Boot camp, or its more politically correct and maybe even more accurate name, recruit training, is supposedly designed to acclimate former civilians into navy life. It still does that, but not nearly as effectively as it used to.
When I stepped off the bus that warm July afternoon, unlike most guys, I knew what to expect. I'd been there before, after all. In high school, I spent a week on that very same base, Recruit Training Center, San Diego, as part of the NJROTC program. Admittedly, they went easy on us, though we didn't know it at the time. We thought they were as tough on us as they were the regular recruits. Live and learn.
So there I stood in the summer of 1988, still with a full head of medium-length blonde hair (which I'll never see again), my bag full of things which I didn't need slung over my shoulder, waiting for a very big, very loud Chief Petty Officer to come over and start yelling at me and the other guys who got off the bus with me, to tell us all what idiotic dirtbags we were, that we didn't know our butts from a hole in the ground, and how he didn't know how he was going to make sailors out of such a worthless group.
That didn't happen, much to my delighted surprise. It would wait a little while longer. All good things, you know.
First we were led by other recruits in their fifth week of training, colloquially known as "service week" (although service ranged from intake to picking up trash to answering phones, to cleaning sloppy trays in the galley), to a temporary barracks which would be home for the next couple of days of in-processing. This is when we got all of our shots, whether we needed them or not (even that early, the Navy assumes its service members are lying), filled out reams of paperwork, and had our hair cut off.
This is both the funniest and saddest day in boot camp for a lot of guys. Even those of us who don't worry much about our hair, and I don't, find that much of our identity is contained in it. Long, short, styled, dyed, or just plain left alone to flap in the breeze, our hair proclaims to anyone who can see it who we are. Then it's gone in an instant, or rather, four or five swipes with electric hair clippers, which when used properly will remove hair, skin, muscle and ego equally. Just ask any guy who twitched while he was in the seat.
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