What things do you remember about adapting to military life?

Waking up early in the morning

The togetherness, just last year I had a reunion with a friend that I hadn't seen in 50 years what a great thing

One the biggest adjustments I had to make when I joined the Army was realizing I no longer had the 1st Amendment right to free speech. I am kind of a smart-a$$ and I used to exercise that right to speech frequently, sometimes to my own detriment. When I joined the Army, I quickly learned the DI's don't really care how funny you think you are. That was a problem they corrected immediately and with great prejudice. LOL

Boot camp was the first time I was in close proximity to Blacks and Hispanics for any length of time. I grew up in Oceanside, NY (a bastion of Whiteness) and had little interaction with minorities other than visiting sports teams. Being raised by a bigoted father for 18 years and then being thrust into the madness of Parris Island with people of color started me rethinking my conditioned perspectives. We were all in this together. We helped one another. We became toughened together, skilled, and sharp together. By graduation we were the same. We were one force. We reacted, moved, and executed commands as a single unit, a single being.

By the last two weeks of boot camp, the drill instructors could do nothing to break us. We were in the best physical condition of our lives, and we had overcome all the psychological stress inflicted upon us. I believe the drill instructors were proud of this fact. We would make good Marines after all. They had done their job.

World War One Marine recruit, Malcolm Aikens, said it best when he described his time at Parris Island, “The first day I was afraid I was going to die. The next two weeks my sole fear was that I wasn’t going to die. And after that I knew I’d never die, because I’d become so hard that nothing could kill me.”

With the insanities I experienced in the war locked firmly in my psyche, other incongruities kept trying to sort themselves out in my mind. Upon entering the Marine Corps, various training bases, and subsequent deployment to Vietnam, I was thrust into a jumbled world of race, color, creed, and national origins that I was ill-equipped to grasp intellectually. There were African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Caucasian-Americans, European-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native-Americans, and Rednecks, fighting communist Vietnamese (supplied by Russians and Chinese) who were fighting against republican Vietnamese. Throw in some Australians, New Zealanders, Thais, Filipinos, Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans, Canadians, various Montagnard tribal warriors, and a host of others, such as Catholics and their Buddhist political rivals, crippled orphans, mama-sans in fear, Bob Hope, kill Cong, take a 5-day vacation with a hired Asian girl, sing Silent Night, ‘yellowing’ the war, refugees everywhere, body counts, and better-dead-than-Red. Welcome to Race Relations 101. How was I ever going to sort out all of this in my young mind?

In the end, I have come to understand how my military experience turned this confused teenager into a humanist.

Initially, it was a change in lifestyle with new responsibilities and life living disciplines. Then it became a constant change in life as I was maturing, moving and deploying, and socializing with new folks from all sorts of life backgrounds. As a small town boy that grew up around family, military life was like a foreign country.

It wasn't so easy but I got used to being in another world/life. It's completely different than civilian life but you just go along with it. I also got used to rotating shift work with odd/random shifts and working on little to no sleep. I don't even know how I managed but I made it through!

I was really excited about joining the Army, my life at home was really bleak. Basic training was great, I loved everything about it. The Army provided me with a life, finally being able to live my life, new adventures, challenges, learning so many things, and establishing life long bonds and friendships. It was the best decision of my life.

I had no skills or plans for life after high school Because of the military I learned how to be independent, live with other not my race, culture or faith The life skills of working with others on the job learning the "boss" may be wrong but they are still the boss gave me skills that kept me as a union leader in civilian life The military saw and encouraged me the value to go on to college that was not even dreamed about in high schools I am still benefiting today because of the G I bill

Adapting to the military (Army, in my case) was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. Sure the physical and mental aspects were challenging, but long ago when I entered service, I was looking for structure, security, and stability in my life. Plus, I knew that the Army would challenge me in many ways and I welcomed that. I wanted the change that the Army would deliver. Adapting to the circumstances was made easier because I was surrounded by many like minded individuals, and the Drill Sergeants pretty quickly weeded out those that were not fit for any number of reasons; leaving only those really committed to the challenge and lifestyle.

I enlisted when I was 18 right out of high school. I was in the DEP program for about 3 months before I went to boot camp. I enlisted to get away from home. I had a mother who was strict and controlling and I just wanted to get away. Going to boot camp was scary because I didn't know what to expect. You see the movies and you see how the drill sergeants get in the person's face and yell and scream, and I thought boot camp would be like the movies. I was wrong. It wasn't near as bad lol. After 8 weeks of boot camp, heading to fleet, I was excited and nervous and just ready to go have fun and begin my life as an enlisted member of the Navy. The fleet was different than boot camp, way more relaxed. My first station was on the USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71 in Norfolk, Virginia. I will tell you, the best 4 years of my life. We were the first ship to call during 9/11 and set world record of an aircraft carrier being at sea with no port call for 159 days. We did a 10-month turn around after OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) and went right into OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom). I got to experience life at sea, visit other countries, made some amazing friends that I still keep in contact to this day, made tons of memories, learned self-discipline and became very independent. Adaptong to military life was easier than I had imagined. It was the best decision I could have made for my life. Adapting back to civilian life was the hard part. I had become accustomed to military life and military tactics that discharging back to civilian life felt out of the norm. To this day (21 years later), I find myself utilizing many of the things I learned while in the military from cleaning and high dusting to folding my clothes and rolling out of bed some mornings, getting ready for work in 7 minutes or less as if I was getting ready for battle stations lol..Biggest mistake I made was reenlisting for Active Reserve and then never reenlisting again after. If I could do it all over again, I would and I would make a career out of the military.