Interlude

Unserviceable. This is the word that is given to pieces of military equipment after they've seen too much service.  It can be applied to helmets, vehicles, weapons, and even soldiers.

Right now, though, I am looking at my boots.  They wrap my feet securely, old friends and sometime enemies - they have been with me throughout my military career, through thick and thin, only rarely have I worn any other boot through my time in the army.

I can still remember the day that they were issued to me.  My group from the 88th Reception Battalion walked with jerky, frightened movements through the halls of reception, like cornered rats attempting to understand just what steps they'd taken to arrive in this confusing, scary maze; the realization slowly dawning on each of us that the steps to get here weren't as important as the fact that the only honorable exit was still months away at the earliest.

Plodding forward through the lines, our PT uniforms comfortably cool against bodies feverish from the multiple injections we'd received, we left the long hallway where motherly women had sized each of us up with sharp eyes and yelled loudly things like, "Medium - Regular!" and "Large - Long!" before throwing crisp, never unfolded stacks of uniforms at us.  There were protests, "But I need a large!" answered quickly, surly, with, "You'll lose weight, honey, everyone does."

Now we stood outside another door, careful not to block it, with our new sea-bags carefully pressed against the wall beside us.  Sea-bags.  I can't help but smile - the army insists on calling them duffle bags, but they will forever be sea-bags to me, having had my Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Michael Arp, beat the name into my 18 year old brain with his terrifying brand of instructional sarcasm shortly after some old shellback had given me the most painful, and closest haircut of my life, carefully tearing my earings out with fingers hard-calloused from years of putting knots in halyards on a ship captained, I strongly suspected, by John Paul Jones.  So sea-bags they will remain.

"Next ten recruits! Move!" came a voice from inside and we quickly moved through the door, counting off as we entered, to find outselves in yet another narrow hallway with some stairs leading up to a narrow platform with a bench on it.  "Put your duffle ("Sea-bag!" I shouted in my head) along the wall behind you, find a seat, take your shoes off,"explained one of the civilians standing in front of the bench.  Before we'd quite had time to take our shoes off a flurry of boots began flying towards us.  Using some system I've never quite understood the civilians were able to guess with nearly perfect accuracy our boot sizes, without, so it seemed, ever looking at our feet.

Ever the squeeky wheel, my boots didn't fit. One of the civilians came down the line, checking the fit, and when he got to me, he shook his head and asked, "What size boot do you think you wear?"  I told him that I usually bought size eleven shoes and boots.  A moment later we'd determined that those were a bad fit, too.  We tried ten and a half.  No go.  By now I was getting nervous - the idea is to get through everything as fast as humanly possible, and I was now wasting valuable hurry-up-and-wait time that I was certain would be made up later. (As it so happens, it took awhile for my make up appointment, and the meeting place was Kuwait, but I'm paying back the army in spades for the time I wasted during my boot fitting.)  He grabbed a ten and a half wide.  Close, but still not a good fit.  For the first time the civilian made eye contact with me, and before he could say anything, (which was probably going to be, "They're close enough - move!") I noticed, and commented, on a religious tattoo on his arm, as I have the same tattoo, but on my back.  He broke into a huge grin, and said, "Brother, I'm glad to meet you - let's find you a boot that fits." And that's the day that I met my very own pair of ten and a half wide boots, with an old-stock manufacturer's code now worn away, and a perfect fit.

We didn't like each other that much when we first met.  Righty enjoyed chewing on the back of my heel while I ran around reception, and Lefty had really stiff leather that made the front of the boot incredibly inflexible.  I looked at them several times over my remaining days in reception, wondering if the trick I'd used on my black leather boots would work on these desert tan rough-out boots.  Dunking them in scalding water and then hitting them with a brick.  Caution got the better of me, and I never tried it - I also couldn't find a brick.
One day while sitting in the reception hall my name was called out, along with a couple hundred others and told to remember that I was "Charlie Three Ten" because I'd be going to my basic training unit the next day.  My boots  were right there with me beneath that awning behind the reception hall when Drill Sergeants Dyon, Graff, and Dubose first looked over the line of soldiers I was standing in.  They sneered.  They jeered.  They snapped pictures of the soldiers who were clearly terrified.  My boots gripped the ground tightly, and if I had my doubts about what I'd gotten myself into, my boots were kind enough to carry me on to a bus marked "4th PLT."

