by Jaquira Díaz
In the navy, for the first time in my life, I believed I could be good at something, that I could have a life full of promise and opportunity. It was the first time in my life that people expected me to succeed, that they looked at me and saw someone who was smart, and capable, with a future. And it scared the hell out of me. It had been easier to let people assume I would end up dead, or in jail, or strung out and living on the streets. It had been easier to want nothing, to believe in nothing.
During the day, the navy’s Recruit Training Command looked alive, like the world was moving faster. The ships full of recruits, the galley full of sailors in their dungarees or smurf suits calling out their numbers to the turnstile, the drill halls with entire divisions marching inside, practicing their flag drills. Outside, sailors and recruits marched in step, calling out cadences, jogging from one place to the next, from the USS Carr to the drill halls to the galley to the Navy Exchange, their recruit ball caps blocking out the sun.
We were fitted for uniforms, the steel-toed boots we were supposed to call boondockers, canteens firmly attached to guard belts, flight jackets, rain coats.
After a few weeks, on a sweltering summer day in Great Lakes, I got down to formation with all my gear, fell in line next to Seaman Recruit Santiago, a tattooed dark-skinned Chicano from California. Santiago, who I called G-mo when we were alone, was in our brother division, and my partner in almost every phase of training. We were both section leaders and always marched side by side, ran together, sat next to each other at chow and in class. We’d been inseparable since the second week of boot camp, sending each other letters through the US mail, passing each other notes in class, talking while standing in formation, while doing push ups in PT or marching to the drill halls.
G-mo looked around for signs of a recruit division commander, then quickly took my hand, squeezed it.
“How you doing, Jaqui?”
He let go of my hand and looked straight ahead, trying to avoid being spotted by an RDC.
“I’m cool,” I said.
Brooks, our brother division’s RPOC, who usually called cadence and relayed orders from RDCs, was standing on the sidelines, watching us. He walked over, pretending he spotted something on the ground.
“You fools need to chill out with that PDA,” he said.
Behind us, Jones was adjusting his safety belt and laughing at us. “Ain’t y’all so sweet. Wait until you get recycled for fraternizing.”
I didn’t know why Jones was hating. Just a couple weeks ago he had a boot camp girlfriend he couldn’t stay away from, until she had to go back to the first week of training with another division. She’d gotten recycled after she got caught sneaking into the male sleeping quarters during her 2:00 a.m. watch. Recycling—sending someone back to start bootcamp over with another division—was what they did to recruits who needed discipline, who fraternized or broke the rules. Basically, it was for recruits who got caught.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Petty Officer Thompson, one of the RDCs, making a beeline straight for us. I braced myself. She was not the one to fuck with.
Petty Officer Thompson strutted up to Jones. “What’s your seventh general order, recruit?” She was the only woman RDC out of the six who ran our two divisions, and the toughest. She had to be. Being a woman in the military, especially a black woman, meant you had to work with men who thought they were better than you, faster than you, stronger than you. It meant you had to constantly prove yourself, every minute of every day, when even the rules said you weren’t good enough. Back then, women were not allowed to be SEALs, were not allowed to serve on submarines, were not allowed to be rescue divers. But when PO Thompson trained with us, she outperformed all the men. And that was just the physical part. Being a black woman in the military also meant you had to be twice as smart, twice as capable. You had to know your job and everyone else’s, and watch people who were less qualified get all the promotions. All the other RDCs had higher ranks than Petty Officer Thompson, but she was the one who knew everything, the one the men turned to when they needed questions answered, when they needed someone who knew all the SOP. She was the one getting us up at 4:00 a.m., the one who could recall military history off the top of her head, the one who was always on time. It was clear to all of us: she ran this shit. And when we were alone with her in the female quarters, she reminded us, told us every time she got the chance, You need to show them that this is our world, that we run this. Don’t you ever let them think otherwise.
