by Mark Bouman
“My name is Sergeant Christian, and I want you to turn around and face the bus.”
With varying degrees of speed and military panache, we did.
“Now I want you to wave good-bye to that bus, boys, because it’s your last chance out of here.”
A few guys snickered, and one standing near me drawled, “Bye-bye, bus,” as the diesel huffed away in a cloud of smoke. I smirked.
“Wipe that smile off your face, a—hole!”
The last syllable was our call to attention. All around I could hear my fellow recruits straightening into a semblance of order. As I stood there with the others, listening to Sergeant Christian scream what seemed an unending stream of profanities at us, it occurred to me: This is just like home. I could tell some of the guys were taking it hard—slumped shoulders, bug eyes—but it was all very normal for me. Maybe the ones who had joined the Air Force because it was a lifelong dream were beginning to doubt that decision. Not me. I was here because it had seemed like my least-bad choice. Sergeant Christian could bark and cuss at me all he wanted—I knew he wouldn’t lay a finger on me, and I’d be getting three square meals plus a paycheck, just for keeping my mouth shut and doing whatever I was told.
“. . . we clear on that, recruit?”
“Sir-yes-sir!”
Back in the recruiting office, I must have pointed at something to do with computers, because after basic training I was shipped to Illinois for eight months of school and then to Montana to work on our nation’s nuclear weapons systems. I had a regular job about a million miles away from anything dangerous, a regular paycheck, and as the months turned into years, it seemed I had a pretty good chance of surviving.
Unfortunately, I also had a regular drug habit that had followed me from college, as well as an irregular aversion to authority.
Especially to Sergeant Simpkins. “Sarge is such a jerk,” I would complain to whoever would listen, making no attempt to hide my disdain. “He’s out to get me, for no reason.”
It was true that he was out to get me, but everyone, including myself, knew there actually were good reasons. I failed dorm room inspections regularly. My uniform was never pressed and often dirty. Whenever I had a job assigned to me, I made sure to quit as soon as I’d done the bare minimum. I drank beer and smoked weed. I was surly to my superiors. All of which meant that I’d accumulated a ridiculous number of demerits and extra work shifts, not to mention an official personnel file filled with Letters of Admonishment and Letters of Reprimand.
Still, it wasn’t all my fault. My roommate knew the right people, and when he got so drunk that he couldn’t crawl out of bed in the morning, Sergeant Simpkins would cover for him. I, on the other hand, had been written up for being an hour late the morning after we switched to daylight saving time.
I hated how unfair it was, and I hated that there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it, but I’d developed an ongoing—and, to that point, successful—policy: ignore everything. One day, however, that option was snatched away.
“I’m gonna need you to come into the office, Airman Bouman.”
I could hear the air quotes around my rank when Sergeant Simpkins spoke. I rolled my eyes and made sure he saw me. He grinned right back.
“I’m writing you up, Bouman,” he gloated as he pushed the paperwork across the desk. I didn’t even read it—what would be the point? I signed it, scarcely looking at the paper, and shoved it back across the desk. We’d been through the same drill before.
Usually I got up and wandered away at that point in the proceedings, but my sergeant wasn’t finished.
“I don’t like you, Bouman. And guess what? I don’t have to like you.” He let that sink in. I shrugged. “And do you know what else?” he continued. “I’m not gonna need to put up with you for much longer.”
My expression must have given me away.
“I see what you’re thinking, Bouman, but you’ve got it backwards. See, I’m not going anywhere. In fact, I’m getting promoted. Nope. It’s you, Bouman—you’re the one who’s going somewhere. And do you know where you’re going? O-U-T. As in out of the Air Force. I’m getting you kicked out, Bouman. Your very next step is an Article 15.”
I knew what an Article 15 would mean: I could never be promoted, and if I quit, I could never reenlist. If he filed the paperwork, it would be a rubber-stamp case for the higher-ups. My file was thick enough to need a forklift. I was trapped, and he knew it.
He left, chuckling on his way out the office door. I stayed in my seat, seething, clenching and unclenching my jaw until it ached. He had me cornered with no way out. Unless something happened to him first.
I left to find a drink.
“If I can’t make it in the Air Force, what’ll I do? I’m gonna end up in prison or dead, you know?”
After four beers and half a joint, my words were slurred, but the wall I was talking to didn’t seem to mind. It just kept listening. I had no other friends, so the wall would have to do. It wasn’t hypothetical, however—I couldn’t make it in the Air Force. I’d proved that. And the thought of my family helping me was laughable. If I was kicked out, I wouldn’t make it. I’d die, sooner or later, probably in a ditch or a motel room, probably wasted.
Another few tokes and I asked the wall, “Then maybe God will help me?”
I laughed as soon as I said it. I knew God wasn’t going to listen to an imbecile like me, especially since I happened to be higher than a mortar round.
Then a strange thing happened. I heard a different voice—not my own, and not the wall’s—and it said, “Yes, he will.”
I considered that. What the hell did I have to lose? I spoke two sentences that summed up the first twenty-two years of my existence.
“Help me, God. I hate my life.”
