We'd known he was going to go to boot camp, of course. And everybody has heard tales about how hard it is. And it is. Back in December I'd stumbled on this article in the Navy Times: "Not your daddy's's boot camp—why Great Lakes got tougher."
Over the past 14 months, Navy leaders have made recruit training tougher. Senior leaders told Navy Times that they've revamped more than 60 percent of the eight-week curriculum to return the enlisted rite of passage to the gritty fundamentals of physical fitness, standing watch and waging war at sea: fighting fires, damage control and force protection. …
Making boot camp tougher, especially at the beginning of the training cycle, dramatically shifted the "attrition profile" at Great Lakes, [Rear Adm. Mike] Bernacchi said.
Before the reforms, most recruits who failed dropped out around the sixth week of entry-level training, not during the initial two weeks.
"Once you get through the first couple of weeks your chances of graduating are now higher and we're wasting less time on people who fall out later in training," he said. …
In the past, lax standards allowed recruits to graduate if they passed the physical fitness test, a multiple-choice exam and the third-class swim evaluation.
They now must pass not only individual skill tests at multiple stages of training, but their team has to ace them, too.
It's pretty impressive, and I've now heard from Jesse things I never would have guessed. They didn't even let them sit in chairs the first week. They sat on the floor. There was a lot of swimming and water survival. And yes, at age thirty-four, he was older than most recruits at boot camp—they were teenagers—and he didn't have to meet some requirements numerically speaking, but he still had to do it all. Everything.
Recruits are forbidden their phones early on, but they can write letters home. Jesse wrote to Katie—and to his mother! Ever the teacher (both he and Katie had just graduated the summer before with master's in education), the older guy, he noticed that some recruits seemed lonely, particularly at mail call. And that's a hard old eight weeks to also be lonely, you know? He asked me to tell my friends (yes, this ended up on Facebook) that if anyone was moved to write generic letters of encouragement for the young men and women in his boot camp "class," he would pass them out to those who weren't getting much mail, if any at all.
As time goes on—I don't know specifically how long—the recruits do, on occasion, get to make brief calls on their own phones. But you never know when he or she will be permitted to call out. When that loved one is also a newlywed, it might not even cross his mother's mind (ahem) that he'd call her. Thus, I missed a call from Jesse one afternoon when I forgot my phone on my desk* when I went downstairs to pull supper together. Aaagh! But he did get Katie (she's his next of kin and has a lot of important things to discuss with him). Later she brought me up to speed on all the news—and she delivered a sweet message from him to me, as well.
Katie and I didn't learn about any of this until later. One thing we did learn was that we had to have a background investigation and pass a security clearance, because the ceremony is held on base. We both passed.
On one of her calls with Jesse, Katie had learned the basic schedule, when we could be there, when the ceremony would start, and that we could take our sailor off the base for a few hours, but he would have to be back in the very early evening. We'd probably have him for about four hours. He'd requested that the first thing we do is go out for coffee. So I had started to research coffee houses and places to go to supper too. (We ended up taking Jesse to Found Kitchen and Social House in Evanston; sadly, it no longer exists.)
In other news, the US Navy, in case you didn't know, broadcasts its boot camp graduations live—which start promptly at 8:45am Central. It can be lengthy, depending on the size of the class, the number of speeches given, and so on. Thus one notes that one might want to visit the ladies' room before being seated.
We were eventually informed of our security status and told where and when we could pick up our passes to get on base. All systems were go.
*I think that was the year I finally got the habit down: I go nowhere without my phone.
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