Jones, who was caught off guard, stood at attention with a dumbstruck look on his face. And I didn’t realize I’d been looking sideways at him until Thompson turned to me and smiled. Damn. I turned my face forward, stood at attention, and kept my eyes open, even though I knew what was coming.
She took a deep breath, then yelled across the formation at the division, “Seaman Recruit Díaz lost her military bearing!” She took a step toward me, put her face right next to mine, so close I could hear her breathing, hard. “Let’s see if she can help you out, Jones,” she said. “What’s your seventh general order, Díaz?”
“To talk to no one except in the line of duty, Petty Officer!” I yelled.
She smiled, turned to Jones, and said, “Jones, drop.” She turned back to me. “Díaz, help him out.”
I stepped out of formation, then dropped to push-up position, started pumping them out as fast as I could, counting out loud as I went. “One, Petty Officer, two, Petty Officer, three, Petty Officer, four, Petty Officer . . .”
Beside me, Jones had already reached twenty. He stopped counting, holding his last push up, then turned to Petty Officer Thompson, and said, “Petty Officer, I respectfully request permission to recover.”
“You recover when I say you recover,” she said. “Now, push!”
Jones kept pumping them out. I struggled to keep up, but I kept going.
When Petty Officer Thompson walked off to inspect the rest of the division, Jones looked over at me. “Hey, you alright, Díaz?” He smiled.
I turned my head toward him, smiled back, then stuck out my tongue.
We both started laughing out loud, and unable to hold myself up in push-up position, I hit the ground. I could hear G-mo laughing, but I got back up and kept pushing before Petty Officer Thompson came back around.
“Díaz, recover,” Thompson ordered. “Jones, recover.”
We both got up, brushed ourselves off, and fell back in line.
Nights inside the USS Carr, I lay in my rack listening to the silence, the other recruits sleeping and breathing and farting, some of them talking in their sleep. I had insomnia, and sometimes it would be hours and I’d still be up. I’d be on the top bunk, looking up into the darkness, trying to remember what a Pepsi tasted like, the noise on the streets back home. The smell of Abuela’s kitchen—sofrito, lechón roasting in the oven. Alaina’s unwashed curls, greasy, tangled. How Papi knelt in the living room to pray every night before leaving for work. This was all I had, so even though I didn’t believe in prayer, I prayed for those things to hold me together for the rest of my time in boot camp.
Those nights I couldn’t sleep, I wrote letter after letter. I wrote every single person in my family. I wrote Cheito. I wrote Cheito’s family. I wrote every single one of my friends. I wrote G-mo. I wrote in my journals, wrote like my life depended on it. But Cheito’s family never wrote. My own family barely wrote me. Once in a while I’d get a letter from Flaca or China. Once I got a letter from Alaina, and then six postcards in a row. Cheito wrote me every week, telling me how proud he was, how strong I was, how he missed me. I felt guilty every time I opened one of his letters. When Cheito left for boot camp, I had only written him three times the whole twelve weeks he was there. I resented him—he’d broken my heart. And then there was also G-mo.
The letters from Flaca and China and Alaina made me feel like shit. I missed them, I missed home, and while I was gone, the whole world kept on going like I was never even there:
Papi got e
victed, and they had to move to some other neighborhood.
Alaina smoked her first joint.
A gang war was sweeping Miami and Miami Beach.
A couple of our friends got convicted of attempted murder and racketeering. One would serve seven years in prison. The other got a twenty-year sentence.
Our old middle school was demolished, an institution built in its place.
Society Hill burned down.
. . .
In boot camp, far from home, far from friends and family, I met Eliza. She was in my division, and we sometimes had fire watch together in the middle of the night. She was tall and strong, with broad shoulders and a buzz cut, and I sometimes watched her from afar. I knew she was gay. I could just tell.
