PRISONER.
Carl.
You can call me Carl. I wouldn"t mind giving you my real name, but my family wouldn"t like it and I"m sure the folks that run this place wouldn"t either. I"m in the Jefferson City Correctional Center in Jeff City, Missouri. It"s also called "The Walls." I don"t know why, to tell the truth. It"s just always been called The Walls.
I robbed a department store in 1989. I"d rather not say which one, but it"s one of the big ones you find at a shopping mall. It was me and two other guys and we all had guns. One of the guys used to work there and he knew that they brought all the money to the office at the end of the night and counted it before they put it in the safe.
It was the week before Christmas. We walked into the store at about ten minutes till close. The place was still pretty busy, so n.o.body thought twice about us coming in so late. We all used separate entrances, shopped around for a while, and then met upstairs in a bathroom near the office. We put on some masks and boom! Gimme all the money and n.o.body gets hurt. [Laughs] It was a cinch. There was just the manager and another guy and a lady in the room and they gave us the loot in shopping bags. There was no violence. I mean, we tied them up, but that"s it. We all had guns on them and it would"ve been stupid for them to do anything.
That was the only time I ever robbed anyplace, and it was exciting, I have to admit. I mean, we just walked in with nothing and walked out with ten grand. That"s a pretty good night"s work.
We divvied the loot up between us-three-way split. I spent mine pretty fast. Bills, Christmas presents. I"ve got a daughter and a stepson and I wanted them to have a good Christmas. I"d had a job at a convenience store, but I got fired right after Thanksgiving because the boss was black and he didn"t like white guys around.
For two years, I thought we were gonna get away with it. We were pretty careful. We"d agreed not to talk about it or be seen together for a while afterwards and we played it as cool as we could. I found a new job, didn"t do no more crimes. But I got caught anyways two years later "cause one of my crew got busted doing another store and he "fessed up to the robbery we did together. He got a deal to give me and the other guy up. I was convicted of armed robbery. That"s a Cla.s.s-A felony.
I came to The Walls in 1992. I was in county jail before that and then in the Diagnostic Center in Fulton. That"s where they keep all the new prisoners while they decide how dangerous you are and figure out which prison you"re going to. You meet with a shrink and they evaluate you and watch you with other inmates to see what you"re like. I don"t think they do a very good job of that. I mean, I"m really not a violent guy. Yeah, I used a gun, but I didn"t have any priors. I got a raw deal because that snitch said I organized the whole thing. Which was a lie. It wasn"t even my idea. Plus, the prosecutor had a hard-on for guns. If I hadn"t used that gun, I"d probably be out walking around now on probation.
They"ve got all sorts of different prisons in Missouri-minimum security, medium security, maximum and supermax. The Walls is maximum and supermax. I didn"t expect to come here. I was figuring, since it was my first offense and everything, that I"d get to go to Boonville, which is minimum security. I was young, too, I was just eighteen when we did the job, and most of the younger guys go to Boonville.
There"s no way I should"ve been sent here. It"s crazy. When they told me I was on my way to The Walls, I thought I was going to die. Either I was going to get killed or I was going to kill myself. As it turns out, I probably should have died. I"ve been pretty lucky. I"ve already beat all the odds just by staying alive this long. And when I make it out of here, I"ll be beating the odds again. I think you"ve got something like a fifty-fifty shot at making it out of The Walls. It"s maybe better than that, but not much.
This place is like a little city, a little world of just itself. Everybody has to have a job-some of them are better than others. There"s people here making license plates and highway signs. Whenever you see a highway sign in Missouri it was made at The Walls. But that job sucks. It"s hard work and you don"t get paid much more than anyone else. I"m a cook. I worked at a Burger King for a while so I know my way around a grill. I cook eggs and bacon and hash browns every morning and I prep lunch.
It"s a good job. I make about eight bucks a week, but it"s not about the money. If you work in the kitchen, you get to make most of your own meals, so I eat pretty good. [Laughs] If you don"t work in the kitchen, the food sucks. It all looks the same and tastes the same too. [Laughs] Plus, this gives me something to do where I"m pretty much by myself as long as I"m at the grill, which I appreciate. I work six days a week, but I could work five. I choose to work the extra day "cause I like to keep busy. It helps pa.s.s the time. And it keeps me out of trouble, keeps me away from a lot of the f.u.c.king people in here-that"s the big thing. [Laughs] That"s why I love my job.
