Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 16

Being a Navy trainee is like being a student in an exclusive private college where the students happen to dress in dark blue uniforms. There are no stern drill instructors like Sergeant Burke, and nobody ever raises their voice at us. Our instructors are Navy officers dressed in immaculately starched khaki shirts and slacks.

We live in dorms, with separate rooms for every trainee, and my first night in Navy training is the first night since PRC Northshore-7 I have spent in a room all by myself. The Navy training companies are all quartered in giant buildings named like ships-Enterprise, Intrepid, Iroquois-and while the buildings are old, the interior of our particular “ship” is new and spotless. The furniture in my room is made of wood-grained polymer, and it looks like nobody has used it before me. There’s a brand new PDP on my desk when I move into my room, the shelves on the wall are lined with reference materials printed on real paper, and my room even has a private bathroom, complete with shower stall.

Navy Indoc training takes five weeks, and nearly all that time is spent in air-conditioned classrooms. There are physical exercise sessions every day, but most of them are ball games between different training platoons or companies, and none of the PT sessions involve running up and down the roads of the Naval Station. Our instructors explain to us that outside runs are restricted because of the abysmal air quality so close to the Chicago metroplex, so we just kick and throw balls to each other in the gym of our “ship”.

The first week in training, I suffer a bit of a culture shock from my transition. In Basic, I followed the policy of always running with the crowd, and never sticking out. Here in Navy Indoc, I stick out no matter what I do. My responses to instructor orders are too loud, my salutes are too sharp, and my PT scores are too good. The creases in my uniform are too precise, my shoes too spotless, and my classroom answers too prompt. Not a week into Indoc, the entire training company seems to know that I’m a transfer from the TA.

Sticking to yourself is not difficult in Indoc. We have a regular workday, just like in the TA, and the evenings and Sundays are our personal time. I spend my free time working out in the gym, or staying in my room and reading manuals. Our PDPs are fully enabled, unlike the one I had in Basic, and I spend a lot of time exchanging messages with Halley and my old squad mates. The squad gives me a good ribbing over being a Navy puke now, and Halley is simply astonished that I managed to make the jump between services. When I send her the first message from my new node, GRAYSON.A/INDOC/RTC/TERRA/NAVY, she accuses me of playing a very elaborate prank on her. It takes two cycles of replies for her to realize that I am, in fact, in the Navy now.

>I have no clue how you pulled that one off, but congratulations!, she writes.

I’m far away from the 365th AIB right now, and well out of Major Unwerth’s reach, but for some reason I don’t want to tell Halley about Detroit over the MilNet. It’s not just that I don’t know who else might be reading our exchanges, but I also find that I’m not able to frame the events in written language. I make three attempts at composing a message, but all of them end up in the electronic trash bin of my new Navy PDP. Instead, I just tell her a slice of the truth— my squad sergeant managed to pull a few strings for me out of sympathy.

>You’ll go to Luna for A-school in a few weeks. Are you excited?

>Hell, yes, I reply. I’ll be the first welfare rat from my block to go into space. Do you get to see Earth from your window, or what?

>Nope. Our quarters have no windows. There’s a clear panorama wall in the mess hall, but it faces the wrong way. All you’ll see is a bunch of stars.

>I’ll deal with it somehow. Maybe we’ll bump into each other up there?

>I doubt it. Your A-school is in a different complex from Combat Flight School. They don’t give us a lot of time off, anyway. But hey, we’ll be on the same rock together. Maybe we’ll get posted to the same ship.

>That would be great, I reply, but I think I just used up all my luck last week, so I won’t hold my breath.

In Week Four, we get a break from the classroom. For the Shipboard Safety Training, we move to another building on the base. This one houses a full-sized simulator of a Lancer-class fleet destroyer. It’s a complete and utterly convincing replica, a five hundred foot long hull with navigation lights, antenna arrays, missile silo covers, and armor plating. The whole thing looks like it could be towed into space and added to the fleet if needed.

Shipboard Safety Training is like starship kindergarten. We learn how to properly move in the narrow aisles and gangways of a Navy warship. As big as the destroyer hull looks from the outside, there’s very little space on the inside.

There’s a lively part of Shipboard Safety Training, and that’s the firefighting and evacuation drill portion. We all get to don sealed vacsuits with oxygen tanks, and the shipboard systems do a convincing job of simulating a major fire on board. We take turns connecting flexible hoses to wall-mounted valves, and dragging our fellow students to safety through smoke-filled corridors. Outside of the Quarterdeck hall, this is the first time I actually get to work up a good sweat in Indoc, and I enjoy doing something physical for a change. I have the feeling that the evac drills are largely a feel-good measure to make the enlisted personnel feel like they have some control over their fates when their ship is on fire and adrift in deep space, but I suppose it’s better than sitting on your hands and waiting to burn or suffocate. So I learn how to direct fire suppressant, operate the thermal imaging gear built into the vacsuit, and search smoke-filled spaces for victims.