Basic training is all about breaking in a civilian and turning them into a soldier.  The process takes anywhere from three weeks to the full ten before the civilian is erased, and the soldier remains.  Boots are made of weaker stuff, and I found that by the end of the first week any attitude that mine had given me was gone - these boots were well and truly broken.  My feet rejoiced, although Righty continued to work on giving me the callous from hell on my heel.  I still have that callous today.

My boots were there with me low-crawling through the tire pits.  My boots gripped warrior tower firmly as I ran up a wall to grab a rope and then climb to the top.  My boots dangled beneath me as a group of four of us jumped, climbed, pushed, and pulled each other to the top of a tower with platforms growing progressively larger the higher you went (meaning you had to lean back further into open space to jump and grab the next platform up.)  Every road march, my boots walked with me.  At Nick at Night my boots crawled their way through the puddles blooming all around in the torrential downpour; the toes of the boots dug deeply into the ground as I pushed myself slowly forward on my back beneath strands of barbed wire, tracers flying above me, and controlled explosions going off all around.  My boots, muddy, waterlogged things that hissed and gurgled water when I walked back to the bus that night after a 4th platoon victory in completing the obstacles first looked forward to the rewarded day off the next day as much as I did.

On our first ruck march when we were told quickly to go to ground and establish a perimeter my boots remained on the relatively dry shoulder of the road while the rest of me lay in choking weeds and briars.  The toes of my boot touched the toes of the boot of the female soldier laying prone next to me, crying, and nudged her for me when I silently handed her two advil and a pilferred cough drop and a smile that I hope said, "You'll be fine, we'll get through this together." When I pretended to be a Drill Sergeant on the last ruck march before graduation, yelling at soldiers to watch their intervals and close up gaps - yep, these boots were silently yelling at all the other boots, too.  When I sat with my back against my wall locker, reading my Dear John letter, my boots, half untied were still on my feet.  I kept her picture in my wall locker until the end of basic, the letter taped behind it.  Marching to the auditorium, voices loud, intervals good, every step planted firmly at the same time as every other soldier...left, right, left, right...these boots were with me when I walked across the stage and spied my family waiting in the audience, seeing for the first time their son the soldier.  They rejoiced when I took them to a professional shoe-shine guy at the St. Louis airport, and he made them look brand new.

They've been with me to my advanced training in Gulfport, Mississippi.  They went with me to the streets of New Orleans when my battle buddy's family said that they didn't care that Nola was well outside our allowed travel distance for Thanksgiving.  They travelled with me back to Fort Leonard Wood while I endured Battle Focus Training.  One weekend a month they sat silently, looking more and more worn, as the soldiers of the 485th watched another power point presentation.  In California, at my first Annual Training / Extended Combat Training they held up well, climbing to the top of that hill over and over again to hope for cellular reception, or watch the wild fires burn around us, and the ash blot out the sun.

At NTC they really began showing their age.  The soles were worn down, and they could no longer pass the pencil test.  Eyelets too worn began cutting through my boot laces at an unacceptable rate. Punishment no doubt for having to carry the extra weight of my new duties as a machine gunner in addition to the already heavy load of a team leader.  At RTC the first sign of a hole showed up on Left.  The triple-stitch seams on both the boots began to look like they were going to pop.

At our second mobilization center, down by Juarez, Righty formed a tear above the heel.
Boots on the ground in Iraq, the outside seams on Lefty and Righty gave up the ghost.  Over the months there, the hole on Lefty up by the pinky toe grew into a strange form of air conditioning - helped along by the corrosive agents in concrete.

Now I sit and look at my boots and can remember all of the good, and all of the bad, that they've been with me through.  So many adventures. My brother bought me new ones for my birthday three months ago, but I haven't received them yet.  I know I'll eventually end up wearing them when they get here...but these boots - my first boots - leaving them behind fills me with sadness.  But the army says they're worn out.  The soles are no good.  They have holes in them.  They're unserviceable.