I’d slept some on the bus, though not as much as I’d have liked, with Woody yakking away most of the time, and all the other guys carrying on, even after the officer stormed around and ordered them to knock it off. So when my head hit my pillow that night at Great Lakes I didn’t have time to be homesick or anything—I just conked right out. I would have stayed asleep for a week, except that at five in the morning somebody came into our barracks hammering on a metal trash can lid and yelling: “You have five minutes to square your bunk, get into your blues, hit the head, and assemble! Five minutes!”

It took me forever to untangle myself from my blankets and then not step on anybody below me as I dropped to the floor and scrambled to get dressed. Woody didn’t budge, so I shook him and told him to get up before he got in trouble, but he just rolled over and pulled a blanket over his head.

I was late getting to the head so there was already a line of guys waiting to pee standing shoulder to shoulder into a long trough. There wasn’t any privacy between the toilets, either, for those guys needing to do their business sitting down, so I skipped that, even though I had to go.

Two minutes later, we were standing at attention in a line at the foot of our bunks. Chief Petty Officer Merkel, our company commander—who we were just supposed to call Chief—was fuming. He yelled at Woody and then dumped him on the floor. He even kicked Woody in the butt, which made Woody cry.

“Are you crying, boot?” Chief yelled. “There’s no crying in the navy! Who told you you could cry in my navy?”

Woody stood up and wiped his eyes and his nose and mumbled something, but Chief wasn’t happy about any of it. “Did I tell you you could wipe the snot off your face? No, I did not. The navy owns that snot, and it is not up to you to decide when and where and how to wipe it. Now put it back!”

Woody blinked.

“I said put it back!” Chief yelled again.

Woody sort of reverse wiped his face, and Chief moved on to yell at somebody else for something else. Then he dumped all our sea bags on the floor and bellowed at us to redo everything and this time to do it according to those navy regulations. He kept yelling that we better know what navy regulations were since they had been explained to us last night, plus they were in our Bluejackets’ Manual, which was this kind of navy bible they’d given us that they said had everything we would need to know to go from being a boot to being a trained sailor.

We repacked our sea bags twice more before Chief was satisfied, and then he ordered us out of the barracks and over to the Grinder, double time. Nobody knew what the Grinder was until he led us there, most of us already out of breath because double time was the same thing as running, and our lungs hurt from the below-freezing temperature. When we got there—the Grinder turned out to be a drill field—Chief ordered us to keep running around the perimeter. Other companies were running, too, and he pointed about a hundred yards ahead of us and said if we ever wanted to so much as smell breakfast we were going to pick up the pace and pass that sorry bunch.

It was hard getting enough traction on the icy ground to go much faster, and when several guys somehow managed to surge ahead, Chief barked at them to come back. “This company is only as fast as the slowest man here,” he yelled, and for some reason he was looking at me when he said it, like he thought I’d be the slowest runner just because I was the shortest guy on the Grinder.

He kept yelling at us to “Move it, move it, move it!” and we all picked up the pace as best we could, but as hard as we moved it, moved it, moved it we couldn’t gain any ground on the company in front of us. Every time it seemed as if we were making progress, Chief ordered us to wait for the stragglers—which I was thankful didn’t include me. Some of the guys were obviously in pretty terrible shape, but I wasn’t one of them.

We ran for an hour, long after the other company had peeled off and headed to the mess hall for breakfast. Continuing on was torture. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. My nose was running the navy’s snot all down my face. And every time a lap around the Grinder took us near the mess hall we could smell the bacon and eggs and coffee and toast. Our stomachs rumbled as loud as our boots on the frozen drill field.

Finally, Chief took mercy on us, or got sick of seeing us drag around the Grinder so slow, and ordered us to stop. But he kept yelling at us. “The problem as I see it is that I must have done something wrong somewhere along the way, and as punishment the navy gave me you dirtballs to train. How I’m supposed to do that is a mystery for the ages, because if you took all the brains from all the skulls in this company, they wouldn’t add up to one whole entire brain. And how God Almighty was able to make a group of men—excuse me, a group of boys—capable of moving so ever-loving slow is another mystery for the ages.”

He spit on the ground to indicate how disgusted he was with us—I bet it froze immediately—then told us to head over to the mess hall in case there was anything left, and he hoped there wasn’t because as far as he was concerned we didn’t deserve to eat, as pathetic a job as we’d done so far of becoming navy men.

I had the feeling that this was how Chief would be talking to us all during boot camp from now on, and the best thing I could do was follow every order and otherwise make myself invisible.

Easier said than done, of course.

*   *   *

The rest of the day was a blur of doing calisthenics until we couldn’t stand up anymore; lying and kneeling and standing to shoot during target practice; holding our rifles over our heads while we stood at attention until we couldn’t feel our arms, but every time somebody lowered their arms we had to start over. Unfortunately, it kept being me who couldn’t hold my gun up—three times—and guys started giving me dirty looks and cursing at me under their breath. I felt terrible—and weak—and gritted my teeth the fourth time and told myself I would die or my arms would have to break off before I let my rifle down, and that time I was able to hold on.

After that we loaded heavy shells into a 5" cannon, then emptied the shells, then loaded them in again, over and over and over until it was automatic. I thought that would be about it for the day, but we seemed to just be getting started, because the next thing I knew we were marching over to an indoor pool the size of a small ocean and swimming back and forth across it with our clothes on—and dragging, or being dragged by, another guy.

