Tough Enough E-Book

Lewis Tucker

• Herausgeber: BooxAi
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Lewis Tucker was always a smart kid growing up. Upon the tragic loss of his mother at the young age of 15, Lewis was determined to make a difference in his life. Little did he know his military experience would help him make the biggest difference.

In his exciting memoirs, Tucker chronicles his time in Basic Combat Training, from the moment he decided to enlist in the military service to the moment he graduated from basic training. His story will hit home for a lot of people facing the same dilemmas he faced prior to his military experience, as well as his experiences in basic training from a psychological standpoint. Tucker's story is motivational and inspiring for those looking to join the armed forces, no matter their age.

Leseprobe

Lewis Tucker

Tough Enough

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Lewis Tucker

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by BooxAi

ISBN: 978-965-578-485-5

TOUGH ENOUGH

(THE DIARIES OF THE TRANSFORMATION FROM CIVILIAN TO SOLDIER)

LEWIS TUCKER

CONTENTS

1. How it All Started

2. Making Moves

3. Test Day

4. Choose and Choose Wisely

5. Loose Ends

6. The Night Before

7. Shipping Out

8. We Have arrived

9. Reception

10. Welcome to Red Phase

11. Smells Like Team Spirit

12. Let the Good Times Roll

13. How to Be a Soldier 101

14. There’s No I in Team

15. I, I, I, I’m Stayin’ Alive

16. I Think This is White Phase

17. White Phase is Upon Us

18. Training Something Fierce

19. Victory Fucking Anvil

20. All Clear Skies

21. Gettin’ Shot at

22. The Last Hurrah!

23. The Bonfire

24. Recovery/Blue Phase

25. Graduation

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER1

HOW IT ALL STARTED

I must start by saying, I never intended to write this book. I only intended to document my journey as I enlisted in the armed forces………. Ok, lies, lies (or, as the kids say nowadays, “Caps! Caps!”). I knew as soon as I enlisted, I was going to write this. As soon as I put the blunt down and realized I was signing up for the military, I knew I was going to write this book. Either it was some really good weed, or the military’s marketing department is second to none because those commercials are hook, line, and sinker. I mean, they really make you feel like you can “Be all you can be,” muthafuckin “Army Strong,” “The Few the Proud,” and all that shit. Uncle Sam will have you hook, line, and fucking sinker!

It was 2009, and I was 28 years old. I had moved back to Charlotte, NC a few years earlier from graduating college and still had no idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself. All I knew was what I didn’t want to do and that was just be ordinary. Fall in line like all the others and just exist. Wake up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, wake up, and do it all over again. I had been doing that since I graduated from college and had never felt more unfulfilled in my life! I graduated with a degree in marketing and was working a job that had absolutely nothing to do with marketing. Zero! Zippo! Absolutely nada. As I sat thinking to myself, chilling with my partner DJ and maybe my Homeboy Kyle, I just remembered thinking, “There has to be more than this out there for me.”

I remembered thinking and feeling slightly irritated that I had spent all my blood, sweat, and tears over a degree that, at the time, I felt was nothing more than an expensive certificate that got me a pat on the back and a good old fashion, “at a boy.” I remember thinking I did all that work for my mother and grandparents to be proud of me and I didn’t feel like I had accomplished a damn thing. You See, they raised me to think if I do well in school and I go to college, then I will have a good job and a great start in life. Those were the old days. In my eyes, in 2008 all I saw were bills, little food in the refrigerator, no woman on my arm, and my life not going the way I wanted or planned. Puffin on my Dutch Master cigar, drinking a beer, lying on my sofa, contemplating, and then what do you know? My sports center top plays get interrupted by an Army commercial. I mean, I was feeling Steward Scott delivering all of the high-flying highlights of the week, and then this commercial came on. “This is some bullshit..punk ass army commercial.”

