was that all of the recruits-to-be were all still civilians who wore civilian clothing, marched and ran in civilian running shoes and had civilian haircuts. It had the effect of making us look not unlike college kids at a summer camp, but with military order enforced by badass Marines. The second big difference was that we didn’t get to handle any weapons or have rifles available for drill practice. Marines and their rifles are inseparable, and the absence was noticeable, awkward even. Perhaps the biggest difference was in the behavior of the drill instructors towards the recruits.
The mini boot camp was set up to mimic the real boot camp’s teaching structure, which was broken into three phases. In real bootcamp, each phase was approximately one month long. Here, each phase was a day. And like real bootcamp, each day started with Physical Training, (PT) led by the drill instructors.
Our Phase one consisted of the very basics – how to stand at attention; how to march and how to turn; how to salute; how to make your rack (bed), etc. In real bootcamp, this is the most emotionally intense phase that takes a raw civilian, strips him of his individuality and individual identity, and starts molding him into a blood-thirsty killing machine Marine. The drill instructors are also at their meanest and least tolerable of anything they don’t command during Phase One. At first, ours were no exception in the intensity I expected from them, but there were some things I noticed. They made a point not to swear directly at any of the recruits in terms of name calling, putting on the air of more reasonable instructors rather than the fierce tyrants they are known to be. The meanest insults I heard drill instructors make were to call a recruit a “thing”, as in “bend and thrust, you pink thing!”
The next day was Phase Two. In regular boot camp, Phase Two is when recruits are taken to the rifle range and taught to shoot, as well as field training, including learning land navigation and other combat-related field skills. For our Phase Two, we went out to an artillery range where the focus was on compass reading and being shown several demonstrations of various weapons systems (mortars, tanks, M-2 .50 caliber machine gun, etc.). Less grind and a bit of fun with the guns. As the day went on, I noticed that the drill instructors started acting more relaxed around the recruits in their tone and attitudes. They were less mean and overtly hostile, leaving the impression that we might eventually make it to their level of worthiness.
Day three – our Phase Three – was more field training and some small unit tactics culminating in a night training exercise. The recruits were divided into small five-man units with a squad leader appointed by the drill instructors. I got lucky and was chosen to lead my squad - four guys I never met before from somewhere I didn’t know. All of us were taken out into “the field” by bus about four miles away from our barracks. We were let loose in the woods to navigate our way home as a squad without being caught or fake “killed” by one of the drill instructors, or other Marines assisting them, who were in full camouflage manning foxholes and ambush sites along the way. There were pockets of ambushers everywhere. We had nothing but they were heavily armed, using blanks in their rifles or machine guns.
Within the first very slow, careful crawl across flat ground covered with tall prairie grass, my squad mates all flaked off on me. They were impatient and had no discipline, choosing to move out quicker in defiance of my commands and committing mutiny before getting themselves “killed” a short while later. Dumbasses had it coming. I continued to slowly make my way, careful of each step through the woods after crossing the open ground on my belly. The sound of slightly muffled fully automatic gunfire started ringing out in multiple places around the woods. Then excited screams of Marines doing their thing: full-auto bursts of gunfire followed by “Die, motherfuckers!” seemed to be going on all around me but just out of sight. Frequently followed by laughter. The Marines were having a ball fulfilling their fantasy mission of wiping out the invading hoard of recruit-trainees. Still, I crept quietly, taking my time and making no noise. I was one of the last of half a dozen recruits to make it safely to the barracks.
In all, the experience gave me confidence that Big Jim’s fears were misplaced because the Marine Corps had changed. There was nothing abusive or cruel that I saw at the mini boot camp. It seemed to me that the drill instructors were actually interested in the progress of the recruits and wanted them to be trained killers of the highest order. One drill instructor even gave us an ego stroke, backhanded and qualified as it was, by telling us, “The Marine Corps is an insane brotherhood…and you all just showed me that you have what it takes to try to be a part of it.” I could see the purpose and points behind all of the training we sampled and was more convinced than ever that I would sail through boot camp without my high arches hindering me.
I didn’t realize that I had just gone through a super-ad for the Marine Corps; a form of sales propaganda that looked and felt real and was thoroughly convincing, like a test-drive. Reality awaited to slap me in the face once again.
—
(CHAPTER 13 GOES BACK TO COOS BAY AND THE NIGHTMARE CASE TAKES OFF! DON’T MISS A THING, SUBSCRIBE TODAY!)
—
The Air Fore Academy had a specific set of physical fitness tests they required for their application. They were not entirely logical, and I specifically mean the so-called shuttle run test. It was called an agility and speed test, but for what? How does running fast back and forth have anything to do with flying a plane or manning a missile site? The applicant had to run from one line to another, touching both a hand and foot on the line, then turn and do the same on the beginning line. You did this three times in under 61.4 seconds (it’s different now and I don’t recall the exact distance or time for the old standards, so that’s what I’m going with). For me, with my fucked-up feet and slow running speed, it was my biggest hurdle. So I practiced. And practiced. And practiced some more. I got consistently .2 seconds under the required time, and that was enough.