We"ve got more than two thousand inmates here. All kinds of people. There"s gang bangers and they"re all black or Mexican. Some of the white guys are in the Brotherhood. The Aryan Brotherhood. And some of the whites just stay by themselves. That"s the best, but then you don"t really have anybody watching your back. It pays to have a crew on the inside, trust me.
One of the guys, a real old-timer, he looks out for me because he went to high school with my dad. He"d been here for more than fifteen years when I came and he"s doing two life sentences for double murder. Killed his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend. Didn"t even try to run, just didn"t care anymore. Crazy. But he"s made sure I"ve been okay. He gives good advice and everybody likes him, so if you"re at his table then people know that you"re not one to f.u.c.k around with. He"s a good guy. We call him "The King" because he"s like the King of the White People in here. He"s got my back.
But I"ve been in fights. Plenty of times. Just because you"ve got friends doesn"t mean you"re not going to fight. I had to fight a lot when I first got here and nothing could be done to stop it. I broke a guy"s arm once. You"ve gotta prove yourself and keep proving yourself. There"s guys in here doing heavy time. I got a ten-year sentence and that"s considered small change by most of the others. A lot of them are doing twenty to life. I"m on my way out, but there"s complete wastes of life in here. They don"t care about themselves or anybody else.
Motherf.u.c.kers around here don"t need a reason to fight. I"ve been punched and kicked and s.h.i.t I don"t know how many times. I"ve been shanked twice. Shanked means stabbed. I got it once with a pen and once with a homemade knife. You make them with a piece of metal or anything you can find that can be sharpened. The first time the guy was going for my neck but I stopped him with my arm and the pen went in just below my wrist. The other time I got nailed from behind, but the guy hit one of my ribs. I was lucky. Guys get killed here just about every week. It happens in the yard and in the cafeteria. It can happen in the TV room or even the shower. Motherf.u.c.kers have died sitting on the toilet. All sorts of reasons. Wouldn"t suck d.i.c.k, wouldn"t give up a.s.s, wouldn"t give their food, looked at somebody the wrong way, you name it. This is prison. These guys are animals and they act like it.
You"ve got all sorts in here. Punks-that"s what we call a f.a.g. A punk. And a lot of guys have their own punk and the punk has to do whatever his boss says. If you don"t, you get hurt. I don"t f.u.c.k with that stuff, though. n.o.body"s made a punk out of me. I had to fight a lot to win respect, but I"m not a little man. I"m six foot three and I weigh two hundred and forty pounds and I work out almost every day. It"s not going to be easy to take my a.s.s, that"s for f.u.c.king sure.
I don"t have a punk of my own, either. I"m not a h.o.m.o. I don"t care what anybody says, if you get your d.i.c.k sucked by another man, then you"re a h.o.m.o. And it"s the same if you f.u.c.k a guy in the a.s.s. You"re gay. Simple as that. A lot of guys in here-the bosses who have punks-they say that if they"re getting their d.i.c.k sucked and they don"t do anything, then they aren"t gay, but that"s bulls.h.i.t.
A lot of guys have tried to rape me and paid for it. And I"ve seen plenty of weaker guys get raped. I"ve seen it too many times, man. It"s f.u.c.ked up. I hadn"t been here but six or seven months when I saw a guy get raped with a broomstick. It happened in the TV lounge and a couple of thugs stood in the doorway and you couldn"t get in or out. The guard was just in the other room, but n.o.body said a word and they f.u.c.ked this guy up the a.s.s in one of the corners of the room. It was f.u.c.king sick. I thought I was going to lose it. I still have that s.h.i.t in my head. I always will.
It"s like sport-raping. These motherf.u.c.kers just want something evil to do so they do it. The guards know it happens but they don"t give a s.h.i.t. They"re f.u.c.king a.s.sholes. Every f.u.c.king one of "em. It"s us versus them in here. I wouldn"t ask a guard what time it was, much less for any f.u.c.king help. They don"t give a s.h.i.t about any of the inmates. They think we"re all animals and they"re right. When you"re on the inside you have to be an animal if you want to get out alive. Like, I don"t let anybody know my release date because they"d kill me "cause they"re jealous. One day I just won"t be here anymore. I"ll be gone and I ain"t never coming back.