One morning in the galley, while we were sitting down to breakfast after physical training, Eliza across from me, our eyes met. We looked at each other for a long time, not saying anything because we weren’t allowed to speak, watching each other longer than was acceptable, longer than was comfortable, and I just knew. It was like we found each other in a crowd, like all we could see was each other. After a while, I looked away, hoping that G-mo, sitting next to me, hadn’t noticed. I could still feel her eyes on me then, and afterward, as we all got up to bus our trays, as we all headed back outside to get in formation, as we double-timed it back to the USS Carr to get in the showers, and then while we were in the showers. I knew every single curve of her body, every tattoo. And she knew mine.
It went on like that for a while, Eliza and I looking at each other, not saying anything. Sometimes, while we were sitting in class, I’d catch her watching me from across the room, and she’d look away. Other times, I’d be sitting in the back, watching her, waiting for her to look back at me, and most of the time she wouldn’t, but sometimes, it was like she could feel me watching her, too.
On the morning before Battle Stations, we were given all the equipment we needed to survive an attack on the USS Carr. Fire safety equipment, gas masks, Kevlar helmets, extra canteens so we could stay hydrated for the five-mile run. We’d learned how to put out all kinds of fires, how to get a ship underway, what to do if one of our shipmates fell overboard, how to shoot a pistol, an M16, how to swim and tread water, how to make a floating device using our waterproof dungarees. During Battle Stations, we had to prove that we could use all those skills. We’d been living on the third deck of a simulated aircraft carrier for the last eight weeks, and everything we’d learned since we got there had been to prepare us for this night. In three hours, we’d be attacked by an enemy navy.
At midnight, we were awakened by the sound of mock explosions, fire alarms, and Atkins, our RPOC, hollering orders in her Tennessee twang.
“Get up!” Atkins yelled. “Battle stations! Battle stations!”
Our division commander, Petty Officer Thompson, was on the 1MC, her voice blaring throughout the whole ship: “General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations. Battle stations, all hands man your battle stations.”
I jumped off the top bunk, landing on my feet, headed straight for my wall-locker.
“You have three minutes to secure all gear adrift,” the RPOC was saying.
We were supposed to run past the quarterdeck and report to formation wearing every piece of equipment we had: gas masks cleaned, canteens filled and clipped to our safety belts, our ten-pound Kevlar helmets, chin-straps fastened securely across our chins, dungarees tucked into our boondockers, gym shorts under our dungarees, swimsuits under our gym shorts. Those of us who were section leaders got extra shit to carry: I had another seabag filled with first aid supplies, extra canteens, spare gas masks, sanitary pads, tampons, panty liners.
When I got down to formation with all my gear, I fell in line next to G-mo. We were early. Less than half of us were in formation.
“Good luck, Jaqui,” he said.
I smiled. “Good luck.”
Suddenly, Petty Officer Thompson came out of the ship, rushing, breaking us into squads of five or six. In our group, we had Jones, Brooks, G-mo, Williams—who was our ship’s female recruit master at arms—and me. Brooks and G-mo were strong and in shape, always got high scores in anything fitness-related. Jones was little and fast as hell. But I was worried about Williams, who was older than the rest of us, and especially about myself. At least Williams could shoot. But Battle Stations was all about making it as a team, and if one person didn’t make it, it wouldn’t look good for the rest of us. I was afraid I’d be holding the rest of them back. I liked all the people on my squad. They’d become my friends over the last two months, like family. Everyone loved Brooks because he was fair, and because he didn’t hesitate when you needed help, and because he was always repping Brooklyn, knew all the words to every single Notorious B.I.G. song. Williams, the only white girl in our group, was crazy loud, but funny as hell. Since she worked as one of the ship’s masters at arms, she got to come and go without permission, and she sometimes snuck G-mo notes from me, brought me back notes from him. And Jones and I were always joking around. He played basketball, and sometimes we called him Muggsy, because he loved Muggsy Bogues, but also because he was small but could still shoot.
Petty Officer Thompson started calling over groups, ordering them off. When she reached us, she said, “Brooks, get your shipmates and fall out!”
