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BN: So anyway, let's go back now to where we left off. And you had, as you said, you had enlisted, basically. And then can you just kind of talk about that experience and what happens subsequently?

NN: It was bad. Like day one, day one was the night before I reported to the induction center which was like, I think, Hill Street in downtown, that my friends threw me a party. I got totally wasted, so come toward the morning when started to get light, they dumped me off in front of my house, and I guess my parents were waiting for me because they knew I had to report that morning. So I guess when they heard my parents coming to the front door, they just kind of took off and so I'm laid out on the front porch, and then they get me in and they tried to sober me up a little bit. And I guess the only advice that my dad gave me was, "Don't go AWOL." So he took me to Hill Street and he dropped me off.

And during that day that we got sworn in, there must have been hundreds of us in this auditorium like room, sitting in these little chairs, and you would wait for your branch to be called. Like, "All the Air Force, would you please go outside and find bus da-da-da." And I think I was just so wasted that I'm just knocked out and everything, but it was probably late in the afternoon when they called for the Marines and the Navy to report outside the induction center and get on bus so-and-so. So I'm on my way, and we hit rush hour traffic. So to get to San Diego, by the time we get there, it's dark. And I remember I fell asleep, and when I woke up in the bus, everything was dark except for the courtesy lights they had on the side of the bus, and I heard this drill instructor shouting. Like, "You motherfucking Marines, get your fucking asses out of the thing," and spiting while he's talking. And it's like a bad dream. And then I guess one of the guys that was like a Navy recruit, started to say, "So long, suckers," or something. And that DI went up to him and, "Bam," just fired on him. I'm going, "Oh, shit." And from there, we all just scrambled to get off the bus because he was throwing people out, off the bus, and also we all scrambled and we got off the bus and we had to stand on these yellow footprints and wait for other buses from other areas to come and fill up all the footprints so we could be divided up into platoons to form a company. And I don't know how long I was standing on these footprints, but here I am, I could barely stand up. But then I had to because they would be going around and firing on people for slouching or looking around. So you're kind of seriously scared by then.

Finally, all the buses came, and all of us occupied all the footprints, and there must have been about close to maybe about, a little less than three hundred of us. And then DI, Drill Instructor, would start calling your names out. He'd say, "Okay, when you hear your name called, go stand over here," and they would start calling out names. "Private Smith, Private Jones, Private Beckham, blah, blah, blah." And I'm still standing there. And so one group was formed and they were taken away, and then finally, he says, the guy up there says, "Private Charlie Chan." And that was funny to me. I'm thinking, "That sure was cold, naming your kid Charlie Chan," right? Yeah. And he says again, "Private Charlie Chan." And I'm kind of looking around, like "Who the fuck is it? Who's Charlie Chan?" And then the DI comes running straight at me, and he had the Smokey the Bear hat on, and the tip of that touched my forehead, and he says, "I'm talking to you, Jap." I mean, it was like shock, right? "Yes, sir," and I had to go to that spot over there. And I guess when they got all of us over there, they marched us over to the billets, and at the billets we were messed with a lot more. Showed us how to... well, first of all, they took us to these different places and got all your, got all these clothing and all this other kind of stuff, and we had to put our civilian clothes in a box and da-da-da. Then they had us all march into this little stall where they had showers, a few showers, and then there was about ninety of us all butt naked, all elbow to asshole, right? You couldn't move around, and there's water pouring down, and I don't even think I got wet.

But you come out and they kind of mess with you some more, and then they marched us over to the billet area which was this desolate, it was all dirt. It was all dirt and felt like you were in the desert, but they had these billets, corrugated billets. And they had four squads, I found out, but the billet I got in, each billet had a drill instructor in there telling us how to make our beds, and we have like ten minutes to make it, and actually it's pretty... I do to this day, I do this military talk, and says, "You do your bed, I got this quarter, and I'm going to throw it off your bed, and if it doesn't bounce, you're getting ass whipped," kind of thing, so trying to make our beds right. I never made my bed at home. Of course, you only got ten minutes, but I was able to manage. But then, he says, "When I say, 'Hit the rack,'" we have bunks. He says, "When I say, 'Hit the rack,' I want you say, 'Aye aye, Sir,' and you jump into bed." And then we were going, he said, "Hit the rack," and we all jumped into bed. "Too slow, get up," we get up, and I swore he must have did that shit for about like fifteen minutes, man. We were going in and out this bed, they call it the racks, right? And then finally it was like we were all sweating and everything, and it'd be like, "Okay, we did it." But in the morning time, when you hear the reveille, you got to get up and be lined up in front of the billets in formation, and you got, fucking, like, ten minutes to put on your fatigues and be out there, and your bed better be made. So no one slept in the bed. And then, plus, from the time we got off the bus 'til right now, we didn't get to use the bathroom, so a cat's got to whizz and stuff, right? People are doing it in their canteens and shit like that, right? So anyway, that's the first night there. Didn't get any better. [Laughs]

So the next day, I'm figuring that, I mean, I'm thinking, I think they're just messing with us the first night to try to scare us. They did a pretty good job, but I think now they kind of shocked us, that now they'll start to teach us. All they taught us was mind control. Because all this stuff really served an overall purpose of following orders. Never question it, follow orders without hesitation. And I guess the end result, if you're told to go kill somebody, that it's an order. So it was like, basically like, I think boot camp then was about, maybe about eleven, twelve weeks of indoctrination. But in the meantime, there's a lot of physical training.

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