Thoughts on FOX-TV's "Boot Camp" reality show (June 2001) originally published in Bucks County Writer (2002) At 9:15 on a Wednesday night I'm sitting in an empty bar overlooking the Delaware River, having a beer with Joe Colby. Joe is an unshaven bear of a man, fifty-something, with a faded USMC tattoo on his left forearm. One summer afternoon when Joe Colby was eighteen, a smiling man in a uniform showed up at the door of the Colby home and told Joe it was time to go. In those days, if you didn't go with the smiling man the FBI would haul you off to jail and your neighbors would stop speaking to your parents. "How old are you again?" he asks, wiping beer foam from his mustache. "Thirty." "It was in your lifetime," he says. "I know." On the TV screen over the bar a young "recruit" in the FOX army is chatting calmly with the camera, talking about $500,000 and motivation. "Motivation?" Joe asks quietly, and sips his beer. He is silent for a long time. Then he says, "I remember rifle qualification at Paris Island. I was the most motivated motherfucker there that day. Didn't need a DI to get me motivated. My cousin come home in a bag the month before -- got it from a bayonet in the throat." He pauses, then downs his beer in one long swallow. "A bayonet. In the twentieth-fucking-century." Joe motions to the bartender. "The reason he got it, though," he continues, "was cause his rifle jammed and I guess he didn't get it together in time. Couldn't remember what he'd been taught. That's the picture I was drawn, anyway. So me, I figure that's one thing I won't ever let happen. Me, I'm gonna know that fucking M16 up and down and in and out." The barman brings another mug for Joe and he picks it up. "Motivated? Yeah, I know about that." * The scenario for "Boot Camp" is simple: sixteen men and women with no prior military experience will attempt to get through a pseudo boot camp run by four former Marine DIs. They'll be put through the misery of enlisted military training, calling on every muscle in their body and every bit of inner-strength they can find to make it through -- or some happy shit like that. Only one will go all the way, and that winner -- survivor -- walks with $500,000. When I heard about the new show I got on the horn with as many veterans as I could find in my address book. Most had either served with me, or around the same time. A few, like Joe Colby, were old enough to be my father. I asked them to watch the show and, with as open of a mind as possible, give me their reaction. Joe Colby said he could only watch it over beer, and that I would have to buy the beer. The others -- most of them strewn around the country, fat and happy in their civilian lives -- agreed to e-mail or call with their thoughts. One flatly refused to watch on the grounds she would miss "The West Wing." Thinking I knew these folks pretty well, I expected to get one of two responses from most of them: A) It's a shame. It's not real, the whole thing is fake, the show doesn't portray how hard basic training really is, how scary, how life-altering. Or, on the other side of the coin, B) It's a shame. The military is in shambles, real basic training is a cake walk these days, FOX TV has tougher standards than our own military. Anyway, those were the thoughts going through my head as I settled in to watch the first episode, the two arguments I was prepared to choose between and defend. But when Joe mumbled a goodbye and left the bar in disgust ten minutes before the episode ended, all I felt was a sadness, a great and heavy sadness washing over me -- for myself, for my friends, and even for the four "DIs" and sixteen "recruits" I had just watched on the TV. It was a shame, but a different shame than I'd envisioned. The bartender comes by and asks if I need another beer. "SPORTS," I say to him. He raises his eyebrows in a question. "That's what Joe Colby's cousin forgot. Slap, pull, observe, release, tap, shoot. When your rifle jams. That would have saved him from the bayonet." "I'll bring your check," the bartender says. * The first e-mail comes in late that night, from James O'Brien in St. Paul. James is twenty-eight now, with a suit-and-tie job and just a year away from a college degree. His wife is pregnant, and he hopes to be a school teacher before he hits thirty. James is tall and good-looking and one of the most fun people I know. He's got a Grateful Dead bear tattooed on his leg, and owns every book Garrison Keillor ever wrote. My favorite memory of him is from late 1994, the two of us -- in full combat gear and camouflage -- playing guitar and dancing with twenty or so sick, skinny Haitian children in the village of Jacmel just days after their neighborhood had been wiped off the map by a minor hurricane. That's my favorite memory; my most vivid memory is shorter, and darker: In the post chapel at Ft. Eustis, VA, James is in dress greens, and from deep inside his slack, Deadhead self, he calls up the training instilled in him by some Drill Sergeant somewhere. He executes a perfect left-face, and hooks his right arm and hand up into the sharpest salute I have ever seen, bidding the best farewell he can to our friend in the flag-draped casket before him. His e-mail is simple, cold, and to the point: "My prize, as it were, for completing basic, was the opportunity to pay the bills, eat, and get a flu shot each year. And my only chance for college. The challenge [of the show] appears to be the same, to overcome mental and physical torment in accomplishing given tasks. The problem I have is what have the contestants risked or given up? What do they have at stake.?" * With one episode down, the sympathy character on Boot Camp is Haar, the thirty-something female pig farmer. She's overweight and out of shape but has a made-for-prime-time heart of gold and winning attitude. Any veteran would recognize Haar: there's a Haar -- male or female -- in every class. Except the pig farm would have just recently gone out of business, and there'd be six kids to support. If a real Haar managed to actually make it through a real boot camp, her prize wouldn't be half-a-million dollars but a minimum-wage job fifteen hours from home. Plus the constant threat of being sent overseas for a year at a time with no one but her mom or sister to care for her kids. An e-mail comes from Lisa Earl, in Ohio. Lisa was neither a pig farmer nor a mother nor overweight when she