And we broke into a run.
We ran toward the drill halls, the old airplane hangars. Inside, we separated into squads as we entered the obstacle course: a maze of compartments, bulkheads, hatches, ladders, artillery, hoses, ropes. Our first event was a rescue mission. One of our shipmates was hurt, and we had to carry them on a stretcher, run the whole obstacle course without dropping them. If we dropped them, or left them, or if they ran out of oxygen or drowned, we’d all die and fail the event.
We picked Jones for the stretcher, since he was the smallest, and we carried him into the first obstacle, a compartment that had lost all power. We found our way in the dark, without tripping or knocking the stretcher into a bulkhead, and did it fast, to avoid running out of oxygen.
Then we carried him through a collapsed bulkhead over a deck, everything covered with debris—sand, gravel, large rocks, dirt, broken equipment. With just a foot and a half of space, we had to drag ourselves across the gravel through the hole in the bulkhead to make it to the next compartment, all without putting down the stretcher. Brooks was the first to go through to the other side, dragging himself across the gravel. He stuck out his arm to hold one end of the stretcher while Williams went through, and then I came through, leaving Joe to hold one end and push the stretcher through the hole just before dragging himself to the other side. After that we ran through what looked like a beach, all gravel, the sky above lighting up with blinking, blinding lights, and everywhere what sounded like bullets whooshing past us, explosions somewhere in the distance.
We finally made it to the area where they were keeping the injured, set the combat stretcher down, and as soon as we did, a couple of sailors ushered us past the area: “Go, go, go!”
The next compartment was a large storage room, and as soon as we carried the stretcher across, we were approached by a damage controlman.
“There’s been a fire!” he said, and then the sprinklers went off, water raining on us. We followed him to the front of the room, where fifty large active missiles were stacked on top of each other. He told us that we needed to move all the missiles out and into the next chamber before the room got flooded, being careful not to drop them, not to bang them against each other and blow ourselves up. And then he left the compartment, climbed into a small hatch to the next chamber, to watch.
We each picked up a missile and climbed into the hatch and laid it on the floor in the next compartment. But that was taking too long, so we made a line and started passing missiles to each other, until Brooks, at the end, set each one down in the room. The sprinklers were spraying water, the water rising fast, then faster, until one of the sprinklers burst.
“Fuck!” I said. “We gotta move faster!”
“If the water comes up to our waist, we have to go,” G-mo said.
We seemed to be moving so slow—we’d never be able to move all those missiles.
G-mo started lifting faster, moving faster. “Let’s go!”
I tried to move as fast as G-mo, pass the missile to Williams, but it was too heavy to move that fast. And Williams was struggling, too. It was starting to feel like G-mo and Brooks were carrying us.
Suddenly, another sprinkler burst. The water was rising faster, and we were all soaked, and all our gear was soaked, and everything was getting heavier. I was so tired, sleep-deprived, moving through the water slowly, my seabag so soaked and heavy. I felt like I might collapse.
Suddenly, all the sprinklers burst, and everyone started splashing across the compartment, grabbing whatever they could and running toward the hatch. If the water reached the hatch, it would flood the other chamber. We needed to move.
G-mo and Brooks carried the last of the rounds, sloppily, hurriedly. We climbed through the hatch, passed through to the other side, securing the door behind us.
Since our ship was attacked, flooded, and on fire, it was sinking. We’d spend the next twelve hours moving from one scenario to the other: We had to pull all the ropes and secure them to get the ship underway. We had to carry the wounded to safety. We had to walk through a maze in a part of the ship that had been almost entirely destroyed by fire, feel our way toward the flames in the dark without touching the hot bulkheads, walk through the smoke, hold on to the firehouse as we pointed it at the flames in the dark. We had to abandon ship, jump over the edge into the ocean, and swim to the nearest rescue boat while avoiding shark attacks.