That’s all I thought at first. Thought no more about it, hopped my happy ass up off the sofa to go grab another beer for me and my partner, went outside to check the mail, came back in and another fucking Army commercial came on. “Muthafucka, I can’t get away from this shit,” I thought. Yet this time, the commercial was action-packed. I mean it was muthafuckas swinging and droppin’ down from choppas and shit, the wind blowing all camouflage out. I thought I was watching a movie for a moment. Then that’s when it hit (all of it, the alcohol, the weed, and the big I dea). That was the moment everything changed. “I’m going to the muthafuckin Army,” I told myself. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I didn’t contemplate for days or weeks about it. Enough was enough. I was tired of how I was living, I wanted more out of my life. I felt I had played my cards the right way, how I was told. I did good in school and graduated college. Never got in any serious trouble (no more than typical teenage boys do), but I didn’t feel I was reaping any benefits of all that sacrificing I had done. I felt like I got screwed. I got the short end of the stick.

Why wasn’t I able to travel and buy the nice things I wanted? Everything felt like Groundhog Day for me. Same old shit just a different day. I remember the feeling like it was 5 minutes ago, and I knew I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. “Aye yo… I’m going to the army,” I announced to my pleasantly slumped over partners. I knew no one would believe me because for one, I was so anti-everything and two, I had a good head on my shoulders. For some stupid reason, people think, “Oh well, if you are smart, why would you go to the army?” I didn’t care about any of that, and quite frankly, didn’t even have time to entertain selling people on it being a good idea for me to go. I made a decision and stuck with my decision.

Shit was going to change from that day forward, and I was not changing my mind. Now, I didn’t have all the answers, and I knew I didn’t, so I did what I do best: research. I tried to look up any and everything I could find about what to expect when joining the armed forces. At no point was I scared, but more so curious. No one likes the unknown, so I wanted to prepare as much as possible. As I did my research, I found mostly information on what to expect from the physical aspect of military life and basic training. Push-ups, yelling, sit-ups, blah blah blah. Out of all the information available, I found truly little, if any information at all, on what to expect from a psychological standpoint.

I knew how to get my body right, but I mostly wanted to know how to get my mind right! What in the hell am I really getting myself into? That’s what I wanted to know. So, being that I could not find enough information to satisfy my inquisition, I stopped looking. I was getting irritated and frustrated, as well as impatient, so I stopped researching. I said fuck it, I’ll join and when I go, I’ll write the shit myself. That’s how this whole thing started. Anyone who tells you they joined the armed forces (especially the army or the marines) and nothing changed, or they stayed the same is a liar (they cappin’, they cappin’). Now, I can’t say I knew exactly how things would change, but I did know the change was coming.

CHAPTER2

MAKING MOVES

It’s Final. Army, here I come. Only I wasn’t just coming for shits and giggles like I was on some Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure. I had a plan. You see, the way I was wired, I already had an attitude I was pissed things weren’t going how I planned in life. Like I said, I felt I played the game how I was told it was to be played, only I felt like I was the one getting played. I still had a young mentality, thinking the world owed me a fucking favor. Real talk, on a miniscule level, I may have even felt entitled. I felt that because I put in the work of going to and graduating from college, everything else was supposed to just come, like the working part was over. I was full of resentment towards corporate America for not giving me an opportunity to make a name for myself in the field I had chosen to polish my skills. Therefore, I gave corporate America the proverbial “fuck you,” and started the process of enlisting.

Before I enlisted, even though I came to the decision at a moment’s notice, I took my sweet ass time figuring out exactly what I wanted to get out of my time serving. We all have had one of those “If I could do things differently, I would” moments. This time I got to capitalize on it. I always said I would have gotten a trade before going to college. This way, I would always have a skill to fall back on in the event I lost my position in corporate America. I wanted to save some money (at the time, I felt as if I was unable to do the things I wanted or felt I should be able to do). I also wanted to travel. I mean yeah, I had been to the beach, and I went to college away from my hometown, but the fact is I hadn’t really experienced anything. I hadn’t lived. I was existing. Going through the motion of carrying on with life, I wasn’t living. I wanted to live and see how others lived.

