The Journey - Part Four - Settling In

 

Breakfast was certainly interesting. I took way too much to eat and couldn’t finish it. We all pretty much just followed the crowd when it was time to leave. I am also pretty sure they did not give us our full-time to eat.

Before I left the galley, some recruit screamed at me. I had no clue what I had done. It turns out I stepped on the brightwork. I looked at him and asked him what the fuck brightwork was. Well, that made things worse. So, I wiped my supposed footprint off his shiny brass. Our company formed up outside the galley, it took a while for everyone to show up. But, once we did it was time to head out again. 

The next stop, haircuts. My hair had always been thin, but I had never had it clean shaved before. I doubt any of us had. We stood there waiting to go inside as our CCs walked around talking about shoes. We were able to wear tennis shoes for some of our time in boot camp. PT was one time and our initial couple days matching was another. A couple guys had their shoes pointed out as too flashy. I had bought a new pair just for boot camp. But, I was smart; I got plain white Nike cross-trainers.

A few of the new recruits had long hair. I spent most of the morning talking to one particular sailor who had hair down to his butt. After he had it shaved, I didn’t recognize him at all. When we were all getting done with our hair cuts, the sun started to creep into the sky. It turned the sort of cool, humid morning into one hot day. We made our way back to RIF and started getting our clothes.

RIF was a term that was not popular. We were talked down to by the senior companies. And in reality, pretty much every company out of P-days would give us grief. Our uniforms stunk, we marched differently, and we pretty much didn’t have a clue what in the hell we were doing. When our company started to get some seniority, we hassled the RIFs too. 

Talk about one long borning event. Stand around get new clothes. Learn to stencil your name in the right spot with the proper color stencil pen. We also were given a box to mail our clothes home. If it didn’t fit, it went into the garbage. Oddly a few guys couldn’t fit it all in.

Also, the order to wear our Navy-supplied swim trunks made sense now. We had to walk around in them while getting out new clothes. Slowly our gear began to reflect Navy attire. By lunchtime, we were all clad in stinky stiff dungarees. Back into the RIF formation and off to eat. This time we were greeted by sniffing noises. Yeah, we smelled like mothballs. At that time, I knew that the sooner we started training, the better we would be.

Back to RIF for clothes, and as the afternoon drug on, we loaded up our sea bags and matched over to Division 4. We were to spend the next 8 weeks on the ground floor of the north wing facing the main sidewalks.

We were not assigned our racks yet; that happened the next day. Our first night was pretty uneventful. I did somehow manage to scratch my right eye on the pillow’s zipper. So, that led to medical a few days later.

We were set of P-days now. This time was spent learning how to fold clothes. How to make our racks. How to clean our compartment. How to march. And most importantly, how to shut up and listen.

C077 was just getting started.

Since I originally shared my experiences, I have found the letters I wrote to my family. I have also spoken to several others RTC Orlando veterans and pieced together a better picture of what happened. I will be looking at those aspects of our time there over the coming weeks. Remember, I am talking about what happened in 1990; your experience will be different.