The summer of 1984 was a fun time to be alive. Sure, we all thought the USSR was going to bomb the bejeezus out of us—and they were thinking the same thing about us—but movies like The Day After notwithstanding, there was more to life that year than the looming specter of World War III. During that summer, the music world saw the issue of Prince’s Purple Rain, Sammy Hagar’s VOA (it was no Standing Hampton, but it was still a good album), and Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. It was the summer of killer movies, too, marking the releases of The Last Starfighter, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and Ghostbusters. It was a grand time for…
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The Longest Day
During our fourth week of U.S. Navy boot camp, we found ourselves in the service of the mess hall. The navy called it Service Week, and we’d been warned about it for the previous three weeks. Everyone said it would be a sweet little piece of hell made up of the most interminable days imaginable. To the carefree civilian, we were told, eight weeks in boot camp might seem like nothing, but to the recruit, Service Week was like a month of decades. Still, we wondered if what we’d been told about Service Week was just another example of our collective leg being pulled. Getting a break from being berated…
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Another Navy Story: Old Milwaukee, Tighty Whities, and the Music of Bruce Springsteen
When I was in U.S. Navy A School, I knew a guy named Walter. In many ways, Walter was an average late-teen-to-early-twenties navy recruit: homesick, restless, impulsive, and far too immature to be taking on any significant responsibility. That was all of us in those days. Unfortunately, Walter was also prone to getting drunk and inexplicably winding up in his underwear. I’m sure there were a lot of steps between Walter’s descents into drunkenness and the shedding of his outerwear, but none of us knew what they were because we never went out with him. We were young and stupid, and we were known to enjoy a beer or five,…