On the day of the physical fitness test, I was required to go to the Grand Forks Air Force base, then home to B-1 bombers and a massive ICBM missile platform. It was an official appointment. I had to stop at the entrance gate and have the guards call in to get permission to pass, then I was given specific directions to the gymnasium where the test was to be conducted. After arriving, I met the test giver, a slightly pudgy six-foot tall Senior Airman with a huge stick up his ass. He had a moustache to match his potbelly, and as a future Marine, I was unimpressed. None-the-less, he acted like he was the Base Commander.
I did fine on all of the tests until we came to the shuttle run. The tests were all done in a multi-use gym that had many sets of lines on the floor for various games like basketball, volleyball, shuffleboard, etc. I was told to run to between two black lines but only the starting line was clear. Nothing was put down to delineate the other line and there were several of them. The Senior Airman stood at the approximate end/turn point with his clipboard and pointed at a line on the floor, then stepped back to observe. Then he hit his stopwatch and yelled “Go!” As I sprinted to where he had stood, I saw three sets of black lines several feet apart. I hit the one I thought was it and turned back sprinting the other way when he shouted, “You missed the line!” I had to turn around again and go back to hit the other line he was pointing to, which was about a foot and a half further than the line I touched, then continued on to finish the test. The error completely messed up my time, way beyond acceptable.
I then pointed out the problem to the Senior Airman, but to absolutely no avail. The man was a completely unreasonable prick, telling me, “Too damn bad. You missed the line, that’s you’re fucking problem.” He wouldn’t even let me do a second attempt, intentionally fucking me over in the process like the turf tyrant he could be that day. I left the Air Force base extremely frustrated and angry. That some individual asshole with an attitude could mess up everything I had done to get this appointment had never occurred to me. Up to this point, all of the military people I had met were supportive, even enthusiastic, about hearing me out and/or helping me along my path. This day was my first taste of the reality of politics and petty authoritarianism at play in the real military service.
Fuck that guy, I thought. I’ll overcome that bullshit test simply by becoming a Marine.
As for Tami, the days of the mini honeymoons were over. We kept up with the intense sex life but now she felt competition for her time and my attention. She didn’t care much for actually studying with any kind of discipline or ambition to achieve a certain grade, she just went along with the flow. Going to events on campus and experiencing the campus lifestyle took precedence over academics for her every time. Tami was there as much or more for the experience of college as she was to get a degree.
The only thing she was disciplined about was going to church every weekend at the campus Catholic chapel, dragging me with her because she emphatically wanted to raise our children as Catholics. I was already quite ambivalent toward the Catholic church by this point - instead of being overtly hostile to the idea - only because I had yet to learn of the church’s long history of sexual abuse of children or the abuse of my father by a priest. What I did know from observation was the hypocrisy of the Church, its priests, and its followers, and that was enough of a turn off for me. The most glaring example was our local priest in Dickinson, Father Bacchus. This man was so flamboyantly gay that his priest robes might as well have been a damn dress. Despite that, he constantly railed against the sins of premarital sex, the evils of adultery and fornication, and the sinful abominations broadcast on cable television. We watched him deteriorate rapidly around 1985 and then die of AIDS (but the church lied about it and claimed it was cancer). It was hard for me to take a person so profoundly twisted up as serious or righteous in any regard.
“It’s about the fellowship,” Tami asserted.
Whatever. I went only to make her happy, leaving it one of the quieter tensions between us.
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(ACTION PICKS UP FAST IN THE NEXT CHAPTER - COME BACK FOR MORE!)
—
Beyond my studies and the Marines, Tami had one other area of competition for my time – my friends from back home in Dickinson. To a very large extent, I shared Tami’s sense of sentimentality. It was harder for me to let go of my friends than I had expected, and I kept in close contact. There were a couple of high school events that took place in Grand Forks that Fall, including a student congress tournament, so of course I was there to support them and hang out with my friends at their hotel. I also went to Fargo to watch the football team on which I used to play lose their State Championship shot at the last second with a barely missed field goal attempt. I even traveled to Bismarck for the State Student Congress Championship in November to help cheer and coach them along to the school’s fifth consecutive State Championship win. (I really shouldn’t have had the sentimental attachment to the classmates that I left behind, the class of ’88, because they never gave a damn. I still haven’t been invited to a class reunion!)
To a large extent, all of these things were treated by Tami as a distraction from her. She wanted me all to herself. My arrogance did not allay her concerns. I was focused more on my mission than on her, feeling confident in our relationship but also believing that I would do okay without her. I thought I was hot shit, right? And the ugly duckling no more…Well, that was not a very reassuring posture for a partner in a serious relationship. We ended up in a pattern of fights that grew in intensity with each round. The more heated a fight got, the more intense the make-up sex got, too. After a while, it seemed we would have a major blow-up about every three weeks, with a couple of very short break-ups in the mix, followed by wildly passionate reunion sex.
At the end of the semester, we were still together. I had two weeks to celebrate my eighteenth birthday, then Christmas, and then get ready to leave for boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego on December 28, 1987. Now, I had time to concentrate on Tami, and I did.