The only good thing about prison is the education. I got my G.E.D. after about a year here and I"ve been taking college cla.s.ses for about three years. I"ve got my a.s.sociates degree in accounting and I might go to a real college someday. The teachers are cool. They actually care. But none of them last very long. n.o.body wants to come to a place like this every day.
This is h.e.l.l on f.u.c.king earth right down to the stink. It"s dirty as s.h.i.t. The filth, the smell, it"s so f.u.c.king gross. I"ve never gotten used to it. My mother keeps a real nice home. Here, they clean everything with bleach and it still f.u.c.king reeks. You have to wash your hands a lot. Least I do. A lot of these motherf.u.c.kers aren"t clean. They don"t bathe proper. Sometimes, if you get to smelling too funky, they make you hit a shower. I"ve seen people have the s.h.i.t beat out of "em and then washed clean. It"s f.u.c.ked up. Can you imagine being so dirty that a bunch of cons knocked you out and had a punk wash you off? The punk sucks the guy"s d.i.c.k sometimes, too. That"s another thing punks do. If they get you alone and you"re weaker than them, it can sometimes be a f.u.c.k or fight. And if they knock you out, then they might suck your d.i.c.k to humiliate you.
I took f.u.c.king ten grand. One robbery, once in my life. Got a f.u.c.king third of it. And I ended up in this s.h.i.t. I"ve paid for my crime. Definitely. A couple of years would have been plenty. I got a raw deal.
I had a chance at parole. Twice denied. I didn"t exactly cooperate with the prosecutor during my trial, so the judge fixed it so I couldn"t get paroled until at least five years. I wasn"t eligible the first time because I hadn"t gone through any programs-A.A., N.A., anger management, that kind of thing. I done that since, but it"s all bulls.h.i.t because you just go in to satisfy the parole board. Prisoners don"t really want to be helped. They just want out.
My second parole was last year. I thought I would be cool, but I got into a fight the day before my board. This one dude found out that I was going up for parole and he decided to f.u.c.k with me. And when you come to the parole board from the hole, well, let"s just say it don"t make a good impression.
So now I"m looking at two more years till my release. [Laughs] Just two more years. I"m not making any plans because you can"t ever count on anything until you get out-and I doubt I can count on things then, either-but I think about getting out all the time. I"ve thought about it too much. I"m gonna go home and see my family and my kids. My girl was two when I got popped. She"s almost eleven now. And my stepson just turned thirteen. I"ve seen them a few times. They come for my birthday and around Christmas. I didn"t want them to ever see this place, but family is family and they know where I am anyway.
My wife and kids live with my mom and dad. They all take care of each other and me too. I talk to them every Sunday night on the phone. It"s hard, though. They should be able to live their lives without me dragging them down. I don"t have a lot going on here to talk about. I"m not gonna tell "em about no f.u.c.king murders and s.h.i.t, so I usually talk about my job or school or whatever. It"s the same routine day in and day out. You could die of boredom. But I like to talk to them and I like to hear what"s going on in the world. And we write back and forth and send pictures. I"ve got hundreds and hundreds of pictures.
I dream about my wife and kids all the time. I dream sometimes about being with them. I had a dream that I was with them last Christmas and we were all just one big happy family. Stuff like that. Some of my dreams, I don"t even want to wake up ever.
I thought I had gotten away with it, you know? That"s what I thought. Turns out I was pretty far f.u.c.king wrong. I"ve heard that for every year you spend inside, it takes three years to get over. Whatever that means. I doubt I"ll ever get over this. It"s like being in a war. Nothing could be worse. The Walls ain"t no joke, man. No joke. This place is totally f.u.c.ked up and I"ll never be the same again.
I got a life.
SAILOR.
Johnny.
I never finished high school. It wasn"t that it was bulls.h.i.t, it"s just that where I was from-let"s just put it this way-in terms of the books, okay? My grandmother"s boyfriend had the same books I did. Back when he was in high school, okay? What I"m sayin" is where I came from was a shallow area. Where I went to school was a shallow area. It"s not your suburbs. It"s not your middle cla.s.s. It"s more like your low, low cla.s.s. East Saint Louis.