We spend a whole day doing emergency drills on the simulated destroyer, culminating with a full pod evacuation from low alert status. Navy ships have life pod systems that are distributed all over the hull, so that no crewmember has more than a compartment or two to cross before reaching a pod in an emergency. When your ship breaks, you’re supposed to find a pod, launch away, and hope that the expeller motor doesn’t fire the pod into the gravitational pull of a gas giant.

The pods on the simulated destroyer don’t launch out of the hull, of course. We rush to the nearest escape hatches, slide down into the pods, and activate the hatch controls. The pod gives a little jolt to simulate a successful launch, and then the exercise is over. I notice that everyone’s pod makes it off the ship and into space, and I wonder just how often a pod evac results in a hundred-percent evacuation rate. The instructor in charge of the exercise just smiles when I ask him that question on the way out of the simulator, and I draw my own conclusions.

At the end of our fifth week in training, we take a battery of skill tests and written exams to verify that we haven’t slept through Indoc, and most of us are pronounced fit to join the Fleet. On graduation day, we get to dress up in our new Navy dress uniforms and pass in review before the training division commander. Then they hand us ball caps and declare that we’re now welcomed into the Fleet.

I receive a merit promotion at the ceremony. The Navy grants me a bump to E-2, because I had the highest combined test scores of my training company. I should feel good about finally receiving a promotion and getting a rank device pinned to my bare collar, but all I can think about is the fact that I would have been an E-2 in the TA by now as well. I shake the Commanding Officer’s hand, and smile when he puts the E-2 chevron on my collar. I carry the platoon guidon as we march out of the review hall, but I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything at all in the last five weeks.

>Did you feel a bit let down by Indoc after Basic? I ask Halley through MilNet later that evening.

>Sort of, she replies. It was a bit of a snooze, wasn’t it?

>I just don’t feel like I’ve actually earned those chevrons. That was like college with uniforms and better food.

>I hear you. Don’t worry, things will be different in A-school for you. If yours is anything like mine, you won’t have much free time most of the week.

I very much doubt that Neural Networking school is anywhere as demanding as Combat Flight School, but I also doubt that it’s as relaxed as Indoc. Anything less formal and strenuous would have to involve the trainees spending all day in their beds and eating hand-delivered meals.

The next morning, I haul my new duffel bag onto a shuttle to Luna.

I’ve never been religious. My mother was raised Catholic, like two thirds of the people living in our corner of the Greater Boston metroplex, and she tried to raise me in the faith as well, but I never went to church again after my first communion. Seeing the planet from orbit, however, is the closest I’ve ever come to having a religious experience. The shuttle takes off, climbs through three hundred thousand feet of ever-thinning atmosphere in ten minutes, and then rolls over onto its back, giving its passengers a perfect view of the planet below through the windows along the dorsal ridge of the ship. Small shuttles like this have no artificial gravity system, and we’re strapped into our seats with six-point harnesses. When I feel the pull of gravity lessen, I have to resist the temptation to just unbuckle my harness and push off the floor to bounce around the inside of the shuttle.

From this altitude, Earth looks like a lovely place. I take in the vastness of the planet below, the swirling cloud formations that look like they’re floating on the shimmering waters, and the gentle arc of the horizon. I can see the thin, bright layer of atmosphere that separates the brilliance of the planet from the blackness of space, an almost insignificant film of air that keeps out the cold darkness beyond. For the first time since I signed my transfer papers, it occurs to me that this may be the last time I get to see my home world. If I get killed somewhere in the expanses of the explored galaxy, my first glimpse of Earth from orbit will also be my last.

I’ve seen pictures of Earth taken from space, but a mere image doesn’t come close to conveying the sheer size and majesty of the planet. I take in mountain ranges, lakes, and big swaths of ocean through the windows of the shuttle, and I realize that I’ve spent all my life confined to just a few square miles of all that vast terrain spreading out below. I’ve never climbed a mountain or crossed an ocean on Terra, and if things go well for me in the Navy, I never will.

I tell myself that there are plenty of colonies out there with mountains and oceans and clean air, and that all those familiar continents below are merely random collections of carbon, but as the shuttle speeds along its path along the curvature of the planet, I admit to myself for the first time that I’ll miss the place just a little—not the place where I grew up, the smelly urban mess that is my home city, but the concept of Earth itself, all the places that may have kept me from wanting to go into space, if only I’d had the chance to see them with my own eyes.