According to Alfred Lord Tennyson, spring is when “… a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

Assuming that’s true, what about an old man’s fancy?

I don’t know about the rest of ’em, but what I think about is boot camp.

On the 20th of April, 1969, I arrived at Great Lakes Recruit Training Command, about to follow in the wake, so to speak, of such nautical luminaries as John Paul Jones, Chester L. Nimitz and Alexander Slidell Mackenzie.

Almost all my eight weeks there are a blur, probably because I — like everyone else — was constantly moving, harassed and sleep-deprived. Every day was full of classes on all sorts of Navy stuff — marlinspike seamanship, telephone talking, military justice, chains of command, and on and on — but the fact is I’ve forgotten all but two of them.

The reason I forgot all the others is because they were eminently forgettable. And the reason they’re forgettable is because the “teachers” couldn’t have cared less about the subjects, the recruits and boot camp itself. They’d be chosen for that duty based on one thing — random selection. They’d had no choice in their orders and hated being there even more than we did.

And why wouldn’t they? They wanted to be at sea, getting liberty all over the world, hitting up all the exotic gin mills and fleshpots within their grasp … and wallet. Instead, they were drowning in a sea of recruits, those almost-civilians who knew nothing about the military, and even less about the Navy. Plus they had to keep our hours, getting up way before dawn, then spending the day shlepping us from pillar to post (or if you prefer, stanchion to stanchion). And all the time, while their bodies may have been with the boot-a**es, their minds were in the Acey-Deucey or Chief’s Club, swilling cheap booze and swapping sea stories with their equally-miserable peers.

The two classes I remember were First Aid and Firefighting.

First Aid stuck with me, only because of the instructor. He was a squared-away First Class Corpsman who obviously cared about his subject and us learning it. He also treated us like human beings, explained his material perfectly and even joked with us from time to time. To use a hokey nautical metaphor, he was a beacon of light in an ocean of darkness.

As for the Firefighting class? While all the other classes were an hour, Firefighting lasted an entire day. The day before it, our company commander told us we’d be in class for eight hours, and to be sure to take our cigarettes. Take cigarettes out of the barracks? Cigarettes were strictly forbidden anywhere but the barracks and smoke breaks were few and far between. Since most of us smoked, we also threw a full eight-week nicotine fit. And now we were ordered to take smokes with us? It made no sense whatsoever.

We were bussed to the site, which was a desolate field somewhere on the outer fringe of boot camp. There were a couple of cinder block buildings, a bunch of huge steel steel drums, each about as big as a backyard swimming pool and maybe four feet high. As soon as we got off the bus we were given rain suits. They were thick oversized rubber, the pants held up by suspenders, the jackets knee-length and with hoods.

Then the instructors introduced themselves. They were a marked contrast to other instructors. They were low-key, easy-going, almost avuncular. I think their job made them that way. They were damage controlmen, arguably the most important and probably the most dangerous job in the fleet. When everything hit the fan through fire, explosion, breaches in the hull (or God forbid all three at once), they and their expertise and guts were the only things keeping the rest of the crew from becoming waterlogged shark snacks tartare.

The class itself was divided into a morning and afternoon portion. The morning was spent learning about diesel fires and how to fight them. First, the instructors showed us how to handle the hoses. Then they broke us into teams and had us do it on dry runs. After that, they took us to the steel drums, which they told us contained oil of some sort. After that, each team manned a hose, they lit the drums on fire, turned on the hoses, and we lumbered forward to put out the flames, as we’d been told to do. Between the fire and the huge choking clouds of black smoke, it was a sobering experience, to say the least. English teachers would always rave about how horrifying James Joyce’s description of hell in “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” was. To which I say that only proved how Joyce and the teachers had never been to the boot camp firefighting class.

After that, we had lunch and started the second part of the class, which began with the smokehouse.

If you think of a smokehouse as a quaint little cabin in the woods where some grizzled old hillbilly (or a clean-shaven younger hillbilly wannabe) was preparing all sorts of meats for yummy snacks, fergit it. This was one of the aforementioned blockhouses. It was rectangular, low to the ground, maybe 50 yards long. At each of the narrow ends was a big steel door. Leading up to it was a set of four cement steps; another set of steps led down to the blockhouse floor.

“OK, listen up,” said one of the instructors. “First, line up two abreast, in descending height. Then lock arms with the man next to you and grab ahold of the jacket of the man in front of you.”

We did as told.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he went on. “I’ll open the door and you’ll walk in there slowly, and keep walking — slowly. Once you’re in the there, it’ll fill with smoke. After that, both doors will be closed. You’ll be in total darkness, but you’re not going to panic, and you’re especially not going to run. You’re also not to hold your breath. Just keep walking, keep your cool, and wait till the door at the other end opens. Once it does, you will walk, not run, to the door and go out it in step and in order.”

Panic? It was an exercise — they’d done this thousands of times, they knew what they were doing, and there was nothing dangerous about it. Since I knew that, I also knew it may not be a walk in the park, but how bad could it be? I found out in short order.

Our line moved forward — 44 pairs of guys who if we knew nothing else about what would happen, we knew we’d keep our cool.

Since we’d lined up according to height, I was in the last pair, arm locked with Pat Love, a good kid from Massena who I’d been with since the recruiting station in Syracuse. I looked at Pat and gave a “no sweat” shrug; he smiled back. Then we moved forward, cool as cool could be.

Once we were all in the blockhouse, the door slammed behind me. Now the only light was from other other end of the building, with its door open. So far, so good.

We kept walking, slowly, in step, breathing in perfect control, in and out, in and out.

Then three things happened.

First, smoke filled the room. And when I say it filled it, I mean it filled it almost instantly. It didn’t creep in or drift in or even waft in. Instead, it blasted in, seemingly from every side of the building at once.

Second, the other door slammed shut, leaving us in pitch-black, smoke in our eyes, our lungs, our ears and for all I knew our souls. Breathing got ragged, pulses and blood pressure spiked, en masse. But we still moved in unison, mostly because we were all locked together with death grips on each other’s arms and jackets.

Third, after what seemed like damned near forever, the door ahead of us opened. A shaft of light shot into the room — the light of Salvation. And at that moment, any sense of keeping either order or cool vanished, instead replaced by screaming, swearing, and a mad dash to door.