In The Navy: Boot Camp

The book you are about to read is a true story of my 13 weeks of Navy boot camp, and the two and a half weeks of A-school immediately afterwards. It stops just as I depart for my first duty station. This short book is actually the first part of the complete account of my four years in the Navy (1975-1979,) and if you enjoy it, I invite you to read In the Navy (Complete.) I did not write my book with the purpose of glorifying the Navy, nor to denigrate it. I only wanted to remain faithful to the truth, and to describe what it was like to serve in the military at that time. And yet most of the Navy veterans who have read my work hated it (though a small minority loved it.) I was quite surprised by their reaction, as I had so much enjoyed reliving my four years in the Navy through the act of writing about them. I can only imagine that, over the years, they have cleaned up their own memories of what they€d lived through, perhaps subconsciously forgetting all the bad stuff (and the raunchy stuff,) so that only a sanitized version remained, something they wouldn€t be ashamed to tell to their wives, children, and even grandchildren. But what I€ve written is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, allowing for lapses in memory over precise details and the proper chronology of events. I do not try to excuse the behavior of the na¯ve and rather immature young man I was back then; my work describes his awkward coming of age. There is much that he did then which I would condemn today. Yet those were different times, post-Vietnam, pre-AIDS, wild and wooly. Is the book politically correct? Hell, no! The only readers I had in mind when I wrote it were my buddies and former shipmates who, I presumed, would be the only ones able to understand my crazy behavior. But I also wanted to give non-Navy people a taste of what it was like to be a sailor at that particular time in history. So, if you are prepared to experience the unexpurgated adventures of a sailor in the U.S. Navy in the late 1970s, I invite you to read this book, and, if it entertains you, to go on to the complete version. But if what I write offends you, you can just jump ship after this book and not force yourself to put up with my drivel any longer than necessary.
So, without any further ado:
Anchors aweigh!