These traces from my personal and family history had faded as the adventures of Harvard, then Oxford, commanded my attention. The question “Why aren’t you wearing your country’s uniform?” did sometimes nag at me as I made, with the unique confidence of a college student, some lofty statement about public service or national security. But it always seemed like there was something else for me to focus on, and few of my peers were serving, either. Most of the role models I would have had, military officers actually connected to me, were relatives who had died before I was even born.
Back from Iowa and visiting my parents one day, I squared up to the painting and looked at it closely. I put myself in Russell’s place; I must have been coming up on the age he had been when the original photo was taken. For him and his generation, a college education and a military career went hand in hand; for me, education had somehow made military service seem more remote. Yet all around me, especially in small towns and rural areas, men my age and much younger were making themselves available for the defense of our country. The more I reflected on it, the less it seemed I had any good excuse or reason not to serve.
THE FIRST TIME I TUGGED on the door of a recruiting office, I found it closed. It was the first step toward realizing that getting into the military was not as simple as I’d have thought. Later, a recruiter who called back from the 1-800 number I had dialed passed me to a cheerful NCO in the local office in South Bend, who routed me toward a lieutenant from somewhere in Michigan who would go silent for days, then suddenly pepper me with calls and emails, before going dark again. At one point I learned that when I’d told them my college coursework in Arabic might make me a good intelligence officer, they had recorded that my minor at Harvard had been in aerobics.
But the wheels of Big Navy did their slow work, one bubble test or triplicate form at a time, until one day an email directed me to check in at a Radisson in Des Plaines, Illinois, ahead of a physical exam at the Military Entrance Processing Station. Judging by the dos and don’ts in the email, the expectations seemed manageable. “Take a shower—be clean.” Also, “No pants that shows exposed underwear.” And body piercings “must now be removable and the pierced area must be free of inflammation or infection.” I could handle this.
At 0415 over breakfast in the suburban hotel, it was hard to miss the fact that the vast majority of people entering the military were more like the teenage recruits I had seen in Iowa than anyone I’d known in college. As conversation around me focused on which girls were the hottest and how various parents had reacted to the news, I began to wonder if I was the only one old enough to drink among this group of seventy or so, preparing to be herded onto the bus to “MEPS.”
The sensation of being an object on an assembly line began at the top of the stairs leading to the intake room, as a woman ran what looked like a marker across my forehead, leaving a moist imprint that I later learned had something to do with testing for swine flu. Then we were separated by service, with Army people going to the Army room, and so on. I took my seat on one of the chairs in the Navy room, warily eyeing a poster on the wall that staff used to identify tattoos containing hate group symbols. A TV was playing some action movie, which captivated most of the recruits around me.
My name was called. A very large woman with gray hair and purple sweatpants took my fingerprint on a computer and presented me with a folder and some papers to take to the “control desk,” whatever that was. Soon I was in line for a vision test; I waited in rows of seats with the other recruits as people filed in, one-in-one-out, to the testing room. The girl behind me, a redhead looking about seventeen, struck up a conversation. “You’re from a small town, aren’t you?” Not wanting to correct her or weigh out loud whether South Bend qualified as a small town, I just asked how she could tell. “The cowboy boots.” I looked down. In fact, they were shoes I had picked up at a Filene’s Basement in Chicago, which slightly resembled cowboy boots if jeans were draped over them. I wasn’t going to ruin our rapport, so I just nodded.
“I’m from a small town, too,” she quickly volunteered. “Marseilles, Illinois.”
I must have looked at her blankly, so she clarified: “It’s close to Peru, Illinois.” We had a Peru in Indiana, too, I offered a bit lamely. She hoped to work as a secretary in the military and had decided to join the Army because it would pay for college.
After the vision test came a color blindness test, a blood test, a pee test. Just as I began to feel a sense of momentum moving from station to station, the line for “urinalysis” came to a standstill. One kid, it seemed, was unable to produce—and, for reasons of security and integrity, pulling him out of sequence was out of the question. This was when I learned that there is a surefire way to make someone urinate: chug fifteen cups of warm water in quick succession. Regrettably, it may also induce vomiting. The unfortunate recruit dutifully did both, and the line began moving again.
There was a Breathalyzer, a doctor one-on-one, more waiting, more testing. The final exercise was in a room mysteriously called “ortho-neuro.” Twenty-five at a time and stripped to our underwear, we were put through a number of exercises by a cheerful civilian and an ancient-looking, humorless doctor. Formed into two lines facing each other, we were told to swing our arms around, forward, backward, do something like jumping jacks, then something called a “duck walk” that involved squatting and walking at the same time, then walk on our knees, and so on through about twenty of these little routines. I began to feel like a preschooler, or like a recruit in newsreel footage from World War II, as they put us through our various motions and then told us to sit, in numbered seats on benches. All of our medical folders were placed in a row of little holders on the wall, each numbered, 1 through 25, just like our spots on the bench. Looking bored, the doctor examined them in no particular order, then in no particular order names were called.
“Winters! You’re qualified.” Winters gets up, is handed his folder, puts his clothes back on, and walks out of the room back into the hallway, looking like he just won the lottery. Macalester. You’re qualified. Lopez. Tagatz. Bowman. Perez. Buttigieg. You’re qualified. Ridiculously, you feel like you’ve accomplished something when they tell you you’re medically qualified. For this, you get to go to another waiting room. Eventually you are called up. A man behind a desk, whom I recalled as an unpleasant presence during the vision test earlier, now seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. “Butti . . . wha? Hoo-hee, it’s a good thing you’re in the Navy. I just wish I had someone with your name in my unit. Ha-haah, the fun I could have. Damn, guy.” Then, a little more quietly, confidential and approving, “You know how hard it is to get in for intel right now.” Then another look at the stack of paper and, finally, “You’re squared away.”