If that wasn’t bad enough, the rest of my time in Civil Air Patrol was dedicated to standing around and listening to guys talk about planes the same way they talked about girls: fantasizing about them from a distance, obsessing over every little detail, arguing about which ones were the sexiest, and hoping one day they’d actually get to go up inside of one.
While some people are able to find a positive path through programs like Civil Air Patrol, after a month I knew it wasn’t for me. I’m more of a “roll up your sleeves and get dirty” kind of guy. Dressing up in a costume and learning the names of military things out of a book was never going to fulfill my desire to serve. So I bailed.
I didn’t even bother trying to join ROTC after that. I was done playing make-believe. Instead, I just started running as much as I could and doing push-ups and sit-ups every day. The hardest part was the waiting. Technically, I couldn’t enlist until I turned seventeen, and even then it wasn’t going to be easy. You can’t just walk into a recruiter’s office, slap your driver’s license down on the desk like you’re checking out bowling shoes, and announce: “My name is Mat Best, and I want to kill people for America!” As a minor, you need both your parents’ signatures on documents that basically say, “We recognize, as our son’s legal guardians, that by signing this piece of paper we are saying that we’re okay with him stepping in front of bullets.” I had a hard time getting my parents to sign field trip permission slips, they were so protective of me. I had no idea how many hoops I might have to jump through to get their John and Jane Hancocks on these enlistment papers.
When asking for something this big—whether it’s enlistment papers, your first gun, or asking your girlfriend to have a threesome for the first time—you always start with the toughest nut to crack. In this situation, I thought for sure that would be my mom. If she said yes, the likelihood my dad would also say yes pretty much doubled. If she tried to defer—“Well, what does your father say?”—then I’d be able to concentrate all my conniving teenage energy on a single target. And to be honest, I wasn’t too worried about my dad’s response. I figured the only thing he might ask was, “It’s not the fucking Coast Guard, is it?”
The day I got the paperwork, I brought it home and spent all night in my room rehearsing how I was going to sell it to my mom. I prepared a whole speech that appealed to her sense of fairness (“Come on, Ma, you let my brothers do it! Why can’t I go and try not to get killed!”), that had just the right amount of baby-boy begging in it, and that ever so subtly preyed on her patriotism (“America is under attack, Mom! WTF?”).
The whole thing was a delicate dance that I could very easily fuck up if I wasn’t careful. Moms are like good teachers: They are hard graders and have well-honed bullshit detectors. You can try to tell them that the dog ate your homework, and they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but then they’ll ask you what kind of dog you have, and what her name is, and how long you’ve had her. And when you don’t have answers to those questions, that’s when they’ll send you to detention and tell you that they’ve secretly always loved the other kids more than you.
Nope, no trust issues here. You can totally have my six-digit iPhone lock screen passcode.
The next morning when I went downstairs for breakfast, I took a deep breath and worked up the courage to pitch my mom as she was washing dishes.
“Mom, I want to enlist in the military.”
“When?” she said.
“Right now.”
“But you’re only seventeen!”
“I know. That’s why I need you to sign these documents.”
My heart stopped as she put the dishes down and turned to look at me. Mentally, I started to chamber my speech. Emotionally, I worked to steady my trigger finger, because you only get one shot at unloading a magazine of hollow-pointed sympathy bullets into your mother. After a few seconds, she looked down and shook her head. Here it comes, I thought.
“Okay. If this is what you are passionate about, you—”
“You let my brothers do it!” I shouted back, not actually hearing a word she was saying.
“—can go too.”
Well, shit.
I was totally unprepared for her to be so cool about this, though in retrospect I shouldn’t have been. My mom was the only woman in a house with six boys. She kept that house together, figuratively and sometimes quite literally. She was Captain Calm of the U.S.S. Clusterfuck. Plus, she was no fool. She looked at the world with clearer eyes than any of us did. Think about it: She married a military man in a military family. She raised a bunch of boys intent on following in those footsteps, boys who trained to run toward the people shooting at them and who, in that training, taught themselves to feel invincible. She was the one thousands of miles away with the very real understanding that possibly more than one of the people she loves most in this world might not come home. It takes a special kind of person to live that life and not let the uncertainty and the fear affect everyone around you. You need to be strong, you need to be resilient, you need to be a patriot, and it doesn’t hurt if you can make chocolate chip cookies with just the right amount of gooeyness in the middle when your kid is not feeling well. My mom was all of those things, in spades. And culottes.
There should be a congressional medal for moms like her, though at the time the first emotion that washed over me was actually disappointment. I’d crafted this ingenious, unimpeachable argument in defense of my plan, and now I didn’t even get to use it. She’d stolen my thunder by being awesome, thanks a lot, Mom. Keep your shit together, I thought. Keep that speech holstered. Little did I know, this was only the first of many times when I would have to work hard to accept someone’s unconditional surrender to my demands instead of getting to blow them away like I really wanted.
Still a little off balance, I figured I should seize the moment and go straight to my dad to lock this fucker down. Since he’s a proud veteran, I thought getting his sign-off would be an easy task, especially with my mom already onboard. He’d understand, sign right away, I’d go in for the hug, instead he’d give me the handshake, I’d grow up that day, and then we’d cut to a commercial for Cialis and reverse mortgages.
Man, was I wrong.
When I handed him the paperwork, he looked at it, gave me a stern look, then told me to sit down.
I knew what that meant. My mom understood the passion aspect of military service. She didn’t just want her boys to be all they could be; she wanted them to be happy and fulfilled too. My dad could give a fuck about my passion if it didn’t also have some purpose behind it. He’d served, he knew what war is, he knew what it really meant. He wanted to make sure I knew what it meant as well. He wanted to know that I understood what I was getting myself into.