And I grew up without a father. Just like almost everybody else around there. Just like my father, he grew up without a father, okay? I did the wrongs as I did the rights in my life, you know. Everything you see on the movies, I"ve done it. I"ve lived it. Like you saw Juice. It was some pretty impressive s.h.i.t, right? I mean, you guys really thought that was cool s.h.i.t, right? To me that ain"t cool. That"s just another day in the life of sump"n I always lived.
I got more friends or family that are either dead or in jail than alive. I always thought my father was dead. Then he decided to come around. I was nineteen years old. By that time I was married. I had a kid. I admit I still was in my ways, in and out of the jails, doin" all the s.h.i.t, but then I finally realized, okay, I can join that crowd, or I can break being part of that crowd. My son-I can break the chain of being, of my name being fatherless, or I can continue with the chain of my family being fatherless.
So I signed up for the military. And when I signed up, I got a life. Serious. The navy gave me a life. Like I could wear this uniform, I could walk down the street and people, they"ll give me all the love and they, you know, give me all the props and everything. "Cause they see the uniform.
At first I never saw myself as a navy person. Okay? Because just like I"d never been in the military before, so like everybody else-you know, you always see the stereotypes about everything. So I wanted to be a marine. You know, I wanted to be the mo"f.u.c.ker with the gun. The hardcore. I was used to that life. Why not get paid for it? In a legal way.
But because I didn"t graduate from high school and I didn"t have the G.E.D., they turned me down. They said I"d have to pay to get some college credits. You had to have so many college credits if you didn"t graduate. Some such s.h.i.t. Whatever. They have their standards. If you"re dumb you"re not getting in. That"s fine with me. But I wasn"t paying for no college so I could get in the marines. You know what I"m saying?
So I went home. And I was sittin" at my house, and the navy recruiter called me and he"s like, "I hear you"re interested in getting into the military." And I was like, "No, not the military [laughs], the marines!" "Cause I was still hung up on the stereotypes. And he was like, "Well, why don"t you come down to the recruiting office and see what we have to offer and then you decide from there." So just to get him the f.u.c.k off the phone [laughs] I went. And then I-I"d say that was the smartest move I ever did.
Any branch of the military you get into is good, I would have to say. From the army to the navy, coast guards, marines, air force. It"s all good. The military needs you, too.
I"m in the Seventh Fleet. I"m on what you call an amphibious ship. We carry Harrier jets like you see in True Lies. And helicopters. We got a flight deck that can land jets, helicopters, Harriers, stuff like that. Anything in a hovering motion. And wherever the marines gotta go, we gotta go. We cab "em there. They have to have some means of transportation to go from one country to another. You know, you gotta cross the oceans, so who do you need? The navy.
I"m an engine man. I deal with diesel engines, all engineering, damage control. I do what basically your mechanics do in a garage, except this garage floats around, yours don"t. [Laughs] I clean. I troubleshoot. If it"s broke, I fix it. If we"re in port, I"m workin" nine to five, regular day job stuff. I see my wife and kid at night. But then comes your deployment, which is six months. That"s six months at sea, every year.
Now on the ship-machines are tricky. You gotta always observe them. You gotta make sure they keep their temperatures in their ranges, no matter what. So, when we"re out at sea, we work in watches. Each watch is a lookout to make sure our equipment is working fine. Just like a nurse in a hospital. They make their rounds, they make sure everybody"s all right. If sump"n happens they know how to deal with it. If nothin" happens they just keep making their regular rounds.
After you get off watch, it all depends on what you wanna do. Do you wanna e-mail your family? Wanna watch TV? Sleep? Do you wanna play cards, games? If we"re in port somewhere, you know, do you want to party?
I"ve been all over the States, all over the world. I like mostly in the States. Florida, California, New York-they"re great. Because I can understand it. Other places are awkward. I like "em, but they"re awkward. Different cultures, different customs, beliefs. Turkey, you know? You gotta watch what you say. You don"t speak street language. You etiquette yourself. And, you know, there are times the country don"t want the military there, don"t want the United States there. Like the Gulf. You won"t see our ship pulling off in the Gulf any time soon just to see around. No. Why? Because that would be like inviting somebody you don"t like into your house. Why would you do it?
