The U. S. Navy taught me how to ride horses. I don’t know many others who can make this claim. If you are one who can, reach out. I’d like to hear about how that happened. This is how it came about for me:
I couldn’t get a security clearance. My orders, coming out of boot camp, were to Monterey, California, to attend school where they would teach me Russian so that I could listen and translate what was being broadcast over the radio. The assignment required a security clearance. Mine came back denied. It was my dad’s fault. He was on a list.
Ramparts magazine was a political magazine published from 1962 to 1975. It was politically left. My dad worked for them. He wasn’t a writer or an editor or anyone who had anything to do with the content of the issues. He was a sales guy. He ran around convincing people that their companies would benefit from advertising in the magazine. He was good at it. He also worked for Natural History and Smithsonian. But those pubs didn’t get him on a list. Ramparts did. And because he was on the list, my clearance was denied, and I couldn’t go to Monterey to learn Russian.
Instead, I entered the Kafka-esque world of the sailor with no orders. Navy limbo. I was sent to a school in Bethesda to learn how to type. When I got out, I still had no orders, and I ended up on a work crew which was, in retrospect, a chain gang without the chains. We went out each day with pick and shovel and dug up concrete pylons along the roadside that helped keep vehicles from rolling over into a ditch. I think that rolling over into a ditch is only a bit worse than hitting a concrete pylon, but I wasn’t being asked. We carefully raised each pylon four inches and reburied them at their new height.
Blisters turned to calluses, and two weeks later, orders came in for everyone in the holding company–except for me. I was assigned to another two weeks in a newly formed holding company and we went out and dug up the same pylons again, this time burying them four inches deeper. I don’t think busy work with a pick and shovel is the best follow up to typing school, but I wasn’t being asked.
I finally got orders. I was sent to Morocco. The U.S. had a communications station in a little place called Sidi Yahya El Gharb. It’s east of Kenitra which is north of Rabat which is north of Casablanca. It’s a dry place, quite desert-like with a hardscrabble surface to the land, not the drifting dune mountains of the Saharan movie scenes, though the Sahara does extend into Morocco—all the way across North Africa from Egypt—further than the distance between Denver and Chicago.
The somewhat secret base (at the time, now it’s in Wikipedia) existed, we were told, to facilitate communications between the Atlantic Fleet and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The problem with being stationed there was that there was nothing to do. If you left the base, you could not be in uniform. That was impolitic.
Not quite nothing. There was a chess club run by the chaplain. I joined that. There was a drama club. I joined that (and ended up directing a play, a precursor to later majoring in theater at U. Mass. nearly 8 years later). There was an on-base bar. I joined that, but I wasn’t any good at drinking, so I gave up on that.
And there was a riding stable run by a retired Moroccan cavalry officer. I joined that. And that’s how I learned to ride horses in the U.S. Navy. I also learned how to ride camels, but I figured out pretty quickly that the camel is not truly a domesticated animal, so I gave up on that.
I gave up on the things I should have given up on. The U.S. gave up on my dad and me. I don’t think they should have, but I wasn’t being asked.