Reveille sounded at four-thirty A.M. "Drop your cocks and grab your socks" was the order of the day and shouted for the duration of the bunk shaking and baton rattling against its metal frame. My boot camp experience began for real just as it is depicted in books and movies, maybe even more so as we were stripped down, dehumanized, called everything imaginable. Fat boys became slim, skinny boys filled out, shy boys became extroverts, extroverts and braggadocios learned to keep their mouths shut, and at the end we were transformed into well trained men, and with that said I will not belabor the experiences of "ass hole and elbows", but for the sake of explaining how the effect my early religious experiences with Jehovah's Witnesses controlled my sense of reasoning I will relate my first Catholic Mass which I attended with a great deal of apprehention.
The first thing I saw which shocked me was the vast number of attendees, because I was under the impression from the Society’s teachings that the waters of Babylon the Great were drying up, but what I saw was in strong contrast--the waters of the river of life seemed to be flowing quite freely and in an abundance from the throne of God. The second shock which reaffirmed my earlier beliefs came as the earth began to tremble as the Priest spread his arms and looked heavenwards and began to pray. The trivial tremors caught my attention and the following tremor which caused the earth to roll turned into a steady shaking, which shook the Mass right out of me and rattled the teachings’ of Jehovah’s Witness right back into my consciousness. I stopped listening to his prayer and started saying my own prayer, "Oh, Jehovah, please don’t let this be Armageddon. I know I am in the wrong place with the wrong people, and doing the wrong thing, but I’ll start serving you again when I get out of the Navy." I’m sure trying to make a deal with Jehovah didn’t pay dividends; but, the tremors did subside without any aftershocks, and needless to say I never attended another Mass. I had enough of false religion to last a lifetime.