In The Army Now...

Today was the day. I was up at 4AM, and Sgt. Hill was here at 5 to take me to Denver. We got there pretty quickly, and at 5:30 I headed in with the rest of the enlisters and the people shipping out to Basic. Things moved pretty smoothly at first: I got my name tag and headed to medical for my weigh-in. I was there with about 30 other guys, either shippers or guys in the same boat as me. I focused on my tricks for standing taller, but still only made 71.5 inches. Apparently they don't round up. However, my weight was right on the dot for standard, 194 lbs, so I passed. That figure means I've lost 12 lbs since my last trip there 30 November, and most of it was the last 2 weeks!

After that, things slowed down. I gave my nessicary paperwork to the Army office, then waited for them to call me up. And I waited, and I waited. Lunch came at 11 and passed. I was starting to think they had forgotten my file, but I also knew they had to deal with the shippers first and get them out of the building, so I waited. Finally, after about 4 hours, they called me into the office.

I went in with the career counselor, and we discussed what was available and what might interest me. They had a couple of admin jobs similar to Mike's, but one that really piqued my interest was a Communication Support Specialist. It came with a $3000 bonus, $100 extra monthy on my GI Bill money, and Top Security clearance! And according to the counselor, this particualr job is not likely to deploy because the unit is an Area Support Group for the mid-Western US, so that's their only area of responsibility. The job also sounds good; I'll be repairing encrypted secure-channel radio equipment. Not exactly computers, but certainly usable skills.

The only big downside is the training length; 9 weeks for Basic, and another 18 for job training (AIT). Since I decided to do those both at once, I'll be gone for 27 weeks, about 6 months. My tenative ship date is May 31, and I'll be back sometime in the beginning of December. I'm just hoping and praying that there's time between trainings to come home for a couple of days.

So after I decided on the job and talked to a different counselor about the security clearance, I was back to shuffling paperwork between offices. Finally, at about 4 PM, they called me up to swear in. They took us back to a relatively small red-carpet room with the flags of all the services. In walked Major Morales, a kind of short, Spanish-looking man. He gave us the speech that sounded reminicent of a serious granduation speech, in which he told us we came to the service for many different reasons, but now it didn't really matter. All that mattered was for us to Serve, Protect, and Defend. We swore in, and now I am a Private. For the next 6 years, I'm a member of the Army Reserve.