Fortunately, it was sunny outside, because our clothes were only partly dry when we were ordered back to the Grinder for more marching drills—and getting yelled at by Chief whenever anybody wasn’t in step. Which was often, especially for Woody. He didn’t seem to know his right from his left, so the guys on either side of him started punching him on one arm or the other to let him know. I felt bad for him but was glad they hadn’t done that to me earlier when I had a hard time holding up my rifle.

Finally, late in the afternoon, after Woody had screwed up yet again, even with the guys pounding on his arms—or maybe because of that—Chief ordered us to halt, and we were so tired that half the company marched into the other half before they stopped. I nearly fell down but somebody—a guy who was probably twice my size—grabbed my arm and held me up.

“Hate for a boy like you to get yourself trampled out here in the Grinder,” he said.

I was going to thank him for helping me, but when he called me a boy I just scowled at him—though once again, my mean grown-up face just made somebody laugh.

Once the company got itself sorted out, Chief launched into a round of loud cursing that went on for a good five minutes before he ran out of either cusswords or breath or both. “I’m going to list all the things you do not know and it will not be a comprehensive list because that would take too long, but I have to start somewhere,” he shouted. Then he barked out dozens of nautical terms and ranks and regulations while we just stood there at attention and listened and tried to remember them but, of course, couldn’t because there were too many.

Chief knew we were struggling, and he stopped reciting the list so he could yell at us some more about how dumb we were. “The reason you boots don’t know any of this is because the B in B Company must stand for babies. There isn’t a man among you, and to even call you boys is an insult to boys everywhere, so you must be babies and ought to be wearing diapers. If I had my way, I would requisition a hundred diapers right here and now and make you wear them so you didn’t poop in your skivvies because you don’t have enough sense to even go to the head by yourselves.”

Only poop wasn’t the word he used.

“All right, you sorry boots,” Chief continued. “One more thing that I am absolutely certain of is that half of you don’t even know how to tie your own shoelaces, which might help explain why you keep tripping over one another and over your own two feet. But it’s my job to teach you how to tie knots, and you will learn to tie knots—nautical knots—starting with the most fundamental and important knot of all, the bowline. It is my belief that not only can none of you tie a bowline, but that none of you even knows what a bowline is!”

Chief stopped yelling and stared at us for a second, as if he was expecting an answer. And stupid me, I raised my hand.

Chief glared at me, and I knew I’d made a mistake. I quickly took my hand down, but it was too late.

“Is your arm a balloon, boot?” he demanded.

“What, Chief?” I said.

“You heard me. I don’t mumble. Now is it? Is your arm a balloon, and that’s why it just lifted up from your side and went up into the air like that—because your arm is a balloon?”

“No, Chief,” I whispered.

“Then get your butt down on the ground and give me fifty push-ups. When I want you to raise your hand I’ll tell you to raise your hand, only I’m never going to do that because it would indicate that I think you have an answer to a question I might be asking and I know for a fact that you and everybody else in this company is too dumb for that.”

I got down on the ground and struggled through ten push-ups, sure there was no way I was going to be able to finish fifty. But when I slowed down, I felt his boot on my back, and when I bent my arms to lower myself he shoved me all the way onto the ground.

“Oof!” I grunted, then struggled back up.

He shoved me back down again, hard, and kept doing that until I somehow managed to do the fifty push-ups. Or maybe we both just lost count.

Either way, when I finished and stood, he threw a length of rope at me—except I now knew in the navy you called it a line and not a rope. He told me to tie that bowline I was so eager to tie.

I was too exhausted to be nervous; besides, I’d tied bowlines a thousand times since I was little and growing up around boats on Ocracoke Island, where every time you needed to tie just about anything to anything else you used a bowline, especially on a sailboat. My fingers were frozen, though, and I messed up twice, which surprised me. Chief rolled his eyes. Before he could say anything, though, I took a deep breath and I guess my hands had warmed up enough by then so I could feel what I was doing because my fingers sort of worked automatically to tie the knot. That time it took me about five seconds.

Chief snatched the line from me, inspected it, yanked on it, and cracked just the tiniest hint of a smile.

“You been around boats before, boot?” he asked. The other guys were straining to listen.

“Yes, Chief,” I said. “Grew up on the Outer Banks in North Carolina.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen, Chief,” I said.

He shook his head. “How old are you really? Because I know they’re taking anybody who can walk through the door on their own two feet, and half this company lied about their age to get here, and that baby face of yours has never even seen a razor before.”

“Seventeen, Chief,” I said again, my voice still shaking. “Honest.”

He stared at me for a minute. Then he said, “All right, boot. I’ll make a deal with you. Tomorrow, the company that has the highest success rate in knot tying wins the Rooster Flag. You seen the Rooster Flag?”

I nodded. We’d all seen it—a flag in the mess hall with a red rooster on a white background.

“The Rooster Flag goes to the top company of the day, and B Company here—Baby Company—is going to be just that for at least one day during boot camp. I want that one day to be this week, and to help me out with that you’re going to teach every one of the men in this company how to tie a bowline—and a figure-eight, and a reef knot, and a clove hitch—by first light tomorrow. You do that and I’ll put you in for whatever assignment you want once you graduate from boot camp. But if you don’t, I’m finding out how old you really are, and then I’m sending you home to your mama so she can give you a good spanking for running away.”

My heart sank. There was no way I could teach a hundred guys how to tie all those knots, no matter how many times I’d tied them myself.

“Company fall out!” Chief ordered. “Our littlest boot here is going to give you all a lesson in knot tying.”

He pointed to a couple of wooden boxes that we’d been marching past since we’d been out on the Grinder. “You’ll find all the line you need in there. Have at it.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing this could all disappear, or I could go back in time and not be so dumb as to raise my hand like some stupid little schoolboy. It was going to be a very, very long night.