Twenty-five years ago today I stepped out of the $190-a-month apartment I shared with my first wife and set off on foot across Boone, N.C., toward the Cardinal Motel on Highway 321. The Cardinal also served as our bus station, and I had a ticket for Charlotte, paid for by the U.S. government.
I'd said goodbye to my wife when she left for her morning class, and packing was easy: a change of clothes, a paperback (Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories), some official paperwork in a folder and a few packs of cigarettes. I wore a denim jacket and sported the world's worst haircut, given to me the night before by my bride so as to offer the Army barber less of me to claim.
I don't remember much about the trip to Charlotte. I don't even remember how I got from Charlotte to Kentucky, although I'm pretty sure we flew.
I remember arriving at the reception station at Fort Knox on a bus in the dark, followed by mysterious, unexplained waits, followed by more driving, heads bobbing back and forth in unison as the driver ground through the gears, the bus heady with the anxious sweat and adrenaline-soaked pheromones of 50 nervous, excited adolescents. Then a drill sergeant bound up the steps and hustled us off the bus and onto the set of the movie Stripes.
Seriously. The Reception Station at the Fort Knox Armor School is the place where Bill Murray and John Candy and Harold Ramis enter the Army in the movie. That room full of big unit insignia where they meet their drill sergeant? Same room.
Anyway, Oct. 15, 1984, was the watershed between my youth and my adult life. Our transitions don't have to be as abrupt as joining the Army, giving up all your possessions and shaving your head, but young people need rites of passage. What marks the ending point of one phase of life and begins the next? For too many of our kids, it's a party after graduation, followed by a trip to the beach and then on into some nowhere job. Where's the adventure in that? .
Our lives are punctuated by transitions, and I'm in the midst of another one now. I hope I can make it across this divide with the same feeling I had that morning in Boone 25 years ago, determined and awake and ready to meet whatever awaited me. I'm pretty sure I will, too.
May your life be blessed with memorable milestones as well..
OK, thats pretty weird. I too had the same induction date, only I was clear across the country. Your description brought back the memories, though. Wasn't your first Army meal a trip?
Posted by: mack | Friday, October 16, 2009 at 08:12
Oh, same date, different year. I went in 1974.
Posted by: mack | Friday, October 16, 2009 at 08:13
Dude, that's AWESOME!
Actually, I'm one of those rare guys who LIKED Army food, in large part because there was so MUCH of it, and there was meat with every meal.
More than 100 recruits were in my basic training class. Each of them lost weight, except for me. I went from 185 to 205 and grew an inch in 14 weeks.
Posted by: Dan | Friday, October 16, 2009 at 10:55
Read my comments on your Tank Boy page
Posted by: jim | Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 17:21