For those who ask, “How do I enlist? Where do I start?” Start the obvious way with whatever branch you are thinking about and go to their website www.whateverbranch.com. Trust me, a recruiter will reach out to you probably before you even finish looking at the site. The military thrives off emotions, so they want to hook you while the feeling is still strong and the motivation level is high. Recruiters are salespersons, let’s not forget, so numbers mean a lot to them. In my situation, I had a best friend (more like a brother) who served, and he just so happened to know a recruiter to connect me with. Typically, there are local recruiters in your city on your side of town in some middle-class strip mall or shopping center that would just love for you to swing their way. God’s plan for us is funny sometimes, and we do not always know the details of the plan, but it seemed like all the stars were aligned for me to join the service. The recruiter just so happened to be renting one of our other best friends’ childhood home, right around the corner from my house!

About a week after my friend introduced the two of us to each other, the recruiter and I met just for me to get a feel of what to expect. Now, these meetings are not formal sit-down meetings. They are more like kick it sessions (more like how you would court a love interest). He took me to eat, and we cruised around town, and I would just watch a day in the life of a recruiter. We went to the mall, downtown, high schools, and other recruits’ houses. It was fun (like dates are supposed to be). I asked all the questions I could think of, but to be honest, you don’t know what you don’t know to ask. Recruiters make that shit seem like it’s going to be as easy as pie. If they are any good at what they do, they will listen to you closely and paint the picture that you need to hear. Each recruiter’s pitch is designed to make your life feel like it’s going to be just what you dreamed. If you want to be a badass, they will paint the picture like you will no doubt about being a badass. Remember, the military feeds off emotions and capitalizes on feelings.

When you want to enlist in the armed forces and you are even remotely serious, outside of any felonies and serious physical concerns, recruiters will do everything they can to make sure you follow through with enlistment. They will help condition you physically, get clean to pass drug tests, and provide resources for legal issues that may need to be addressed, like child support, custody rights, property matters, you name it! Oh, you are the star of the show at that point! I met with my recruiter at least once a week until I left for basic training. I think part of it was to make sure that all was going according to plan, and the other part was to make sure I wasn’t going to flake out and come up with some lame excuse at the last minute.

Once you are assigned a recruiter (usually the first recruiter to greet you at the door when you walk into the office), they schedule a date for you to take what’s called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, also known as the (ASVAB) test. In short, the test determines which jobs offered in the branch of service you choose you would be most likely to excel in. Your recruiter will ask you what field you want to be in, but they would not really go into many specifics until after you test and the results are in. This way, your hopes do not get up in case you don’t score high enough for your job field of choice. Word to the wise: You want to take the test seriously, just as you would the SAT, ACT, or any other test you deem important. When taking the test, remember it’s not set up like a pass-or-fail exam. It’s more like an assessment along the lines of a Wonderlic test, depending on what areas you do well in, depending on the opportunities and job selections available to you. Also, bonus money is attached to ASVAB scores along with Military Occupational Specialties (MOS). If you don’t know what you want to do, at least rule out what you know you don’t want to do. This will save everyone time, and recruiters will have a better idea of what areas to focus on.

Everyone is different, and everyone has different reasons for enlisting in the military. To some, this may come as a surprise, but for most people who enlist, it is not to fulfill a civic or patriotic duty. At some point, soldiers were civilians prior to enlisting too. Hell, people have bills to pay. Life can be a muthafucka. Parents were barely making enough to support kids, and kids were tired of their living conditions. Some people want a change in life, some think they have no other options, and some just simply are, well, running. The list goes on and on, but what you can pretty much bet on is they didn’t join because they just simply love America. Sounds lovely, though.