But it"s not a lot of sightseeing anyway. It"s work is what it is. So most days, it"s like, who the f.u.c.k cares where you are? At sea, our days-a military day is not your regular eight-hour day. I could hold two civilian jobs full-time doing what we do. Because in your guys" days, two civilian jobs is a sixteen-hour day. My job is a twentyfour/seven. We work hard, we play hard.
So like, I could work all day from six in the morning till twelve at night. And then I could be just getting into my rack, okay? Into bed. And as soon as I start to fall asleep they could say, you know, "Man the diesels." Or, you know, somebody falls overboard. Some c.r.a.p. Guess what I gotta do? I"m out of my rack, and I get dressed, and I go back to work. And say they call for a man overboard and I gotta go deal with it, say if we don"t get the guy back on the ship till eight in the morning, guess what? You"ve been working since six in the morning the day before-that"s twenty-six hours-but guess what you"re doing? You"re working some more. [Laughs] You get to sleep when the night falls again. That"s a twenty-four/seven job right there.
Now, they can be lenient. Your captain can go easy on you. Sometimes. They do know we need sleep. They do treat us like humans. [Laughs] We"re not robots. You know, they do make sure that you get the sleep that you need to make another working day. Sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. [Laughs] That"s the military way. You"re human, but you"re not like other humans.
In the military, the military always comes first. Always. No matter what you do. It"s s"posed to be before your family and all that. So basically, instead of running wild, you learn to set your ways. You learn how to cool things down. "Adapt and overcome" is a motto that is used.
It"s just a job. It"s a job you do. It"s a job that you commit to as if you were married. You devote your life to the military. Like me, I"m proud of what I do. I"m proud to wear this uniform. No matter what anybody says about me-like my friends when I was first starting to join went, "You"ll be a slave to this." Or, oh, you know, "After this they always got you." And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You never been in it. Don"t tell me how it is. [Laughs] If you never been in it don"t judge me. You know, everybody that came out of the military always has sump"n nice to say about it.
The only person who can say s.h.i.t about the military to me is my wife. You know? She"s got the license. Because, one thing is with the military, if you have family, it"s hard. It"s not hard hard. Sometimes it"s hard on your part. But it"s mostly harder on the spouses because they don"t understand it, why we gotta do what we do. They don"t understand why we gotta leave "em when we leave.
I"m not saying everybody gets a divorce, but a lot of people get a divorce. You know, if you"re not always gone, you"re gone for like six months. And six months is actually a long time. And within that six months time sump"n could happen and you"re away and you don"t know and things just happen. But you take the bad with the good. As in life. That"s what I tell my wife. The good with the bad.
And there"s a lot of good. I love my job. I love everything I do. This is the only job that you know you have a paycheck coming the first and fifteenth of every month, that you know you got every benefit that they promise you. You know you got it. And I"m striving for goals. I"d like to be an officer. You can work your way up from engine man to officer. It takes time, but what else do I got left but time?
My wife understands. She does. She knows this is good. After I had my son, I admit I still was in my ways. Then I got locked up again. I did some things. For the last time. I realized I could spend the rest of my life in jail, or I could spend the rest of eternity dead and my son never knows who I am. Never accomplish nothin" in my life. And never go nowhere, and never become n.o.body. I could just be another face, another person, another name that was in this world. And I wasn"t gonna let that happen. And I didn"t.
I"m not saying that the military is gonna make me that face or that name or that person in this world. But I"m strivin". If I don"t succeed at it, at least I tried. And I"ll be tryin" until I die. I can pat myself on the back for that.
We have to get people"s behavior to be
what we want it to be.
ARMY PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS SPECIALIST.
Catherine Knigge.
I"ve been in the army for almost three years. I signed up when I was nineteen years old because-it was like I wanted to do something that, you know, felt important. I don"t know if that makes sense. But I wanted to do something that just meant something. I see a lot of people that I knew back home in Spokane doing-it"s not that they are not important jobs you know, like office jobs and regular jobs, but to me, it wasn"t very-it didn"t seem like something that would be worthwhile in life.
I told my recruiter I wanted to be a spy. [Laughs] That"s funny, huh? He thought it was pretty funny. I wanted to do, like, undercover stuff. Like top secret squirrel stuff. He said Psych Ops was about as close as I could get, so he gave me this job and I was like, all right!
