Lev Lazinskiy

Great Lakes, Illinois

I must have looked so desperate on the evening of December 11, 2006 when I asked the woman standing outside in the freezing cold at O’Hare airport for a cigarette. “Excuse me, can I please bum a smoke? I am going to boot camp today and this will be my last one for a while.”

“Here, have two” she said, handing me some Pall Malls and going back to shivering.

A few months before that I was working at FYE at Northgate Mall. I’d spend my days labeling and relabeling things, special ordering box set DVDs of obscure sci-fi TV shows, and blasting promotional pop music while sneaking in Madonna remixes when no one was paying too close attention. Next door to the mall was an Armed Services Career Center. One day, a Navy Recruiter walked in to buy something and I thought to myself “Hm, the Navy sounds like fun.” At the time I felt lost, my life was going no where, and that is how I found myself standing outside in the cold taking the last hit of a final cigarette.

I already had my “final cigarette” a few hours before outside of Columbus airport after saying goodbye to my family. I was not mentally prepared to quit but I didn’t really have a choice. Any minute now I would get on a bus with a bunch of other anxious 18 year old kids and ship off to the first day of the next 4 years. We all signed a contract with the U.S. Navy and there was no going back now.

The cigarette tasted awful, not my brand, but who was I to complain? I tried to savor them as much as possible and didn’t even notice the punishing cold. I took one last hit, threw the butts in the ashtray, said thank you to the kind stranger, and hurried back to the USO to continue to wait for our bus.

The holiday season was coming up soon and lots of military members were traveling through Chicago that day. Half of the USO lounge was active duty people taking a break, the other half were people like me. Recruits. Some looked stoic, some made stupid jokes, others looked like they just made the worst decision of their life. You could feel the tension building as we all waited for the bus. The recruits filled with dread, everyone else filled with glee at the impending schadenfreude that they were soon to witness.

The bus pulled in, a gaggle of RDCs¹ stepped out and immediately began to yell at us to form a height line, and then hurry up and get on the bus. We grabbed our paperwork, a handful of belongings, and made our way on the government-plated coach bus. The trip up to Great Lakes Recruit Training Command took about an hour. As we approached the final destination, a Navy produced informational video came on welcoming us to boot camp and explaining that over the next several weeks we would be transformed from hopeless creatures into U.S. Navy Sailors. Hooyah.

We pull into the base, get off the bus, and immediately start getting yelled at from all directions. We were all complete fuckups in their eyes. We were either moving too slow or too fast. We were too stupid but also smart asses. We quickly learned that the only correct answer to any question was “Yes, Petty Officer”. Some people slipped up and said “Yes, Sir”, like they saw in the movies. This evoked the ultimate wrath from the Chief Petty Officer who would turn beet red, get a centimeter away from your face and shout “DON’T CALL ME SIR, I WORK FOR A LIVING!”

The next 24 hours was a blur. You enter a room with several rows of long tables that have an empty box on top. It’s like the mystery box challenge in Master Chef, except instead of cooking something while getting yelled at by Gordon Ramsay you are yelled at by HM1 Gordon and told to strip down, take everything you brought with you, shove it in the box, label it with your address, and drop it off in the corner. When the box finally arrives at your home address a few days later it serves as the only notification to your family that you officialy made it to boot camp.

The next step was to pee for your country and pass a drug test. You could not leave the room until you peed in a cup. Every 5-10 minutes a row of people would go try to take the test. You stood side by side with your fellow recruits while an observer watched to make sure you were not cheating. If you could not produce a sample, you got a sip of water, got yelled at to stop wasting time and were commanded to pace around a room along with all the other people who couldn’t pee under pressure. At some point it becomes purely a mental game, your bladder feels like it’s going to burst but you still can’t produce anything. It remember feeling like I would be stuck in that room forever. Then, finally, release. On to the next phase of the recruit assembly line.

It’s hard to remember the exact order of operations. I was sleep deprived, hungry, and already numb to being yelled at. I was under so much stress that I forgot all about the nicotine withdrawals. We moved from room to room, station to station, slowly being broken down into a piece of human clay that the RDCs was responsible for turning into Sailors. We got to eat a meal, we met our assigned instructors, they told us we were worthless failures. We did pushups, eight counts, sit ups, mountain climbers, more push ups, we got to take a shower, I remember feeling so exhausted.

When we were finally allowed to sleep, I climbed to the top of my bunk on the thinnest mattress I’d ever seen and dozed off while wondering why the hell I volunteered to be here. December 13, only 8 more weeks and six days to go.