CHAPTER3

TEST DAY

Test day, test day! Being that I hate suspense and I wanted to get it over with, I took my test first thing that morning. I knew the test would take a few hours, so my recruiter told me it was possible to get my scores back the same day. The test started at 9:00 a.m., so my recruiter came to pick me up at 7:30 a.m. We went to eat breakfast somewhere, simple McDonald’s or Burger King, some shit like that. As we ate, my recruiter asked if I was nervous. He couldn’t have known that test taking was kind of my thing, so I stated boldly, “hell no.” I guess that was his moment of relief because as soon as he realized I was serious, he chuckled a bit, devoured the rest of that McWhatever, gulped his last little swig of orange juice down and sat straight up. As I continued to enjoy my breakfast (being it was still early), My recruiter gave me the run-down of what to expect once we entered what’s called MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) and how testing would go.

I wasn’t worried about taking the test. I was more curious as to what jobs I would qualify for. As I said before, one of my objectives was to learn a trade, so I knew I didn’t want to take a classification that would serve me no purpose once I got out. With that said, I also knew I wasn’t trying to be Rambo or MR. G.I. Joe, none of that nonsense. I didn’t have shit to prove to the point I needed to be that destructive. I was going through car issues at the time, and I always had a curiosity for mechanics and cars, so I decided once I found out my scores, I’d do something with mechanics. To me, that was practical and respectable. I knew that as a mechanic, you had to be smart and resilient.

As we pull into the parking lot of MEPS, of course, the first thing you see are recruiters, all in their various uniforms, all neat to the point of perfect (almost like they were trying to outdo each other), and then beside them, their recruits. Up until this point, I always thought I would be old going through basic training (and I was somewhat), but I saw people of all sexes and nationalities, but more so, I saw people of all ages, literally up until the cut off age of 42. Some were in shape, some looked focused, some looked confused, but they seemed like they wanted to be there.

The next thing I remembered was that everyone involved with MEPS was either active military or retired military. One facilitator said something to me that resonated immediately. As I Stood in line waiting to sign in, this tall, bold stature man came to the front of the line and stated in a loud voice, “The Military is a well-oiled machine! The one thing that keeps that machine running isn’t rifles or missiles or bombs….. It's paperwork! The sooner you understand that, the better off you will be. Finish your forms, pay attention to what the fuck you are doing, and hurry up so you can wait!”

The wait wasn’t terrible. As I sat there, I remember talking to a few recruits, swapping stories of what we thought was expected. Describing things we would love to do and places we would love to see, some of it was naive thinking I’ll admit that. At this point, I was just killing time and making conversation. I also remembered, as I sat there amongst the different ranges of ages, how young 18 (in some kid’s cases 17 if they have finished high school) really is. I was 29 and I thought, “Man, it’s no way I could do this at 18.”

As my name was called, I filed into the test room with the other recruits and was assigned a seat. Like most other testing locations, there was zero tolerance for cheating or falsifying documents, and each section was timed. I wasn’t nervous, more anxious to get it over with. I didn’t think the test overall was terribly hard. There were some sections here and there I did scratch my head on, but overall, it wasn’t bad. Looking back on it now, I do wish I would have taken my time. So, for anyone about to take the ASVAB, take your time, and take it seriously!

I finished up the test confident I had done well, submitted my testing materials, and strolled out of the center. As I reached the lobby, I saw my recruiter sitting waiting anxiously like he was at Grey-Sloan Memorial waiting for Dr. Grey to deliver life altering news. As I approached closer and he saw me, he gathered his belongings, brushed his uniform off, and we headed off. “How do you think you did?” Those were the first words, of course. “It was cake,” I replied. With a sigh of relief look on his face, he pointed to where he had parked the car, and we headed back to the recruiting office.