Now I"m an E-4 Psych Ops Specialist, stationed at Camp Bondsteel in Ferizaji, Kosovo. We"re here with the NATO force. Psych Ops is, well, what we do depends on the mission. Sometimes it"s like information operations and sometimes it"s like psychological warfare. Basically what we"re trying to do when we go out is we gotta change people-we have to get people"s behavior to be what we want it to be.
In wartime, we want people to surrender, so it"s our job to go out and convince them to do that. In like what we have now here with the NATO occupying force, we"re more trying to like keep the peace, make everything stable, you know, tell people that criminal activities need to stop, and if you have weapons and you are on the street after curfew and stuff, if you are out shooting and stuff, that"s considered hostile to NATO.
So we go and talk to the people in the villages-usually the village elder-and figure out, you know, what the problems are. Then we write up a sheet that says what we think should be done, and we pa.s.s it on. Our product development detachment actually makes the products, like the "No looting and no burning" signs. And then they give them back to us and we go out to disseminate them. Everything you see around here-all the checkpoint signs, all the peace flyers, don"t play with guns stuff, all the mine awareness stuff-that"s ours.
We had one operation where we dropped leaflets during the bombings, basically to play on the emotions of the Serb soldiers. We told them, "You are fighting for a wrongful cause!" You know? Or like, "Your family is not getting food because you are out here fighting for something that"s not right!" "Your family misses you." We played on stuff like that. We just kept telling them it over and over and over: "Hey, all this stuff is screwed up, you might as well just quit. If you surrender, we"ll treat you better, you"ll go home." Stuff like that. And we just bombarded them with it over and over and over.
That"s psychological warfare right there. Then there"s Information Ops, where you tell people where to go for help, to get food, to find out about families. Some of what we"ve been doing is curfew, telling people about curfews in towns so they don"t get in trouble. Also, weapons turn-in. We tell people to turn in weapons or stolen property and stuff like that. Some people don"t really like that, but [laughs] we"re not fooling around.
We usually go out in sets of two teams. Each team rides around in a Humvee, a big green monster. A big, huge turtle is what it really is. It"s got giant tires and they can go just about anywhere. I wish it was air-conditioned, but no. The windows open, though-they slide up and down on the sides and the doors kind of "click" open. There"s a big hole in the top that"s got a turret in it, where the gunner rides. Five of us can fit into a Humvee, including the gunner. And every team that goes out has at least one interpreter-most of them speak both Serb and Albanian. [Laughs] I only speak English, so I"d have a pretty hard time if it wasn"t for them.
On a typical day we get out about seven-thirty and go to whatever town we are going to. When we get there, it depends on whether we are doing loudspeaker or whether we are doing handbills, or just talking to people. Generally we do a little bit of all of "em every day. We go in, stop, talk to some people. Everybody wants to shake your hand. Everybody wants to, you know, look inside the truck and see all the neat gadgets, and everybody wants to talk to you. We answer a lot of questions. "Why is this happening? Why isn"t this happening?" We try and answer forthrightly. As best we can.
Then sometimes we just drive around really, really slow, playing scripts over our loudspeaker.
Everything that we do is based on the town, you know, the needs of the town. So if it"s an all-Albanian town, then we are not going to work Serb stuff in there, we are not going to go in and talk to them about giving back stolen property from the war or something.
We always try to be sensitive to the people we"re dealing with. In our training, the army taught us a little bit about, you know, cultural sensitivity. How to figure out-without offending people or p.i.s.sing them off-how to figure out what is going through their heads, and how to use it to our advantage, basically. Advanced Individual Training, it"s called. AIT. It"s cla.s.sroom training, eleven weeks long. It"s not really culturally specific-just general things to watch out for, things we"re going to have to do. We went out into the field at the very end, and we had a week-long exercise where people had to play the role of foreign civilians, and we had to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Like they made up these concoctions that we had to drink, and if we didn"t drink it, you would offend your host, right? I mean, this stuff was nasty, but it really helped.
Like I was in Malawi before I got sent here. It"s this little itty-bitty tiny country in Africa, pretty peaceful-not wacked out, like some of the other ones. I was down there for a month and a half, teaching the army officers peacekeeping skills. And they fed us this gruel goat stuff, I don"t know what it was, and you had to eat it with your hands. It was meat and cornmeal and gravy and beans-just a big slosh of stuff. I looked at it and I was like, okay, smile, nod, eat. This is yummy. [Laughs] Everything from training just came back to me about never offending them-doing exactly what they do.
