Sandusky Burning, page 3
It was easier for shady people to work at the campground because managers didn’t bother with expensive criminal background checks. Otherwise, half of the clowns on the payroll would have been disqualified. That was disturbing, given these campgrounds were marketed as “family-friendly” places.
I had been staying in Ohio at the Sandusky Shores campground for a few weeks and had been making all kinds of observations. I called it being observant; others may call it being nosy.
Twenty years in the army will make you an observant person. My outstanding observational capabilities were one of the many talents that advanced me from a private to a sergeant first class very rapidly. But then I hit a wall.
Sergeant first class wasn’t a bad rank. It was a career rank, but it wasn’t spectacular.
I stalled at E-7 because I had squandered several critical years of upward mobility floundering in a state of stagnation. I should have been seeking more rigorous leadership opportunities and competing for developmental schools to make myself promotable. But those were the years that things fell apart with my wife, Kelly. The hard-drinking years, the years when things got blurry. I was lucky to keep my career together satisfactorily enough to make it to retirement, let alone worrying about climbing the career ladder.
So many regrets. Maintaining my sanity each day required that I just focus on what went well for me and hope the negatives would eventually fade away. But they never seemed to.
I was born on a military base in Italy but was primarily raised in the US south. There were times throughout my army career when I played up the whole “black country boy from Georgia” persona, but in reality, while I was southern, I was not country.
I spent my childhood in the suburbs of Atlanta and had a similar upbringing to most suburban kids throughout the country, southern, black, or otherwise. Maybe we did hunt and fish more than kids in other regions, but then we returned to our middle-class neighborhoods with houses on quarter-acre lots in the small town of Smyrna.
If it was to my advantage, I could pour on the southern. I could drop y’alls with the best of them, chew tobacco, and knew the lyrics to most country songs. Most of my black friends preferred rhythm-and-blues or rap, but I had always favored country. I could blame that on having a white father from the south.
My dialect was fluid. If I was around northerners, I could strip my accent down to nothing, which was what northern accents were, the absence of an accent. If I was around blacks, I could adjust to a more urban way of speaking. Know your audience.
Growing up, I always knew I would be a soldier. My dad was a soldier, and so that was what I wanted to be. I didn’t have a lot of other options following high school, having been a fairly poor student. I knew I was joining the army and didn’t try particularly hard. The army didn’t care if I got a C in English or math, as long as I had a high school diploma. I didn’t seriously entertain the thought of attending college, and I never applied.
My father was pleased with my decision to enlist; my mother, less so. She took me aside several times before I left and reminded me I could live at home and go to a junior college for a few semesters and establish a good GPA. Then, I could transfer to the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech. But my dad would have hit the roof if I backed out of my enlistment contract.
He was a legit country boy who escaped poverty in rural Georgia by joining the army. Growing up in a household of six siblings with an alcoholic father who couldn’t hold a job, there was never enough to eat. The first time he saw a doctor or dentist was in the army. He would need those medical benefits throughout his enlistment for a wide range of issues, ranging from having pieces of shrapnel extracted from his back in Vietnam to having a compound leg fracture set following a skydiving accident in Alabama.
My childhood was so much easier by comparison. There was the stress of moving a few times when I was very young, while my dad was wrapping up his military career, but we never had to worry where our next meal was coming from.
My father was a hard man, and he had to be. In the 1970s, when he married my mother; mixed couples had a rough time. Especially in the south.
I was an only child. My parents had me in their late thirties, when, by some miracle, I was conceived despite the fact that my mom was told she could never have kids after being injured in a car accident as a teenager. I was only five years old when my dad retired and moved back to Georgia, so I had little recollection of my army brat days.
I had it better than most dark kids in the south, entirely because of my dad. I was generally allowed to fight my own battles, but if an adult was mistreating me, there was a visit from Sergeant Clemmons. And it wouldn’t be pleasant. The stone-faced combat veteran got his point across by any means necessary, and even the most racist of rednecks thought twice about attracting his attention.
One of the greatest lessons he taught me was that flaws are individual traits, not cultural norms. He would not accept excuses from me merely because my skin happened to be darker. He had high expectations of me as a human being.
There were some rough moments growing up, and many of those involved being mistreated for being black. But I never allowed myself to believe I was a victim. I was raised to have morals and character, and that allowed me to persist through the tough times in my childhood.
My mom was also an army brat. Her dad retired in the Midwest, where she met my dad at Fort Riley, Kansas. Although she never went to college, she came across as educated, intelligent, and well-spoken. She worked clerical civilian jobs at the various bases where my dad was stationed throughout the years.
Although she knew my enlistment was inevitable, she broke down and cried when we said our goodbyes at the Greyhound station in downtown Atlanta. It was only a short bus ride from Atlanta to Columbus, where I would then be transported to nearby Fort Benning for basic training.
There was a fair amount of racism in the army, but it was much less prevalent than in general society. Affirmative action was firmly rooted in the military by the time I joined, so promotions and other preferences were afforded to minorities across the board.