“Test results are in,” one of the recruiters announced. Man, that was fast. I mean, I thought it felt like we took the long way back, kind of like we were stalling to get back, almost like a child stalls to get home if they know they are going to get a whipping. As my recruiter fumbled with typing and accessing my account, he started to explain a little more about what scores meant and how they could affect a recruit’s negotiation leverage. Once he finally got into my account, he looked at the screen, looked back up at me, looked back down at the screen one more time, and as he looked up again, he had the biggest Kool-Aid smile on his face I had ever seen. “MY MAN!” he screamed proudly as if he had coached me up to achieve this magnificent score. He starts pulling out all these pamphlets and pictures and jobs and bonus structures attached to jobs. At this point, he was all over the place. Grabbing any and every piece of information, he had in his office to show me I could basically do whatever I wanted to do.

At this point, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed, so I decided to gather all the information and packets he had given me and review the information at home over the next few days to really see what I would have an interest in. Some jobs I had information on were practical, and some just sounded cool. Some came with great bonuses, but the job wasn’t interesting, and some jobs sounded like perfect fits, yet the bonus pay was a little north of gas money.

I explained to the sergeant I needed to review by myself first, and once I had questions about anything I researched, I’d give him a ring, and we could go over things. I don’t like to feel like I am being manipulated, nor do I like for someone else to decide my fate or persuade me into doing what they feel I should do. He understood (he had to because that’s the way I said it was going to be) and said that was a wise thing to do. At that point, I proceeded with what I call the ol’ “wrap em and dap em” technique. Wrap up the conversation, dap em up (that means shake their hand for you suburban folks) and get the hell on.

CHAPTER4

CHOOSE AND CHOOSE WISELY

As I pondered on different jobs, I started to realize something important that I think most younger recruits may have noticed but may have downplayed. The more dangerous the job, the higher the bonus pay!

Damn. I ain't tryin’ to get shot or blown up or none of that shit. I ain't that fucking hard, and shit didn’t seem that fuckin cool or glamorous to me, at least not becoming disfigured. At the same time, I wasn’t trying to be a pencil pusher either. I mean fuck, I wanna live, I wanted to have some stories to tell once I got out. That’s what life’s about. Isn’t it? I knew I was done living in fear and in hopes of what others thought or wanted me to be. The cookie cutter mold wasn’t getting it for me. I knew I wanted to do something respectable yet still macho enough not to get clowned by my partners at home. I damn sure was gonna be no fucking MP (military police). I already considered myself a damn good cook, so that was out of the question.

I came across this brochure for M1 Abrams tanks. Oh shit, this looks interesting. Then I saw another one. Bradley tanks, hmm, the fuck is this, I thought to myself. “Them shits look badass!” So, I read up a little about them, and then I asked my recruiter to give me the scoop on what he knew about the job. He told me you had to be smart to be a tank mechanic, and mechanics got respect. “Everyone respects mechanics,” he stated. “You gonna be with the grunts, but hey, if shit hit the fan, who better to be with though, right,” he asked rhetorically. He did have a point. Then to drive the point home, I was having car troubles at the time anyway. What better job to have, I thought. I’ll be able to work on my own car.”

That’s the lightbulb that went off in my head. At that point, I knew mechanic it was for me I just had to decide what I wanted to work on. Not to go into job specifics too much, but I decided to work on Bradley vehicles because of the versatility. “Bradley mechanic, final answer,” I said. My recruiter looked at me and nodded with a confirmation as if to say, “Yeah, bro, that’s a good pick!” I kind of got the feeling he would have looked at me with a side eye if I said groundskeeper or some bullshit.

“Hey, battles!” he screamed. “We got us a 91 mike!” 91 mike is the job classification for Bradley mechanic. I asked if I would get to travel with that job classification, and my recruiter laughed. “Well, don’t worry about traveling,” he said. “While you’re in the army, the one thing I guarantee you will do…is travel.” Man, he never lied about that. I sat there for a few moments, just soaking in the idea that I was about to be a mechanic. “Ok, so what’s the next step,” I asked. I wanted to know everything right then and there.