March 26, 1985, was my first day of basic training for the U.S. Army. I was just eight days away from my 22nd birthday and was feeling old compared to the other guys around me, who were mostly 18 to 20 years old, but looking back at these photos; I feel like I looked like I was about 15 years old. Raging inside was an angry 12-year-old who believed he was in an old man’s body. I signed up for this gig because I was bored while attending DeVry Technical Institute. I thought I wanted a degree in Computer Information Systems, but I hated accounting. But more than that, I was bored.

One morning while doing homework with MTV playing in the background, an ad came on with a jingle about Being All That You Can Be with promises of jobs in Japan, Korea, and Germany. That song echoed in my head later as I sat in a classroom waiting for a professor who was habitually late, except today, we also were missing his assistants, so nothing was going on. Replaying the ad in mind, I picked up on the “Guaranteed career opportunity in Germany.” I asked a friend to watch my stuff and ran to the payphone to call the local recruiting office. By that afternoon, I’d signed up to join the U.S. Army.

Basic training was a love-hate relationship for me. Somehow, I was made class leader, which was horrible as I had never been chosen for anything as a first pick. It might have had something to do with coming in as in E-3 or Private First Class due to my college credit, or maybe it was because I was an egghead, I wasn’t sure.

Getting fit was rigorous as I could barely run, could hardly do ten pushups, and situps weren’t a strong suit either. While I wasn’t fat, I wasn’t very physically active. That changed. After nine weeks at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, I could do 54 pushups in 2 minutes and 70 situps in the same time and was able to run 2 miles in under 16 minutes. At this point in my military career, I had no regrets about what I signed up for. To this day, I believe that every American should be required to complete basic training.

Around June 1st, I boarded a bus north to Indianapolis, Indiana, where the second leg of my training would begin at Ft. Benjamin Harrison. My memory is foggy about how long this training session lasted, but I believe it was eight weeks.

Like in basic training, I was made class leader on arrival, but the high point of my time here was leading flag detail. Here, I was at the Army’s financial, clerical, and information technology training center, and I was leading ten other soldiers to raise and lower the U.S. Flag at an American military facility; I was astonished. For this detail, I was the NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge), two halyard pullers were upfront, and eight flag handlers were between us.

Out of basic training, we were allowed some amount of normalcy. Sunglasses and contact lenses returned along with civilian clothing. Our classmates included women whom we had only seen from a distance while in Kentucky. Maybe the confidence of being first and out front went to my head because this is when things fell apart.

This was my locker, and somehow, I thought this was my private space in a place I should have understood private space didn’t exist. Then, one day, after an early morning fire drill that was accompanied by an inspection, I was brought in front of my commanding officer for breaking the rules. I had been stashing contraband food items in my locker.

I was crushed. I was being relieved of my class leadership position, but at least I wasn’t losing the rank that I had just recently earned. The saving grace through this ordeal was that my commander, Captain Rivera, took a minute to talk to a rather dispirited Specialist Wise. He voiced that he understood how this affected me so negatively, but these kinds of setbacks are part of life and that when they happen, it is upon us to “turn and face the music,” especially for actions we’ve brought upon ourselves.

His words resonated with me, and I got on with it. Soon, I was dancing in the barracks, almost breathing easy that I no longer had to be the focus of anger from other soldiers who didn’t enjoy being told what to do by a person they felt was their equal, not their superior.

Every free minute to be me was cherished. All I could focus on was that I was going to be in Germany before the end of summer. The training was easy, and even the regimented life was a welcome relief from the purposeless wandering around trying to figure out when life was going to give me what I wanted when I was “back on the block.”

For the first time in my life, I was fitting in, to some small degree, but I later realized that this was because of the conditioning of the military working so hard on removing our differences. I was seriously enjoying this moment, though it came at the cost of drinking with everyone, hanging out, going to the movies, baseball games at Victory Field, and more drinking.

All the while, I held on to my interest in photography, and with the extra money that I was saving, not having any expenses, I was able to expand the equipment I had access to…until I reached Germany. With graduation arriving so quickly after I first arrived at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, I was soon about to be underway once more. But first, I needed to head to Buffalo, New York, for a family reunion on my mother’s side.

Everything I hated about being in Germany is right here in this photo, but that story will have to find its way into another blog post chronicling my rocky relationship with the U.S. Army during the Cold War.

And then, only two years, seven months, and 21 days later, I was out of my contract with the military.

I went from this moment in the forest outside Rhein-Main Airbase with the largest gathering of generals in a single location since immediately after World War II, including General Colin Powell (not pictured) and Bernard W. Rogers, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the guy with four stars on his shoulder), to landing at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where I orchestrated my departure from ridiculous servitude. How I did that is embedded in a story about Los Angeles performance artist Johanna Went, which you can read by clicking here.

[This post was written in April 2021]