Basic training was the great equalizer. Boys were mixed together from different races, regions, subcultures, and economic backgrounds. We discovered we weren’t all that much different in most respects.
During my first ten years in the army, everything came easily to me. I was physically fit, highly teachable, easy to get along with, and did what was asked of me. I volunteered for every school I could and found my way to the Airborne, Ranger, and Pathfinder schools.
I was even a drill sergeant for a few years. I didn’t fit the stereotype of a drill sergeant, as I wasn’t brash, loud, or aggressive. That made me stand out in a positive way. Sure, there were times when the job required that I rant and scream a bit, but comparatively, I was level-headed. And the drill sergeant hat was pretty cool; there were times I wished I had saved mine for laughs.
I met a nice girl named Kelly while stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, and we got married. We had two kids, a son, Mike Jr., and a daughter, Sadie. Life was good.
I was in the right place at the right time with the right skills when the 9/11 attacks happened in 2001. As a staff sergeant with all kinds of credentials, I found myself in Iraq with my Ranger unit.
I did a few tours there and a few more in Afghanistan. It was tough on the family, but we made it through.
I survived combat with only a few scratches. The closest call was while traveling in a Humvee in Fallujah in a convoy directly behind a truck that ran over an improvised explosive device. A soldier in that vehicle died, and another lost his legs. It would have been me rolling over that bomb if our vehicles happened to be sequenced differently that morning.
After all these schools and deployments, my Class A dress uniform was pretty damn colorful, with a lot of patches and ribbons. I had the right resumé to keep advancing. I was sergeant major material, maybe Pentagon material.
Everything began to unravel after my daughter died. It was sudden and unexpected. It was especially devastating because it was my fault.
My resilience was what got me through life during the challenging times, and in a moment, it disappeared. I couldn’t be there for Kelly. I couldn’t be there for Mike Jr. I wasn’t there for myself. I faded away and never really returned.
It was only the momentum of my early years in the army that allowed me to remain in the service far beyond my usefulness. I rotated out of the forward infantry units and received main post assignments. During my final enlistment contract, I was basically just a supply sergeant. I received mercy waivers from sympathetic commanders for PT tests and rifle marksmanship requalification.
I lived on post in the barracks with the junior enlisted. Although I was given the courtesy of having my own room, beyond that, I was essentially another private.
Except I was outdrinking the lower enlisted. I was a solitary drunk, and so when I was into the bottle, I remained in my room. People suspected I had a problem, but there was no real evidence I had a problem. As long as I was subtle about bringing the full bottles in and getting rid of the empties while staying off the radar of my leadership, no one was going to confront me about it.
I was a moderate drinker before my daughter died. Going out and tying one on with the boys would happen here and there, but I was never a daily drinker. I devolved into being a daily drinker. It took all my willpower not to drink while in uniform, but the moment I was on my own time, the alcohol began to flow. It was the only way to numb my despair.
My career ended where it began, at Fort Benning. With my twenty-year service date approaching, the first sergeant called me into his office and laid out my options: retire immediately or the process would be set into motion to discharge me for failing to meet basic standards.
On my last day, I loaded up everything I owned into the back of my little green Chevy S-10. It had a lockable bed cover so no one would be tempted to steal my worthless possessions. After twenty years of service, I wasn’t leaving with much more than I had arrived with as a teenager.
I left the fort and drove north on I-85 without a destination in mind. I had a modest military pension coming, but no savings and no civilian skills that would earn me more than minimum wage. At thirty-nine years old, and with potentially another thirty-nine plus years to live, I was without use or purpose.
I drove through Atlanta and continued north. My parents were both dead. I had no siblings. I hadn’t communicated with my childhood friends in decades. What would be the point of returning “home”?
I had also lost touch with my army buddies. At one time, my army friends were my family. Now I didn’t even know where to find them. Not that I was going to try.
When I pulled off for gas near the Tennessee border, I passed by a little dealership with used cars and RVs for sale. Intrigued, I drove over and took a look at the RVs.
The salesman came over and chatted me up. He was a good ole boy and condescending at first. I was just a dumb black, driving a junky little truck that he could take advantage of. His respect level increased when I mentioned I was active-duty army. I was still in the military, technically. I was able to take my unused leave in advance of being discharged, so I was on “terminal leave.”
As far as anyone knew, I was still fully employed by Uncle Sam. The salesman ran a credit check, and I was able to get a line of credit for ten thousand dollars. A beat-up twenty-seven-foot aluminum Airstream RV was soon mine.
The dealership had a supply store, and I bought most of the RV supplies the salesman recommended, while their service department installed a hitch kit on my truck. A short time later, I was towing it out of the lot.
I found a campground along the highway a few hours north, paid the lot fee for a week, and set up. There was a Walmart nearby, and I picked up groceries and the general supplies I would need. Blankets, pillows, linens, a lawn chair, tools, and a toolbox. I also bought a cheap mountain bike and a bike rack that fastened to the back of the RV.
