Lover's Point

Lover’s Point

There are about 20 or 30 linguist soldiers who are in my group. I am starting to get to know some of them; I am making friends.

When we arrive in San Francisco from basic training, my entire group is wearing Class A uniforms. I have my “Dairy Queen” hat on, wool pants, shiny shoes. Our crowd stands out in the crowd.

There is a chartered bus that drives us down to Monterey, where we will begin the next phase of our military careers. We enter base through the gates, which seem to be in the middle of a neighborhood. The bus is driving up the hill to Bravo Company, and I can tell I am already starting to like the institute.

Defense Language Institute, D.L.I. As some soldiers come to know it, the Defense Love Institute. Every 18-22 year old here seems to find someone they truly care about, then marry them within six months. The Army gives the new couple a sweet house to live in out at Fort Ord, near the institute. When the army couple finishes language training a year or two later, they usually go to different bases in different states. The wife will go to Germany while the husband will go to Georgia. The Sergeants recommend that no one get married, but they can only control so much.

The point of the school is to train military personnel to learn foreign languages. The military must learn languages for various reasons: diplomatic missions, attaché duty and the like; but the overall point of it is to create soldiers, seaman, airmen and marines who can all speak a language in order to fill a billet at a base somewhere in the real military. These service men and women many never use the language again after they leave their language training, but the point of the school is to teach language as fast as the brain can soak up the words.

The entire base is on a hill, with forests intertwined with barracks and buildings. As I walk out of the bus for the first time onto D.L.I., the time is 2:30 AM, and the temperature is around 60 degrees.

A few of the soldiers at Bravo Company sit us down in a meeting room and hand out keys to our rooms. PFC Fisher tells us what life is like at D.L.I.

“You are paid for your brains, not your skills with a weapon. We don’t go shooting, ever.”

The next morning I take a short walk through the forest to get some supplies at the “Post Exchange.” There are deer in the forest on base, and a sports field with a track on the top of the hill that I am walking up.

I go to chow with my friends and there are civilians working in the Dining Facility that take our orders for special made omelets. There are cappuccino machines, ice cream coolers, rotating cases with cakes and pies, taco bars and pasta bars. I am oddly reassured that the Army is the place for me.

My clan and I arrive on the 4th of July weekend; since we are new, we are not allowed to wear anything besides military uniforms. Our first day we go to a meeting with one of the drill sergeants. His name is Drill Sergeant Fisher. He does not yell at all. He simply lets us know how life at the Defense Language Institute will be.

My roommate is a guy named Eick from New Jersey. He seems friendly enough, although neither one of us can understand what worlds we come from. Across the hall is Mcphee and Benevides; both East Coasters, Benevides from New York City and Mcphee again from New Jersey.

My rooming with Eick is short lived. I am only there two or three weeks. Eick does not socialize much, and I come to learn the fraternity and college world that I come from is quite foreign to this New Jersey boy.
Eick goes to the PX to bar a large package of soap bars.

I walk into the room after pulling duty and Eick is hunched over his desk carving figurines with a knife.

“I’m making a chess set,” Eick says.

Another day I go to the PX after we finish with PT and Eick is with me. I am picking up some reading materials to make up for 3 months in isolation at Basic Training, so far away from the music and sports that used to take up so much of my time. Eick picks a few copies of Archie comic books that he brings back to our rooms. I have never seen anyone more easily amused than Eick. The drill sergeants at basic used to call him “Ick!.”

As we read, shine boots, and iron uniforms at the barracks that night, Eick is kicking back with his new comics.

“Oh Jughead, when will you ever learn!” Eick says. He continues reading.

I am unsure if Eick is doing this to amuse me or if he is doing this to amuse himself. Maybe it’s a game and he is amusing himself by making me amused. Eick is totally unaware of himself, I am fully pleased by my roommate.

The next day while on casual duty I am bull shitting with Mueller and Leonard, my new best friends. I share with them the Jughead comments from Eick’s reading the night before. By the end of the day, Muller, Leonard and I have our own inside joke.

“Oh, Jughead, when will you learn!” We exclaim whenever appropriate. We do this all day long. We are giggling little school children.

Monterey is a place where I find new parts of myself that were never there before. Both on base and in town I am finding new things to explore on every turn. My favorite part of the day is when we do our runs on “Lovers Point.” I am finding that I am a strong runner.

The very first day of PT, Drill Sergeant Wiggins (get wiggy wit’ it) pairs me with a guy named Hafen. I will later learn he can run 2 miles in under 11 minutes. I do not keep up with Hafen on that first run we do on Lovers, but I learn that I have new limits that I did not know about. I am not a talented runner, but I can endure pain and am physically fit.

The runs we do every day in Bravo Company strike my curiosity about the civilian world around me and the Army world I live in. There is a huge group of men and women in Army t-shirts and shorts running in groups of twos and fours. We are running along tourists in four seat bikes, past bed and breakfasts full of future Google creators in town for the weekend, and the old haunts of John Steinbeck.

The Lovers Point run starts out at the bottom of the hill, the big hill that is the Defense Language Institute.

When we would start out on the run, we run through a parking garage, dodging cars and each other, then crossing a foot bridge over the main road of Monterey. We then scamper down stairs and run left along the trail that parallels the ocean. First we pass sea lions, and then past the Monterey Aquarium, the fancy bars and restaurants that adorn Cannery Row. Being one of the faster runners, the goal was always to make it to the restaurant at the actual point, the namesake of Lover’s Point. The restaurant, named the Bath House, is exquisite, another dichotomy of my soldier life.

I move away from Bravo Company to a different part of base, I do not return and do the Lover’s Point run as much as I should. No one can do the Lover’s Point run enough in their lifetime.