joined the army at the age of nineteen. She was a girl with a sense of adventure, looking to get out of her small town and maybe pay for an education. She joined a military where women are in theory fully integrated except for front-line positions. She spent the next year trying to ignore regular episodes of blatant sexual harassment and discrimination. Then, in 1992, she was deployed to Mogadishu, the text-book study of how there is no such thing as a front line in combat. She spent almost a year there, rifle in hand. Her e-mail is shorter than the one from James: "I'll never forgive you for making me watch that." Quickly on the heels of Lisa comes a note from Ben Scruggs, a folk and bluegrass DJ for a small radio station in New Hampshire. Ben joined up in 1984, never saw combat, and spent most of his enlistment happily sipping dark beer in Germany. Ben was done with the army before he even walked out the door; he says he doesn't regret it, but he sure didn't love it. Although you couldn't find two more different people, his words match Lisa's: "I feel like I need to go disinfect myself." * On a blazing hot day in January 1993, on an army Mike Boat near Kismaayo, Somalia, Sam Pitski and I strapped on our Kevlar helmets, pulled flak jackets over our chests, and locked and loaded our M16 rifles. As our sergeant, John "Yard Dog" Caldwell, maneuvered the steel landing craft, Sam and I crossed the welldeck, climbed to the top of the ramp, and aimed our M16s at a big wooden sailing vessel headed for the American port compound. Sam had been in the army a year longer than me, and was everything I worried I was not: smart, quick, fearless. The Mike Boat moved through the water, and the reality of the situation slammed down on me. I took my eye from the sites of the M16 and looked over at Sam. Sam, I saw, was looking over at me. He smiled, weakly, and said, "SPORTS, Bauman. Slap, pull, observe, release, tap, shoot." His face was pale and covered with sweat. Then he raised his rifle again and waited for the distance to close. Last night I stayed up until dawn, waiting for an e-mail from Sam Pitski. It never came. I shouldn't be surprised: Sam is in his first month as a Michigan State Trooper, and he works nights. He probably didn't get a chance to watch the show. More likely, I think now, he made a decision not to watch the show. * The thing people really want to know, though: is "Boot Camp" like boot camp? Is it as hard? Is it as rough? Is it as miserable? Easy answer: Of course not. It's MTV's Real World meets Outward Bound. It's silly. But it's not the physical differences between the show and real basic training that make my friend Ben Scruggs want to go disinfect himself. That's too easy, and there's a world of soldiers and Marines out there this morning counting them up: the sloppy drill and ceremony, the free time that a real recruit would never get, the lack of live ammunition (live ammo: that's what keeps the military one step above the Boy Scouts, you know). The real difference is hard to explain, but it comes down to how you survive something miserable and turn it into pride, or maybe even something more useful than pride. Misery, true misery, does not come from the moment. It isn't inflicted action: the fiftieth push-up, or the tenth mile of the road march, or the screaming DI. Anything in the moment, in the here and the now, can be gotten over -- one more push of muscle, one more force of will. True misery comes from knowledge -- knowing that you can draw on everything inside you for one more push of muscle, one more burst of adrenaline, but all you will find on the other side is another thing to be pushed and there is no escape. For whatever reason -- jail, money, pride -- you cannot walk away. What waits for you at the end of your eight weeks in boot camp might be worse than the struggle you're in, but still you can't leave. That is what is intolerable about the real thing. That's where true misery lives. And that's the difference. But dear reader/viewer, what you really want to know is: Could I make it? If I was in real boot camp, could I survive? Sleep easy tonight in the knowledge that if you had to, you could. * In early 1991 -- as newbie privates and lieutenants in the Persian Gulf were thanking God their Drills had been so ferocious toward them in gas-mask training -- I was twenty, with no college education, pumping gas for a living on Route 22 in western New Jersey. A doctor told me and my wife that our three-year-old daughter would soon need a kidney operation. An army recruiter told me Uncle Sam would pay for it. That October, a cold and wet month at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, I became a contestant in the survival game so many before me had gone through; some voluntary, some involuntary, most of us a blurred line between that black and that white. Our first day in basic training we had to pass a minimum-skills physical fitness test, with failure providing a bus ticket home. Me and three other guys had the supreme bad luck of being assigned to KP the very first day, so we missed the test with the rest of our platoon. Late that night, after we'd finished twelve hours in the kitchen and after everyone else was asleep, the three of us were marched by a Drill Sergeant through the dark rain to the PT field and the track that waited there. Determined to pass my first test with flying colors I leapt from the starting line in a sprint. Ten minutes later, barely limping along, my doubled-over body wracked with unbearable cramps, mucous and vomit dripping from my mouth, it was my daughter's face I kept in my head, the vision of her features that kept me on my feet, the sound of her voice in my ear that would not allow me to fall over and fail. Could I have done the same if it had been $500,000 instead of my daughter motivating me? You bet. That's a lot of bread. And I for one bear no ill-will toward those given that opportunity. A part of me understands their drive and I wish them the best. They didn't create this stupid contest, they're just trying to take advantage of it, and get through it. But someone created it. Someone thought it would be a good idea to turn this sharpest, harshest form of reality into a game, and bring it to our TV screens. And no, that's not a crime I guess. But it is a shame. The names in this article have been changed.

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