INTRODUCTION

It’s one in the afternoon. 1300 hours. My parents have just dropped me off at a military school in the middle of Nowhere, Missouri, some 1,200 miles from my home on Long Island. I’m twelve years old, a sixth grader. I swear I saw a smirk on my dad’s face as my parents said goodbye, walked away, and left me.

I’m in the Admissions Office. The guy with me now, a major, is wearing a stiff-looking black uniform jacket. He had been extremely polite and attentive with my parents, like he was the nicest guy in the world. But the moment they were out of sight, his smile vacated his face. He tells me not to worry, that he’ll take care of me, but his words lack any conviction. He beckons me outside, walking me into the bright sunshine onto what he tells me is the “quad.” It’s a giant square slab of concrete, about half the size of a football field, right in the middle of the campus, and is surrounded by the barracks, the mess hall, some classroom buildings, and the Admissions Office.

I’d spend a lot of time on the quad in the next three years. Every morning all of the cadets in the school were required to report here for roll call and to raise and salute the American flag. Every evening, we met here again, to lower it. And the entire school was required to meet here in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings to do our exercises—the marching and the drills—every single day, no matter the weather. Monsoon-like rain. Sleet. Snow. We’d do our drills when it was minus 10 degrees and you couldn’t feel your fingers and couldn’t move your toes. On midsummer afternoons, we marched for hours in heavy trench coats under the blazing 110-degree sun. We also had to stand at attention. Four hours straight of not moving at all. I learned not to lock my knees. If you did, you’d fall out, face-first onto the concrete. Happened all the time.

Any bad behavior in school meant even more time on the quad, doing extra marches and drills, and standing at attention. It’s the place I remember most about my time at military school. A little taste of hell on earth.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time. Now, I’m just standing in the middle of the quad watching the major—the same guy who just told me that he’d take care of me—walk back to the Admissions Office, his shiny black shoes clacking on the hot concrete.

I’m all alone. I’m small for my age. I’m wearing cargo shorts and a red T-shirt and my big, black, thick-rimmed glasses. I looked like a nerd-ass motherfucker. My bags are on the concrete behind me. I stare at the mess hall. The campus is eerily still and quiet. I want to sit down, but I’m petrified. Literally. I don’t feel like I can move. I stand there for five minutes, then ten minutes, not knowing what the hell I am supposed to be doing.

Suddenly, from somewhere on the periphery, I hear a huge, roaring noise. A cacophony of voices, screaming and cussing. A surge of adrenaline rushes through my body. Fight or flight.

And then I see them—a small group of people who I would later learn was a mix of cadets, drill sergeants, and officers. Eight of them in total. They’ve sprung out from behind some bushes and are now sprinting toward me. They’d been hiding, watching me and waiting. As they rush me, I recoil and put my hands up in front of my face.

Then they’re in my face, yelling all at once. The spray from their spit smears my glasses.

“Get the fuck down, you piece of shit! Get the fuck down on the ground!” one of them screams at me, mere inches from my ear.

I start to go down, slowly, still in shock, my mind and body unable to move in concert.

“No, you little shit! Not like that! Get the fuck up!” the same guy yells at me. He’s the one who seems to be in charge. He turns to another guy and points to the ground.

“Cadet, show this little shit how it’s done!”

The cadet drops straight to the concrete and does ten quick, powerful push-ups, and then springs back up, his back ramrod straight.

The man in charge turns to me. “Now, you. Get the fuck down and do it right!”

This time, I drop. I do push-ups until he tells me to stop. Then the man orders me to roll over onto my back. I do flutter kicks, pointing my legs out in front of me and scissoring them in the air. My stomach burns. If—no, when—one of my feet touches the ground, I’m forced to start all over again.

I do this for fifteen minutes straight—push-ups alternating with flutter kicks—with all eight of the guys watching me, yelling at me and reveling in my ineptitude, my pain, and my fear.

What I’m doing now, I’ll learn later, is called “getting smoked.” It’s used as punishment for bad behavior. I would get smoked a lot in the next few years.

* * *

I hated my dad at that moment. Hated him more than anyone or anything I had ever hated in my life. It felt reciprocal. He sent me here? It’s not just that he doesn’t love me, he must hate me. Damn that asshole.

Later in life, I’d come to understand why he did what he did. Or at least, I’d see his rationale. Up to this point, I’d been a total disaster. I’d been kicked out of every school I’d been enrolled in. I’m talking preschool, elementary, middle. I had no respect for my teachers or, really, for any authority figures. I had no respect for myself. Though I’d somehow managed to avoid serious misconduct, some of the people I hung out with were starting to run into real trouble with the law. I was not exactly on the pathway to success. My dad would explain later that he was just buying me time, trying to keep me from getting into real trouble, with the law or worse. He wanted to give me a chance to get my head on straight.

But still … What the fuck was this? I didn’t know places like this even existed. I was the youngest person at the military school, not even close to being mentally, emotionally, or physically mature enough to handle it. At the time, it only fucked me up worse. It made me feel less loved by my parents. It destroyed any confidence—and thus, love—I had for myself. I already had a toxic relationship with my dad at that point, my hatred for him simmering within me. Sending me to military school just made it all bubble and then erupt to the surface. It crushed me. It still hurts to this day if I really stop and think about it.

But I would eventually learn a way to use that pain. I would own it. And if you want, you, too, will be able to use your pain as inspiration.

* * *

That first night at military school, I cried myself to sleep. My roommate didn’t say a word to me or even so much as look at me for the first couple of days. He’d been at the school for a semester already. I guess he knew that it was best that I get this part over with, that there was nothing anyone could say or do to make it any better. The crying was only the last gasp of denial of a life left behind—and a realization that the life yet to come was only going to get worse.

The school’s student body was comprised of kids from all over the place—West Coast, East Coast, the South, the Midwest, and even Alaska. Some were rich kids who had tested their parents’ patience and failed. There were dirt-poor kids who seemed grateful just to have three real meals a day and a bed and a roof over their heads. There were kids who were racist as hell and didn’t even try to hide it. There were plenty of kids who already had records for some really bad shit—theft, battery, selling drugs.

And here we were, all thrown in together, a forced assimilation. There was no privacy. In the barracks, we had to keep our doors open at all times. There were no doors on the bathroom stalls. We all showered together in a square room, with twelve showerheads. The showerheads alternated cold and hot: One sprayed water so frigid that you couldn’t stand under it for more than five seconds. The next was so scalding hot that it blistered your skin if you stayed under it for too long. We walked through them all, in a row, as if on a conveyor belt. A drill sergeant barked out instructions, keeping us moving, ten seconds per showerhead. He grinned as he watched us, exhilarated by our displays of pain.

I remember standing outside of that shower room on that first day, buck naked, with eleven other kids, holding my little shower caddy and thinking, Man, this was not in the brochure.

I made my bed with hospital corners, the sheets as tight as I could get them. A drill sergeant came by every morning and smacked my bed with his saber. If that saber didn’t bounce, I’d get demerits, or “sticks,” as they were known. In my closet, my uniform had to be perfectly hung, with the sleeves pinned behind it. I wiped down my room and closet every day. My success, or lack of success, in doing this task was tested daily by a drill sergeant, who donned a white glove and ran a finger on the tops of all surfaces and in the corners of the room. Anything that soiled those white gloves in the slightest meant more sticks.

At meals, we had to sit on the edge of our chairs—so far on the edge that the bolts near the front of the seat had to be visible. Our backs had to be straight, at a perfect right angle. We ate in a squared motion—fork to food, raised straight up, then straight across to the mouth, a perfect upside-down L. Any deviation in form meant more sticks.


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