All Write, Already!

Basic military training does not afford much time for introspection. It's only now, in retrospect, that I can see just exactly how many layers of meaning were piled one atop the other during my six weeks at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas.

The first step -- depersonalization -- is overt, and doesn't take a genius to understand: young men from all sorts of disparate backgrounds are brought in, their clothes are taken away, and they're shaved bald. You are no longer an individual; hell, to the Training Instructor, you're not even a person. You're a thin streak of shit and you'll probably quit, run home to your mother, and amount to nothing in life. After that moment of relative clarity, things become much hazier.

The TIs reduce you to the same rhythms by which early humanity lived: rise before dawn, perform demanding labor all day, and fall asleep as the sun sets. It's good training for the ability to fall asleep anywhere at any time.

When you're making your bed to dustcover specifications, you're not making your bed. You're calibrating the guidance system on a Sidewinder missile, or adjusting the tension of a control cable in an F-16's wing. You're not making sure that the secondary blanket, the dustcover, folds under at exactly 12 inches from the head of the bed; you're directing incoming airstrikes on positions less than a kilometer from your own. The really smart thing that the designers of BMT did is to make sure that you can't do any of your tasks alone. In order to make a dustcover bed, you have to have a second person providing tension on the sheets, or holding the end of the mattress. Making a bed becomes an object lesson in attention to detail and teamwork.

Teamwork doesn't work out like it does in the movies, though. The streetwise black kid from Harlem who lives by the book doesn't have a revelation that he and the redneck from the sticks who does things his way are really alike after all, and they tell each other that they can be their respective wingmen. Well, it almost never works that way. One night, I was working dorm guard (doing firewatch activities and monitoring the doors to the barracks) with Vic Fontanez, who actually was a streetwise black kid from Puerto Rico. He and I had developed a fast friendship, which I think got started because he saw a picture of my younger sister and wanted to make sure he got an introduction when my family came down to Texas. At any rate, we were shining our boots because there's nothing else to do at 3:30 AM when you're standing guard duty, and we were talking about our lives, about what we thought getting out of Basic would feel like, when Vic said to me, "You know, we all boys, and that's cool. But you're my nigga, Bragg." I told him I didn't think I'd been anyone's nigga before, and he informed me that it conferred on me the right to call him my nigga, "but you say that word to any other brother without permission and they'll fuck your shit up, man." We laughed and when Basic ended, we parted ways: he went to Security Forces (the MPs) and I went into communications.

I looked Vic up through some old military contacts about 18 months ago, and found out he'd been in a convoy near Halabjah when an IED took out his Humvee. We never said goodbye, because you don't say goodbye in the military. When there's a very good chance that you'll probably end up being stationed together again, you say "see you later." Well, goodbye, Vic. You're still my nigga.