How I Learned About Life: Navy Boot Camp

By Edward Olsen

We all learn to be who we are through our experiences in life. Some of us are predisposed to avoid new things and challenges, which places great limitations on who you are. Or for the young, who you will become. For those of you who want to learn about people, come along with me on my journey through life in this first book in a series. This one is about people and things I learned in Boot Camp. It is not really a military book, but a narrative about what that environment brings out in people. Some is very good and some not so good.

So come with me and learn what I learned. Why people are the way they are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329999497

Book preview

How I Learned About Life: Navy Boot Camp

How I learned About Life

Navy Boot Camp

Edward D Olsen

Copyright © 2016 Edward D Olsen

All Rights Reserved

ISBN  978-1-329-99949-7

Navy Boot Camp

Forward

As each of us grows past adolescence into adulthood we learn lessons along the way that can make us better people. Most of these lessons are taught to us by other folks who have no idea they are teaching us anything. By watching what they do, whether good or bad, they can each teach us something of value if we simply observe and take it in.  These lessons can also teach us about people.  As adolescents most of us tend to want to think that adults are all good and always do the right things. These life lessons can teach us that it is not so in many cases.  I learned many of my life lessons in the navy, a place that for me was rich with experience, both good and bad.  All of it was educational though. A thorough education about people that I don't think I could have gotten any other way.

This book is the first in a collection of stories about how I learned about life from the navy

Why I Joined The Navy

I enlisted in the navy back in the early 1970’s. It was about a year after I graduated from high school.  I had been working at a grocery store near my house, K-Mart foods, since I turned sixteen years old and had been tempted to make it a career.  It seemed quite possible at the time from my naive point of view.  But there was something, even back then that told me this was not really what I should be doing.  Something kept nagging at me that I should be doing something else, something a little bigger and better than working in a grocery store all my life.  Now I don’t see anything wrong with that.  A lot of fine people do that, and it’s great if that’s what you want to do.

But for me it just wasn’t a good fit. because I was always interested in science and that sort of thing, especially electricity.  I used to burn up small electric model train motors when I was four or five years old, much to the horror of my mother.  She would routinely see smoke rising from behind the couch and find me playing with the cut off end of an extension cord, using it to apply power to something or other and making a little smoke while I was doing it.  There is a very distinctive odor given off by burning electrical things.  An overheating electric motor or transformer smells that way and whenever my mother got a whiff of that all too familiar smell, she would go looking for me. 

Why I didn’t kill myself is a good question for debate I suppose, but from a very early age I understood electricity.  It sort of made inherent sense to me.  I made up models of behavior in my young mind to explain why it did what it did and of course these made up models were technically incorrect, but from a certain point of view, made the kind of sense that did accurately explain the dangers. 

I don’t think my mother gave a second thought about that though.  I was never able to get her attention long enough to explain it to her.  I learned that mothers don’t listen to five year olds trying to explain why it was no big deal if you were found behind the couch amid sparks and billowing smoke, holding a plugged in, cut off extension cord in one hand.

My mother did know something about electricity though.  Maybe that was my problem.  I had seen her on many occasions, reattach a cord that had come off the old vacuum cleaner.  I watched her open the thing up, strip back the wires, attach them properly and then put it all back together just like it was supposed to be.  She’d plug it in and the thing would fire up and was ready to keep on working for another season.

I remember she was pretty smart about other things too.  One time I got a really neat little electric train toy for Christmas that ran on batteries.  There was this little car that ran on a metal track back and forth, switching direction when it ran into a bumper at either end of this little track.  Well it was really neat and I played with it for quite a while but it didn’t take very long before the batteries were running out of gas.  I took the thing over to my mom with hopeful eyes, asking her for new batteries.  Well we didn’t have any, so instead she put the batteries in a very warm spot, just above the coal fired cooking stove in the kitchen and then she told me to wait for