There was a moment in Basic Training when I realized that maybe my childhood experiences weren’t the norm. It was the first hour after our bus dropped us off in front of the boxy building that would be our barracks, definitely not our home, for the next 6 weeks. The instructors were surprisingly quiet, but then again it was after 10pm. We made it upstairs to our section and schlumped our way in as the Training Instructors (TI) herded us forward and told us to pick a bunk, any damn bunk, and dump everything out of our bags on the bunk in front of us. At this point is when the yelling started. The TIs no longer spoke; they yelled. They tossed my fellow recruits’ stuff off the bunks, they mocked whatever they could, and they created general one-sided mayhem as they moved down the line of bunks in the bay. The goal was to shake everyone up and to see just how each of us reacted to their aggression.

It was all very loud and confusing, just as they intended. I didn’t really get to see too much of my fellow recruits’ reactions, because I wasn’t supposed to turn my head and look. It was very easy though to sense their progress since they were the ones making most of the noise, outside of the classic,

“Yes Ma’am!”

“Do I look like an officer to you?”

“No Ma’am”

“You will call me Sargent Powell or Sgt. I work for a living“

“Yes Ma’am, I mean yes Sgt”

“What did you say? I can’t hear you!”

“Yes SGT Powell!”

There were 52 recruits in the flight. Introductions like these lasted at least an hour. I was subject to my own introduction somewhere in the middle. SGT Powell showed up, her nose nearly touching mine. She hadn’t stopped yelling yet from the last recruit. As she began her spiel, I realized that I felt right at home. I knew that I couldn’t smile, that would wreck the SGT’s whole evening. Here was this woman attempting to scare me by the force of her diaphragm, and all she managed to do was put me at ease. I knew how to do this. I knew it was all posturing on her part. I knew this because my father was a United States Marine veteran. His default mode was to yell. His default settings were learned in his own boot camp experience and in the final days of the Korean conflict. Although SGT Powell was doing her best, this was Air Force Basic Training. She didn’t have the bugged-out eyes, nor the pulsing vein in her forehead, and her neck didn’t inflate like a bullfrog’s. I let it wash over me. She didn’t like my nail file. It had to go. She didn’t like a whole bunch of stuff. That was expected. I almost felt bad that I had deprived her of the satisfaction of disliking my hair since I had cut off the neon orange tail before traveling.

The TI’s blew out of the barracks like the final gusts of a thunderstorm. They left behind 52 young women, who came from all over the country, with as varied a set of backgrounds as you would expect. The only missing demographic was someone wealthy. But not a one of them, other than me, felt right at home. Those TIs spent the next 6 weeks trying to get under the skin of each of us. I can’t tell you the ways they used for the other women. I can tell you though that they purposefully mispronounce my name, made me a squad leader, and generally harassed me the entire 6 weeks. They never got under my skin though. That was where I differed from most of my fellow recruits. If someone told me to march into a wall, well I wasn’t about to stop my feet but I also wasn’t going into the wall. I grew up raking soil in straight lines, even under the bushes. I was used to the only version of a compliment being a silent stare and a grunt. My childhood was filled with meaningless busywork. If I was injured, there were 2 responses available: did I hurt the wall or did I want to be given something to really cry about.

I grew up in a world where there was everyday fear, and real fear. All the yelling, screaming, hollering and threats can just roll on by because they’re usually an attempt at coercion. If someone is yelling, they are trying to scare you into complying. I don’t enjoy being screamed at any more than I enjoy someone trying to manipulate me by flattery. Flattery is probably the more dangerous approach because it can catch you off guard. When I am told that I should be afraid, or that I should be happy, or that I should be livid, I have to look at why someone wants me to feel that emotion. Most of the time it is because someone wants something from me. It might be nothing more than they need to feel that they are taken seriously. I won’t take someone seriously who consistently makes threats and defaults to yelling. I refuse to be afraid of words. The future is not created yet. I can take precautions without living in fear.

Why would my father refuse to give compliments? Years later, I learned that he viewed giving compliments as a net negative because he believed that once someone was praised that they would stop trying to do better. I have no idea where he got that belief from, but I heartily disagree with it. Why the rake lines in the flower beds? He probably just liked rake lines. One of my last memories of my father, before his dementia began, was the childlike enjoyment on his face the morning after I came home on leave from technical school. I was sleeping soundly in my old bed in my old room and that man had the nerve, the absolute gall, to bring out his cassette recorder with reveille blasting as loud as those little speakers could go. I flew out of bed, eyes wide open, only to see him standing there in the doorway with the largest smile I have ever seen on his face. I growled at him for general purposes and went back to bed. He must have laughed for days. He told everyone about it. Just like he told everyone I had made Sgt without a word to me. Even the strangest families can still have some good memories.