And then I stumbled to my bed.
That was late on a Friday night. Monday, before Sergeant Simpkins had filed any paperwork, and before I’d hatched any real plans for revenge, Brian, one of the airmen I worked with, cornered me.
“Hey, Mark,” he said, an earnest expression on his face, “I can see you’re not doing so well. So . . . why don’t you come to church on Wednesday? We’re going to show a movie.” That was one of the weirdest things I had ever heard—who would go to church for a movie? I knew Brian was a bit different from most of the other guys, but our bosses seemed to like him. I was more worried about church than about him. Church was for good people, and I was clearly not one of them.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, as surprised as he was by my answer.
I was even more surprised when, two days later, I actually opened the front door of the small church. The pews were half full already, and I slipped into a seat at the back just as the lights went out and the movie started. It turned out to be one of those movies about the end of the world, and when the last frame of the film passed the bulb and someone flipped the lights on, I saw Brian sitting close to the front of the church along with some other airmen. The pastor then talked about how to be sure you were saved. Being saved definitely sounded like something I needed, but there was no way I was getting out of my pew in front of the other guys from work. I left before I was forced to talk to anyone.
Nothing improved over the next few days—not with my sergeant, who was still watching me like a hawk and counting down the days until he could write me up again, and certainly not with me. I went right back to slacking at work and drinking and doing drugs the moment I went off duty.
The following Sunday, though, I found myself back at church, opening the front door and sliding into the same seat, farthest pew back. I don’t remember anything from the service until the part when the pastor asked if anyone wanted to come forward to accept Jesus.
I was the only one who stood up. I left my seat and began to walk the center aisle toward the front. Every eye was fixed on me—weirdo Bouman, failure Bouman—but I didn’t care. I was desperate. My life was like our old house back in Belmont. Everything I was trying—pretending my past h
adn’t happened, relying on the military to take care of me, searching for oblivion with beer and weed—wasn’t any better than slapping some paint on the chipped cinder-block walls. Paint or no paint, I’d still be the same falling-apart shack underneath.
With each step down the aisle, the heaviness of everything I was carrying seemed to increase. Why would God ever want me? I wondered. I had failed at everything I ever tried. I had nothing to offer. Nothing.
Next thing I knew I was kneeling on the carpeted steps that led up to the low stage, as if the weight of my life had pushed me to my knees.
I prayed. “Help me, God. My life is a mess.”
With that, my life—that broken house built on sand—was leveled in a single shuddering instant. Something changed in me. I felt cleaner than I’d ever been. Eventually I stood and walked back to my pew. As I did, a voice I’d heard years before, back when I was a boy running the woods with Zeke, spoke to me.
I’m going to start over with you, Mark. You’re going to start over.
38
AFTER THAT FATEFUL SUNDAY, the little church became my life. If the front door was open, I was inside. Sunday morning services, Sunday evening prayer meetings, potlucks, Wednesday movie nights, Saturday yard work. I didn’t talk much about it to anyone else, and I couldn’t describe it well to myself, either, but I knew that something had changed for the better in my life, and I wanted more of it. As much as I could get.
I started reading the Bible, and there was one verse that seemed to keep echoing inside my mind nearly every hour I was awake. “When a man’s ways are pleasing to the LORD,” it read, “he makes even his enemies live at peace with him.”
Despite having invited me to church, Brian was just as shocked as everyone else at work that I had become a Christian. Most of the other guys pounced on the chance to tease me, and Sergeant Simpkins egged them on. “Praise the Lord,” someone would drawl when I walked past, and the group would roar with laughter.
Brian pulled me aside one day. “Mark, they’re just waiting for you to fail, watching you like a hawk. You’re doing the right thing—keep it up!”
I didn’t hate Sergeant Simpkins anymore, but I still had a serious problem on my hands because of him. I didn’t even think about him much, being so busy with my new life, but he was still riding me harder than the other airmen, and I figured it was only a matter of time before something final happened. If I messed up once more, I was finished.
The trouble for Sergeant Simpkins was that I really had cleaned up my act. Before, I’d been giving him an embarrassment of material he could use to get me into trouble, but now his opportunities had dried up. Without even thinking about it, I quit beer and weed. And all the time I was doing my job, keeping my head down, I was turning that verse over and over in my mind, like a river rock tumbling down a stream.
A few months later, I heard that Sergeant Simpkins was being transferred, and I didn’t know what that meant until my new boss, Sergeant Barns, called me into the office to discuss my personnel file. He was smiling in a genuinely friendly way. “Mark, I sense there was some bad blood between you and your former sergeant. We don’t need to go into all that. What we do need is for you to keep this file from getting any thicker—and something tells me you’re already on the right track.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, sir, I am.”
“Well then, Mark, I’ll see what I can do to keep you on Uncle Sam’s side, okay?”
I left the office, then stopped midstride in the hallway. My boss had always been my enemy—but now I was at peace with my boss. Stranger still, my problem had required no violence or anger to solve. I smiled and kept walking. And Sergeant Barns made good on his word: with his help, I was able to stay in the service and even earn promotions.
