The Last Cigarette

A small-town Kansas kid who had never flown anywhere in his life.

My fiancée drove me to the recruiter on a bitter cold morning. We'd been engaged about a month. Saying goodbye to her was the hardest part. I was just hoping we'd built something strong enough to make it through the next three months.

I barely slept the night before.

I'll tell you something about me: I hate the unknown. Things being out of my control has always gotten under my skin.

I got on the bus anyway.

Bus to Kansas City. A big stack of paperwork. Then the plane to Chicago O'Hare.

I had never seen anything that big in my life. That many people, all of them moving fast, all of them knowing exactly where they were going.

I did not.

The first test

A guy in uniform handed me a card with directions to the food court by the McDonald's. That was the whole instruction. Looking back, I think it was the first test of boot camp:

Can this kid find a McDonald's.

I found it.

And I sat there for hours with recruits from all over, most of them younger than me, all of us acting like we weren't scared.

Before the bus came, I smoked one last cigarette.

My very last one. New life, new man. I tossed the pack in the trash.

I'd love to tell you that was the end of it.

It was not.

The minute the Navy let us smoke again, I was right back at it. A few months later I turned twenty-one at my training school, and my birthday cake was a McDonald's apple pie with a cigarette stuck in it for a candle. That's the picture above.

The kid at O'Hare

Here's what I take from that kid at O'Hare.

He didn't become a new man at the airport. Nobody does.

The big dramatic moment is the easy part. Tossing the pack is easy. Signing the paper is easy.

It's the ten thousand ordinary days afterward that make you.

But he got on the plane. Never flown, hated the unknown, no idea what was coming, and he got on the plane.

That part stuck.