"A Simple Paper Job, Part I"

When I signed up to join the Navy in 1995 (and later went to Boot Camp in 1996), I got a decent score on my ASVAB and I picked the job rating of “AZ” or Aviation Maintenance Administrationman. I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, Todd… that’s an obnoxiously long title for a paper-pusher job!” Indeed, young grasshopper… you have struck the vegetable on the head! I graduated from boot-camp in late April of ’96 and we all got split up to go to each of our respective schools, and I remembered: My A-School was in an armpit of a town called Meridian in Mississippi, and summer was quickly approaching. For those of you that have been to the “Deep South”, you already know what I’m going to address in regards to the sheer hellishness of the summers there. For those of you that haven’t, however, let me describe why there shouldn’t be any obese humans in that area of the country.
Imagine that you just got out of bed, and you amble over to the bathroom and take a shower to get a fresh start to your day. You take a warm, prolonged shower and dry yourself off before putting on your “Working Whites”, or as we called them, “The Good Humor Man Suit”. You walk out of the door of your dorm room to the little lounge that rests at the center of three adjoined dorm rooms. Now, as you step outside you feel a blast of heat that would make even the Devil say, “Fuck! It’s hot out here!” and then notice that your ass-crack has erupted with sweat the likes of which can only be seen in a low-rent XXX porn movie filmed in a walk-in oven. And before we go any further, look at your watch: It’s only 7:00 AM! Now you start to regret ever signing up for the service in the first place, and understand what I’m talking about.
I can take extremes of hot and cold weather, after all; I grew up in the High Desert of Southern California, spent summers in Jacksonville, North Carolina and even went to High School in Sturgis, South Dakota during the winter. But this was a new kind of heat that I had never experienced before. Humid is not a word that can properly describe what it was like there. No, humid is too small of a word for this type of warmth, as are the adjectives tepid or moist. No, this is the heat of a Biblical sort; I’m talkin’ about the ninth ring of Dante’s Inferno hot. The kind of heat wherein you find yourself looking for lakes of fire or little demons scampering about with the souls of the un-baptized; that kind of hot.
Upon arriving at my new station in Meridian, we had to go log-in as present and accounted for at the Phase II barracks on base. The young female 3rd class Petty Officer standing behind the counter looked at my billet, started chuckling and said, “Man, I hope you like running” and told me where my dorm room was in the Phase I barracks. I walked down the path that connected the two areas and went upstairs to the West side of the building to meet my two room-mates. Sean was from Louisiana and Jason was from Texas. Sean was already attending his “AZ” classes, and Jason was taking his classes to be a “PN”, or Personnelman. I asked Sean what the lady at the desk meant by saying that I better like running and he said, “Aw, man… we gotta do our PT with the Marines and shit.” I couldn’t believe it, so I asked him why, and he told me, “Y’see, we’ve got a ‘Cross-Branch’ rating. That means that both the Marines and us have the same job, that’s done in the same way, with the same paperwork. I guess they figured that if we learn together, we should train together, y’know… the whole ‘Unit Integrity’ thing.” After telling me that, Sean said that he and Jason were going to the base club, so I finished putting all my stuff away in my locker and went the Mess Hall to get something to eat.
Being that I got there on a Friday afternoon, I didn’t have a class until Monday, so I decided to sock away the thought of running until Monday, and Monday came quicker than I thought it would. Me and my future classmates met down at the area between the two class buildings a little after 6 AM in our uncomfortably short running shorts and Boot Camp T-Shirts in order to meet our Core Instructor, Master Gunnery Sergeant Michael Pritchett. Gunney Pritchett has a lazy eye, but exudes authority in a way that is almost uniquely Marine, and welcomed us to “AZ” A-School. He said that he would start us off with some light calisthenics and a “Short Run”. We were all looking at each other and thinking, “Great, a short run and then we can go get something to eat at the Mess Hall before going to class!” Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that a “Short Run” was “Short” in Marine terms; a little over three miles long… chalk it up to Naval intuition.
As we started our run, it wasn’t so bad; after all, it was still kind of cool outside and the sun was still down. But about thirty minutes into the run, I was starting to burn out… after all; we only had to run a max of two miles in Navy Boot Camp, so we weren’t conditioned for this type of running. And on top of all that, the first half of the run was done on a gravel-and-soft-sand-covered road that wound its way through the forest area behind the class buildings. After we finished the run, we had barely enough time to take a shower before running to class, or we would have been late.
Towards the end of the first day of class, Gunney Pritchett started calling each of us into his office, one by one, to have a quick chat to familiarize himself with his new pupils. I was towards the bottom of the list, being that my last name is “Tobin”. That’s typically how it’s worked out for most of my life, so I wasn’t all that surprised. Gunney stood up as I came in the office and shook my hand. He had a grip like a frickin’ vice, much like my Dad, who also was a Marine but had retired after 20 years of service upon returning from the Persian Gulf War. He looked at my face and then at the stencil of my name on my shirt and asked me who my Father was.
I looked him in the eye that I thought was his good eye and told him, “My Dad’s name is Calvin…” his face brightened up and he shouted, “Buzz Tobin is your Dad?! That fucker saved my life a time or two, back in the day… a good man and a good Marine! So why didn’t you join the Corps?” I figured, why bother lying to him? So I said, “My Dad told me not to join the Marines because I have a brain between my ears.” Which is exactly what both my Father and Grand-Father told me (they were both Marines) word for word. He straightened up and slapped me on the shoulder and said, “That sounds like Buzz! I’ll be damned, Buzz Tobin’s kid is in my class… well, if you need any help with anything, you let me know, Tobin.” And opened the door to let me know to get out without telling me verbally. I walked out into the hallway to find my classmates were staring at me like they were astounded that I was still breathing or something.
I looked at them, shrugged and walked down the hallway to get a soda, and a guy I went through Boot Camp with named Jason Wimbrough asked me what all the noise was about. I told him that Gunney knows my Father from way back, which probably meant that Gunney was stationed at either Cherry Point or Lejeune in North Carolina during the 1980’s. He thought that I would have it easy by having an old war buddy of my Dad supervising my classes. I told him that it would be likely that my Dad would try to set me up to take advantage of the situation, to test my character. Jason asked me why he would do that, and I told him, “Because that’s what I would do.” He didn’t get it, but then again, he’s from Jackson, Mississippi, and wasn’t a very deviant or creative thinker.