I didn’t need to look far to discover another place I could pitch in at church. The youth group was always in need of volunteers to help at meetings and to chaperone trips, and I was a natural fit. The kids seemed to like me, regardless of my character flaws—or perhaps because of them. The more I hung out with the youth, watching all the fun things they did together—pizza parties and football games and campfires—a realization punched me in the gut. I had never done any of those things.
I had done interesting things, sure. Crazy things even. Things other kids had envied. None of them had ridden in a carplane or scuba dived. None of them had lived on a formerly derelict ship or seen their father’s tank run over a car. None of them had fired machine guns. But their simple activities were infused with a goodness and innocence that the atmosphere of my childhood had choked away.
I had been robbed of my childhood.
I’d been learning to pray, but the realization kicked my prayer into high gear—and it wasn’t always pretty. My heart ached, thinking of everything I had missed and everything I had endured instead. My list of complaints to God seemed endless. The gap between what my childhood had been and what it might have been felt like a widening chasm inside my heart, and in my prayers I pleaded with God for a way to close it.
Then one day I was reading the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis, and I found that after he had been sold into slavery by his brothers, he eventually rose up to become the second most powerful man in all of Egypt. He married and had two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. The version of the Bible I was reading told me what the two names meant, and the instant I read the meaning of Manasseh’s name, I knew that God was talking to me.
“Manasseh, meaning, ‘God made up to him all the evil of his youth.’”
In that moment, I felt God was making me a promise, and I clung to that promise with everything I had. When I was a boy, I had tasted only fleeting moments of joy—in the outdoors, first alone in the hills at home and on the shoreline waters of the Grand River, and later accompanied by Zeke. As if opening my eyes for the first time to my surroundings, I found that I was living in Montana’s unspoiled wilderness. All around me were lakes and forests and mountains and skies that stretched forever, but I’d been too busy screwing up to notice. I’d been too busy regretting my past to remember an important part of it: You’ll be in Montana, in the military.
Now I noticed. Life on the base was going well. I was staying on the right side of military law. Life at church was flourishing, and I wasn’t just learning about my faith—I was starting to make the first true and deep human friendships of my life. I could look other men in the eye, and I talked with them about work and God and life. And so, with the foundation of a normal life holding me up, I began to spend every minute of free time outdoors, often with new friends from church who also loved the outdoors. But unlike my childhood, I wasn’t escaping. I was celebrating.
One of the guys I’d met at church was named Jerry, and something surprised me about him: he loved the outdoors even more than I did. Between us we had enough gear to do everything we loved—hunt, trap, fish, canoe, and just disappear into the wilderness for days at a time. We decided to share a small apartment that had a basement, which we converted into what must have seemed like an entire sporting goods store. Our motto became that if it had fins, fur, or feathers, we’d go after it.
Someone asked if I wanted a dog who needed a new owner. Of course I did! On Sundays, Jerry and I would load my beater truck with gear before the morning church service, then race out the door to hunt the moment the service ended. Once, we pulled back into the parking lot for evening service with two dead deer in the bed of the truck, and our mud-splattered hunting clothes didn’t merit even a second glance from anyone else at church.
It was precisely what I needed.
The older ladies at church started to joke that I’d never marry since I was spending all my time hunting. At least I hoped they were joking. They did have a point, though: I had no idea how to have a conversation with a woman my age.
But God hadn’t finished promising.
I noticed Joan the first Sunday she came to church. She was a park ranger in Yellowstone during the summertime, but during the rest
of the year, she worked as an audiologist in the local schools. And since my friends at church noticed me noticing her, they urged me to ask her out on a date.
“Mark, think about it: she’s a ranger, and you love the outdoors!”
That logic, which I had heard variations of for week after week, was sound. What wasn’t logically obvious was why someone like Joan, whose beauty was only equaled by her gracious sophistication, would be attracted to someone like me, an obsessed outdoorsman with the social skills of a rock. But I thought about Joan all the time, and I prayed that God would have mercy on me.
It took me months to gather enough courage to ask her out, and I have no idea what she saw in me that made her say yes. My truck was beat up and in constant need of repair. My apartment was so dirty that we joked you could grow mushrooms in the carpet. Jerry and I had so much wild game stuffed in the refrigerator that there was barely room for store-bought food.
“So,” I ventured one Sunday morning after church, “would you go out with me? If you want?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “What’s the plan?”
My brain was already completely overloaded. No one had prepared me for this. I had to have a plan as well?
“You can drive over to me and Jerry’s apartment?” I tried.
She paused like she was waiting for more. But I was fresh out of ideas.
“Okay, great, then.” She was still smiling. “I’ll come over tomorrow night at seven.”
When Joan agreed, I felt I had won the lottery. She seemed too perfect. By the time she arrived the next night in her immaculate Honda Accord, I’d managed to clear the dirty plates and ammo boxes and hunting catalogs and trays of elk jerky off our dining room table.
“Come on in,” I invited. I’d practiced that line.
“Thank you.”
She didn’t run back out the door screaming, which was a good sign.
