Sailor

Everything about the experience was breathtaking and soul searching. It was a time of breaking, creating and hatching from an unknown shell. TJ was on a quest to learn and interprete the meaning of his life. Every step he took was unstable and without any sense of direction. Deep within the crevices of his heart, he somehow knew his path was ordained, orchestrated by a power greater than himself. There were days when his steps seemed to mark time. He seemed to be headed nowhere with no purpose and there were times when he was motivated to walk tall, like the Sailor he longed to become.

The term “Raison” was humiliating to him for the first few weeks of Boot Camp. To think of a Raison, one might picture a dried up shriveled fruit. Very small and insignificant. To TJ, Raison sounded humiliating and degrading but everyone went through the same humiliation. The fact all new recruits were called Raison helped him deal with the term. The concept of Raisons is because new recruits were clean-shaven and the fact of being dry, not knowing cadence or how to march. Raisons were shriveled up because they were always stopping too late of the cadence call or bumping into one another while flanking. To the rear march was nothing but a fiasco early on. Or just tripping and bumping into one another for no apparent reason. In addition to being called Raisons, they wore a white badge a little larger than a silver dollar on a white string hooked onto a front shirt pocket button. The message was clear to all other recruits they came in contact with that they were brand new recruits; or, Raisons. What a humiliating thing, TJ thought and to top it off senior recruits (those ready to graduate) got pleasure out of calling them, “Raisons, step aside!” TJ thought, “our day is coming and I’m sure I will do the same thing when I run into a “Raison.” He was struggling to learn Navy terminology and he looked forward to the day that he could call new recruits “Raison, step aside.” The irony of new terms and learning new things sometimes one may feel they have arrived at a point to broadcast what they have learned. For instance two short weeks into Boot Camp after their hair had begun to grow back, different ones in TJ’s company began pointing out and yelling out to new recruits calling them Raison. New recruits did not have a name, their name was Raison and that’s what they were called and that’s what TJ pridefully called them . . . Raison!

There was a Navy term that TJ embraced and felt affection of the term. It was a new way of saying you are my friend and we have many things in common. The first he heard the term “Shipmate” was when the CC was speaking to another CC he called him “Shipmate.” TJ was not sure if the word was derogatory in nature or harbored feminine characteristic. Having heard negative stories about Sailors in close quarters he just was not sure. What he did not completely understand at the time that if there were any ungodly promiscuity onboard a naval vessel it would not have been because of close quarters but because of what was in the heart of the individuals. The vices of the heart is a truth he did not come to learn until years later. Nonetheless, he got the boldness to ask the Company Commander what does “Shipmate” mean and the CC must have been in a good teaching mood because he actually took the time to explain to him. He led TJ to the Blue Jackets Manual (a kind of Bible for new recruits). The CC said “Shipmate means you are my friend, my confidant, the one I can trust. We are on the same path together. Reliability, dependability so on and so forth”. He gladly embraced the term Shipmate and from that point began calling his new friends in Recruit Company 76-179 his “Shipmate.”