I Dont Care What You Say Anymore This is My Life.
They say that trauma initiates memories. I don't know if it's true. What I do remember is my earliest memory is from when I was about two and a half years old. It is of a metal plate over my right eye and a hallway in the Presbyterian Hospital in San Fransisco. It was a long hall at least so itseemed to me. I walked that hall many times with my mom to and from radiation treatments. Finally, a day came when I put on a very smelly, stinky oxygen maks like the ones I'd seen on pilots I awoke to find my right eye bandaged up. I didn't know it then and it took awhile before my mom told me, my right eye had been removed but I was now cancer free. Fast forward to when I was seven years old. My mom tried to keep me wrapped in gauze but her father, my grandfather would have nothing of it and believed even less than the evidence before his own eyes. To him, no matter what the doctors said he'd noticed that I could see and recognize his car from several blocks away. He also noticed that I could sight a rifle in and line up the sights at ranges of 200 yards on a 1,000 yard simulated target and held me to the same standard he expected of his sons of hitting such a target in the bulls eye with the single shot he allowed out of his 1903 Springfield rifle. In every way he cut me no slack although according to my physicians I was supposed to be visually impaired. It was years of his stubborn refusal to accept a handicap that created me. I was shooting competitively for ammunition to hunt with from the Department of Civilian Marksmanship by the age of nine and competed in my first Camp Perry Match before my tenth birthday. Eventually, I'd shot two out of three "leg" matches toward my Distinguished Marksmanship badge. At the ripe old age of 13 I was in High School after having skipped a couple of grades in elementary school. Ok, as a High Schooler I was very immature for my grade. However, I was in love with a girl who'd been kicked out of private school and was pregnant. So, with the help of a Catholic priest I had a baptismal certificate made up that made me about seventeen. Ostensibly so I could work. My relationship with my father was inimical at best so the name that was used was a combination of my Mom's family name and the name I'd chosen at my Bar Mitzvah. Armed with this and my NRA match records and other such documents I saw a Marine Corps recruiter. The Marines liked what they saw until I came up against the Navy's medical people. The doctor there noticed the missing eye and the remnants of a tumor on my left eye. From there a whole series of tests ensued that culminated in the formal pronouncement by the Navy's tumor board that my retinal blastoma was cured and that the GPA and marksmanship justified a waiver on the basis of demonstrated ability. So it was I found myself waiting at the recruiting station on Bishop Street waiting tp be sworn into the Marines. However, the recruiter was out of the office. The Army recruiter was not and he looked over my paperwork. Several other people looked over the paperwork and because of my test scores they recruited me to be a Medic. They also promised me parachute school. What they didn't tell me was I had a very short life expectancy. So off I journeyed to the next Basic Training class to be held at Fort Dix New Jersey.