Yup, that’s me. (Or at least it was). (Provided photo)

Last week’s column was about my first day in boot camp, at Camp Barry, which was the processing camp. It was an introduction to boot camp, a warm-up act for the main show. We’d be there for only a couple of days and then be formed into a regular company and moved to Camp Dewey, where we’d spend the rest of our eight weeks as recruits.

Once we got to Camp Dewey, things would immediately get better — but we didn’t know that at the time. Then again, at that time we didn’t know nuthin’ about This Man’s Navy, since only hours before we’d been civilians. During one lull in the first day’s chaos, my mind-fog cleared enough for to recall a story from my childhood. It was about Philip Nolan, the sadly-misguided, hopelessly lost and eternally regretful protagonist of “The Man Without a Country.” And in my one brief moment of clarity, it dawned on me: I was Philip Nolan.

By any standard, Camp Barry was a living nightmare. Which was exactly what it was supposed to be. Its purpose was to break us down and reduce us to basic, primal man (there were no wave recruits at Great Lakes when I was there; in fact, I never saw a wave my whole time in the Navy). I assume the theory was once we were shocked, bullied and mind-blown and our only vestige of civilian life was our smallpox vaccinations scars, we’d be starting with a blank slate, ready to be reprogrammed to Navy specs. It was as if we were prisoners of war, which in a symbolic sense, we were.

Boot camp was a frenzy of activity, our only free time being when we slept. In Camp Dewey all that time would be taken up by classes, PT, and everyday housekeeping details, like cleaning, sweeping and swabbing the barracks and, of course, washing our clothes (by hand, I might add, because if that’s how they did it in John Paul Jones’s day, then, by Gawd, that’s how they were gonna do it in ours).

By contrast, in Camp Barry, there was nothing resembling instruction, beyond basic commands barked at us at ear-splitting levels. Instead, we were herded from one intake activity to the next, with no preamble or explanation, thus guaranteeing our uninterrupted confusion and confoundment.

Haircuts were first. We all expected them and they were like the ones we’d had as civilians, except when we got up from the chair this time we were about as bald as newborns.

Next we were ordered into a big room that had 3-by-3-foot squares painted on the floor. We were told to sit on one square, keep our mouths shut and wait, which we did. After about an hour we were each handed a box and pen and told to write our family’s name and home address on it. Then we stripped to our skivs, put all our clothes in the box and sealed it up, ready to be sent to kith and kin, yet one more break with Home Sweet Home.

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The “highlights”

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Because it was such an “Alice in Wonderland” experience, it all runs together in my mind, and I have only flashes of this and that. All in all, I remember only two things from Camp Barry with perfect clarity.

The first was getting issued our uniforms. We were herded into yet one more wooden WWII-era building as innocuous as the rest and given a long strip of paper. On it we put our vital stats — hat size, shoe size, waist size, etc. — in a specific order, and told to stick it in our mouths and chomp down on it, letting it hand down the front of our chests. Then we were given a huge canvas bag, which we shlepped through some freaky maze, along which were guys behind counters. At each counter, when we held out the bag, they threw into it the clothing item of the right size and quantity. At some point, all the stuff would be jammed in our seabags, but I can’t remember how, when or where, that happened.

The second Camp Barry highlight was the dental check. Again, we were jammed in line, guts to butts, and led into a building divided into a mass of cubicles. In the center of each cube was a dental chair, a dental tech flanking each side, one with a clipboard, the other empty handed, both scowling and yelling insults galore at the passing parade. I got hustled into a cube and sat in the chair.

“OK, loser, open wide,” said the tech.

I did.

He leaned over and looked and then shouted out numbers which the guy with the clipboard wrote down. But, this being Camp Barry, he didn’t shout ONLY the numbers. Uh-uh, he managed to also yell a litany of insults, laced with obscenities.

“Hey,” said, “you must be from Ohio.”

He paused.

“You gotta be from Ohio,” he said.

Then he turned to the other guy and, “Dontcha think this jagass is from Ohio?”

“Gotta be,” said the other guy.

“Know how I know that?” said the first guy, neither expecting nor waiting for an answer. “It’s cuz everyone I ever met in the Nav from Ohio is a total moron and loser. Every effin one. And you gotta be one of the biggest.”

“If not the biggest,” said the other guy.

“And believe me,” said the first guy, “I know how effin dumb those Ohio losers are, cuz I’m from Ohio.”

He shook his head in disgust, called out some more numbers, and then told me to get outta his face before he puked.

When was in his Ohio rant he showed no sign of irony that everyone from Ohio was a loser, and he knew it because he was from Ohio. And thus, if we ere to finish that syllogism, he too was a loser.

I had no time to reflect on my insight.

Instead, I got up and joined my line of fellow shell-shocked losers. As we shuffled our way out of the maze, all of us were thinking the same thing. It was while we had no idea what was next, we knew for sure it would not be good.