One night, about a week before I was scheduled to leave for boot camp, Tami and I were snuggled up on the couch at my house watching an intense World War Two movie about the biggest escape from a concentration camp during the war. It was called Escape From Sobibor, starring Alan Arkin among other notable talents. I had always felt huge empathy for the plight of the victims of the Holocaust – so much so that I got physically sick to my stomach watching old videos played in a history class of the bodies being bulldozed into pits or piled onto carts for the ovens. I was strongly motivated by an internal sense of justice and humanity to keep that sort of barbarism and horror from ever recurring, and I was very willing to put my life on the line to fight for freedom. The United Nations’ initial motto “Never again!” really meant something to me.
Semper Fi!
There was a sequence in the movie that really stuck out to me and filled me with righteous outrage, horror, and grief. It starts out with the escape of two inmates on a work detail who run off into the forest. As punishment, the camp commander forces the remaining thirteen prisoners, now back at camp, to choose someone else to be executed with them or else the commander will choose fifty prisoners. The prisoners make their choices and all twenty-six are then shot dead. My sense of Justice was offended to the maximum…what monsters! How could anyone have such a lack of basic human decency or just honor? I could only imagine the sense of hopelessness and despair those people suffered…
RINGGG!! The phone interrupted my thoughts. I answered.
“Hello?”
“Is this Wesley Miller?” It was an official sounding woman’s voice.
“Yes,” I replied.
Before I could say anything else, she cut me off with, “Please hold for Congressman Dorgan.”
Holy shit! Why would he be calling me at home, over the holidays, at night? Was this IT?!
I held for a few white-knuckle moments before his familiar voice picked up the line.
“Wesley,” Congressman Byron Dorgan said firmly. “How are you this evening?”
“Just wonderful, sir. How are you?” I replied with firmness in my voice as well.
“Doing well, thank you. The reason I’m calling you tonight is that I wanted to talk to you about your Academy application.”
This IS it!! Holy fuck!
“Now, I know you were focused on an appointment to the Air Force Academy,” Dorgan continued. “I’m sorry to say that I have a prior commitment for that appointment.”
FUCK! Gotta be some big donors kid…shit! My mind was racing just like my pulse.
“What I would like to do instead is offer you the principal nomination to the United States Military Academy at West Point.”
I just got appointed to West Point!...What the fuck do I do now?...
“But the thing is, I don’t want to throw away my appointment. I know how much you want to go to the Air Force Academy specifically, and if you get an appointment to go there from one of our Senators (as he thought I would), I need to have your commitment that you will still be going to West Point,” Congressman Dorgan said quite sincerely.
FUCK.
This was something I didn’t see coming. At all.
The man was asking me to accept a position some people would kill for, one that would put me in exactly the same career position as if I attended the Air Force Academy, just not the exact WHERE I wanted to go. As a Marine-to-be, I looked down at the Army as not elite enough or tough enough. Yeah, that arrogance thing. If I accepted and committed, my enlistment in the Marines could be tossed aside and I could finish out the year in college, with Tami. I would have crossed the finish line but not gotten the prize I sought. And I honestly did not want that.
Honor. I was trying to be amongst those who “do not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate among us anyone who does,” so how could I tell this congressman anything other than the truth. So I did. I made the biggest, most fateful decision of my life by processing all that went into the decision in about five seconds when I answered him.
“Sir, thank you so much for calling me and being so forthright with me about the situation. And for the offer of the West Point appointment. But I have to be totally honest with you – if I get an appointment to the Air force Academy from one of the Senators or from the alternate pool, I would have to go there. I really fell in love with the place,” I told him. “So I guess if you can’t offer me that principal nomination, I would rather have an alternate nomination from you for the Air Force Academy and take my chances in the alternate pool. I’m pretty confident I would beat out enough contenders to get in.”
I think I rocked the Congressman’s world as he took a moment before he responded. “Young man, I can’t say I recall someone being so truthful and direct with me. I really respect your integrity. I’m sorry I can’t give you the Air Force slot, but I will give you that alternate nomination and recommend you as a principal nominee to the Senators.”
“Thank you, sir. And thank you again for calling me.”
“My pleasure, Wesley. You have a merry Christmas with your family.”
“Merry Christmas to you, sir.” And the call ended.
I just turned down going to West Point for a full-ride college scholarship and military career to go to Marine Corps boot camp the following week. If you think that sounds like a stupid decision, just wait and see how monumentally fucking stupid it turned out to be.
(Don’t worry, dear reader, this timeline gets picked up again in a few chapters)
*********************
Interview continued…
“…And that’s why I couldn’t go - I’ve got extremely high arches in my feet, and after a couple of weeks of humping the hills in boot camp, my feet were all tore up and they discharged me. I still got the appointment, and a promise of a medical waiver for the feet, but the day before I was supposed to leave, I was notified that the waiver had been denied.”
After a short pause, Blanchett deadpans, “That’s a really sad story.”
“Yeah, well, it forced me to make some fast adjustments to my college plans, and that’s how I ended up at UND (University of North Dakota).