Here in the Balkans, it"s not so extreme, the culture shock. But still, there"s plenty of it. People here are all about sitting down to have Turkish coffee, and giving you food and stuff. And some of it is weird. Like we ate with the Russians, and I don"t eat seafood at all- whatsoever-and they brought out bowls of seafood soup something or other and it had scales floating in it. And I"m just looking at it and I knew I was going to throw up if I ate it, but the last thing I wanted to do was offend somebody, so I just sat there and pretended I was eating it. Then when they weren"t looking, I traded my bowl with the guy across from me who had finished. He wanted more, so I traded bowls and he hurried up and ate it.
And with the coffee, have you had it? Turkish coffee. It"s got like a half an inch of grounds on the bottom. Well, I didn"t know if I was supposed to eat the grounds or not, and there"s all these village people sitting there watching me drink the coffee. The coffee itself was great. I"d never had it before and I was like, wow, it"s really sweet, it"s pretty good, you know? But I get to the bottom and I"m looking at all these grounds and I"m like, oh c.r.a.p, what am I supposed to do now? And I asked one of our guys, "What do I do with the bottom of this? Do they eat it, do they, you know?" And he thought it would be really funny to tell me to eat the coffee grounds. So of course I"m thinking I can"t offend them and leave half a cup of coffee grounds, so I eat the freaking coffee grounds. I"m sitting there trying to smile and swallow these grounds and he starts laughing and I was just like, oh, I knew it. [Laughs]
But our training, you know, it"s not all just about not offending people. They also taught us how to watch people and how to do what other people, the natives, I guess, what they do. So, like, we"re running our mine awareness campaign right now. They taught us that if the locals don"t walk down that road, you don"t walk down that road. So we watch where people drive, where people go. We"ll ask people, "Do a lot of you drive down this road? Have you seen anyone walk down this road?" So that we can figure out where mines are so we don"t get into trouble ourselves. It"s very good training.
I"m not much of a soapbox person, but I love this. I don"t know how to pick it apart and say what"s more fun than the other. I know it sucks to sleep in the mud, but that"s for everybody. It"s just part of the job. Maybe it"s just I haven"t gotten into any seriously bad stuff yet, but I love it. I would never want to do anything else in the army. Because there"s limited stuff that females can do that can actually get them out into things and this is one of them. I"ve gone on just about everything the guys have gone on, you know? Half the people on this hill don"t get to go out in towns and do stuff and I get to go out every single day. I"ve gone and done a whole lot more than most people I know, so it makes me feel like I"m doing something. Which is why I got into this. So I feel satisfied.
If I didn"t have a family, I could see myself all over the place in the army, doing this for rest of my life, working my way up the ranks. But I"m single-and I have a kid back home. A baby, really. When I last saw him, he was four and a half months old and now he"s eight months, a little over eight. My mom is watching him. It"s tough. I don"t get any special treatment or anything like that. I get deployed just like everybody else. And I"m not sure how well all that is going to work out. My son doesn"t have a father, and I kind of want him to have at least one parent, you know? He"s got me seriously thinking about whether it"s important for me to go all over the world. Is it worth it-missing the things that my son is doing right now, that I am never, ever going to see again? Like his first steps? I don"t know.
But I can"t imagine myself doing anything else, either. I just don"t see myself in another job. So really, I have no idea. I"m just living through this situation here and in two months, or whenever, I"ll start thinking about the future. But now, I mean right now, I love this. Like when people come up to us and tell us how grateful they are that we came here and they give you hugs and kisses and stuff, I"m just like wow, you know, somebody is glad that I am around. Maybe not me specifically, but us. It makes me feel so good when we go out and people are just happy to see us. Like sometimes the kids just line the streets and cheer, like when we first got here. I just thought that was the coolest thing. The day we drove in, on our way through Macedonia, kids would come out of the refugee camps right on the border-tons of them. They would line the streets just going, "Hi, hi, h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, NATO, NATO!" Giving us the peace sign and everything. I loved that. It was crazy. Like you know they had never seen anything so good in their lives as an army truck going by.
Somewhere in the world at any hour of
the day or night, the gear is going up or
down on an airplane that belongs to me.
AIR FORCE GENERAL.