I often think about the navy. I remember the insect like sound of the P3 Orions idling on the naval air station tarmac in my hometown. A sequestered set of shops, barracks, gyms, bunkers, pubs, golf courses, and hangers that sat behind a checkpoint that proudly declared the admiral's name and obscured the standard issue M4 carbines that sat idle below the guard's poste.
The base closed after 2008. Soviet subs were a distant memory and the Orion's radar faded from the pentagon's flavor of the moment. All of a sudden my junior high was holding lacrosse pre-season in an old navy gym off of Orion way a two lane boulevard that was lined by tall pines that grew in the sandy soil and old P3s decorated with paintings of ace of spades. All of a sudden I was learning to drive in cracking parking lots that sat next to mounds of earth with little smoke stacks coming out of the top.
Seal team six loomed large at the middle school lunch table. Talked about like the new renegade rap collective or heavy metal band that held the weight of young men's angst and aspiration. Call of duty and Star Wars battlefront often became the digital playground after the school day and on the weekends holed up in my parent's attic tv room.
In the fall I ran cross country running through the northern woods as the leaves changed. With that sharp first frost air and a hint of wood smoke in my lungs.
In the spring I tried to fit into the lacrosse team. I lobbied my parents to buy the right gear. I freaked out if I couldn't find the gear they did buy before practice. I saw my friend max tear his ACL and I never found the aggression required to get the pass or steal the ball.
Our school's marching band would attend the memorial day parade marching behind a flat bed truck of old vets sitting on folding chairs wearing tan baseball caps that espoused their tour waving black flags that said veterans for peace.
In high school I interviewed a vet in his little house in the woods for a school project who told me stories about barren hills, mud ridden roads, and the last bottle of saline that saved his 18 year old life as his broken limbs rested before him in the bed of a pickup truck that brought him down from what looked like his last hilltop dance.
We drank chocolate milk from a glass bottle, and after the interview he called his son who was building a wind turbine on top of a hill somewhere in North Carolina.