There was a county liquor store down the street from Walmart. I bought a bottle of vodka, a bottle of whiskey, a two-liter of tonic water, a two-liter of Coke, plastic cups, and a bag of ice.
On my way back, I stopped at the campground office and bought a bundle of firewood. I made myself a turkey, cheese, and mayonnaise sandwich on white bread, with Doritos and a pickle on the side. I also made myself a very stiff Jack and Coke to wash down my first dinner as a camper.
I assessed my financial situation. My current expenses were the RV payment, truck and RV insurance, campsite fees, fuel, food, and drink. This was balanced against my last active-duty paycheck and future pension payments. I owned the truck, and the camper payment would go away in five years. This was sustainable indefinitely.
My pension checks would be automatically deposited into my bank account, so I didn’t need a permanent address to receive funds. I could be totally transient and still get paid regularly.
This was the kind of freedom and anonymity I needed years earlier when my life had gone sideways. I had found escape in the bottle when I lost my family, but now I was capable of being physically secluded in my own world whenever I wanted to be.
As tough and resilient as I was perceived to be, as established by all the military patches and medals I earned throughout my career, I lacked emotional resilience. I had folded after the first major serving of personal adversity in my life. Sitting beside my first campfire as a retiree, none of that mattered. The army was out of my life. My ex-wife, son, and deceased daughter were out of my life. I only remained in my life because I couldn’t physically walk away from myself.
Five years had passed since I was discharged from the army. Driving the same truck and living in the same RV, I had traveled a lot of miles and picked up a lot of camping experience along the way. I had stayed at hundreds of campgrounds, migrating back and forth to different regions of the country according to the season.
The Midwest in the early spring had the best camping. I loved the trees. It was amazing how they all transformed so quickly from skeletal at the end of winter to completely green by late spring. The weather was great, and the bugs, snakes, and rodents were generally out in much smaller numbers than in the south.
I camped across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin in May and stayed around that region until late September. Then I would move slowly southward, sometimes heading a little westward. I wanted to head to the West Coast at some point and camp along the ocean in California and the Pacific Northwest, but I hadn’t made it there yet.
People were generally nice and tolerant at the campgrounds. A middle-aged black man camping by himself definitely concerned some people. A lone male traveler of any race was always a little unsettling. Although I received a few glares from time to time, most of my fellow campers seemed fine coexisting with me.
Colorado was occasionally on my mind. That was where Kelly and Mike Jr. likely were. Her parents were still there, assuming they were still alive. But I could never work up the courage to reengage.
I had the same general daily routine. Each morning, I woke up with some degree of a hangover, depending on how deep into the bottle I was the night prior. I would have breakfast according to what my stomach could handle and usually ate outside in my lawn chair. If there was a chill in the air, I built a fire.
Sometimes I would walk or ride my bike to the campground clubhouse and get a newspaper. My cell was a basic flip phone without data, and I didn’t own a computer, so I got my news the old-fashioned way. Aside from the newspaper, I also listened to local radio here and there. After breakfast, I would spend an hour or two maintaining the camper.
I took a short nap each day to help recover from my hangover. If things were real bad, I would sweeten my morning coffee with a few splashes of whiskey to take the edge off.
Lunch and dinner were random. I might explore the area and find a diner or cheap Mexican cantina to eat at. Otherwise, I would make a sandwich or cook a burger on the grill. At dusk, I would build a fire and have a few drinks. Some nights I remembered going off to bed, other nights I didn’t.
These five years hadn’t changed me too much physically. I probably gained ten pounds. My fitness level had decreased, but maybe some of the walking and cycling kept me from slipping too far.
I stepped away from my RV window and walked to my small bathroom. After I splashed water onto my face, I took a look at myself in the mirror. I had aged a bit in the past five years. Most of my dark hair was still present, cut short enough to be within military regulations. My hairline had crept back, and gray was starting to appear at my temples.
My brown eyes seemed to have faded a shade, but that was probably just my imagination. I had crow’s feet, small black bags under my eyes, and the skin from underneath my chin was a little too loose. No one had ever accused me of being handsome, but I had always been considered average looking, at worst.
I went back and gazed out the window again. Being in the military for so many years made me feel as though I could read people. A new soldier would arrive at the unit, and after observing him for a short time, I could get a feel for who he was. Sure, I was wrong occasionally, but for the most part, I was effective at sizing people up.
Looking at this fat Harley guy fiddling around with the electrical box at lot 66, I was able to conclude a few things. He was a scammer. He was lazy. He was shifty. He didn’t know what he was doing. What could he possibly tell by staring at an electrical box? He was flicking the breaker switches back and forth, but since nothing was plugged in, how was that helpful? The guy was just killing time.
He turned around and caught me staring at him. I had the irrational urge to duck but didn’t. He faked a smile and waved. I faked a smile and waved back.
