8 Personal Narrative

My Time Served

by Devin Nardecchia

When I was about eight years old, I told my parents that I already knew how my future would look, proudly informing them: I would be the first person in my family to earn a high school diploma, then join the Marines where I would serve 20 years, get married, and have a kid or two by age 25. Things didn’t exactly go as planned when at the ripe old age of 22 I was working on exiting the Marine Corps ready to start my life as a civilian. After spending the last decade of my life preparing for this goal of being a marine, needless to say, I found myself feeling a bit lost. But by telling my story about my military training and duty stations, I now feel able to help others who are thinking about this career choice and sharing how these experiences led me to a place where I am better suited today.

June 2014, the summer before I entered the marines, proved a very challenging time in my life. I was finishing up high school assignments to ensure I could graduate on time because a late graduation would mean leaving for bootcamp late. My great grandmother was on her deathbed, and my relationship with my girlfriend was rocky at best. These times were also scary because I was the only person from my friend group who was enlisting, not to mention the only one who turned down a full ride scholarship for college.

Despite the chaos, I muscled through and graduated on time, but that celebration was short lived. My last conversation with my great grandmother ended with her disowning me for joining the military due to her lack of support for the U.S. government. She passed less than an hour later. With barely any time to grieve, I was on a bus getting ready to step on the infamous Yellow Footprints a week later.

Things did not get much better during basic training, I ended up arriving with another kid from my high school, but due to our height differences, we were separated and did not have time to connect and de-stress in this high stress environment. My shorter height also is the reason that one of my drill instructors memorized my face and name. I slept on the top bunk and was too short to make the bed on my own since my mattress was resting above my head, so this made me slower at completing the task. Sgt Alverado gave me hell for it every day for thirteen weeks.

The loneliness also took a toll. For the first two months of my three months in San Diego, I did not receive a single letter. Everyone else in my platoon got letters daily, including the classmate I arrived with. I didn’t feel as if I had any support back home. One day after hearing about the passing of Robin Williams, I felt at my lowest and thought to myself that I couldn’t take the situation anymore, but fate had different plans for me. The same day I was going to quit, I got my first letter. It was from my girlfriend. She was telling me how busy life had been and how things back home were changing. With this letter I now had the strength I needed to complete my goal of making it through boot camp.

When I finally climbed the mountain where men become Marines, known as “The Reaper,” I cried for the first time in three months. Thoughts of my great grandmother, my family, and my girlfriend rushed through my mind, and in my proudest moments standing atop that ridge, they were all I could think of.

After spending 10 days home after basic training, I was sent back to the hot sun of California for infantry training, and before I even arrived, things were not looking good. My plane was late, so I showed up alone. I also had a difficult last name, so my instructor had to match my nametape to his roll call sheet, thus giving me my first nickname: “Effin Narnia.” While I feel like I was treated better by my instructors during this stint, the training was 100 times harder. We packed more weight for our hikes, had less time to eat, had less to eat since we were always the last to arrive at the chow hall, and somehow even more heat to deal with than in the summer. To top everything off, I was freshly out of a relationship. Luckily I had my best battle buddy with me to push me along. He saw how hard of a time I had in basic and was determined to drag me to complete this course despite my protests. But even that time together was shortened because he tried out for a Recon unit and would soon leave to join a different training division.

Fast forward about a month, and I found myself on a plane heading to Chesapeake, Virginia, for Basic Security Job school. There, things were much easier than boot camp and infantry training, which were rough on both my body and my mind. Still, the worst part of Basic Security Guard School was not having any free time. Up to this point, most of my training was rushed, always being reminded that we typically would have longer to learn about subjects or that “this school is normally 2 weeks longer.” Ours consisted of the 9th class for security guard school, and this class would typically occur during spring break. As with many youth on spring break, “Nasty 9” was notorious for getting into trouble. Despite it being February, we still earned the title of Nasty 9 and were subsequently not allotted any liberty, but luckily for me, this was the worst punishment. My platoon mostly goofed off during this time.

My first duty station brought me back home to Washington up near Bangor, a nuclear submarine base. Here I made some of my deepest bonds and had my first experiences with death. As a Marine, I had spent a lot of time mentally preparing myself for all kinds of encounters with death, but I never could have anticipated to experience her in this manner when my friend Rocky was hit and killed by a drunk driver back home. My command was understanding of my wanting to be there for friends and family, and thankfully I lived close enough for them to send me home. Upon returning home, the first interaction I had with anyone was one of my seniors, a man who had been with the unit about a year longer than me, started to go ballistic because I had “robbed him of his day off” to “spend time with his girlfriend.” At this moment I was defended by one of the people I least expected, my Section Leader. He grabbed him by the collar, turned as red in the face as possible, and proceeded to tell him about my situation and that if he had any problem with me taking 3 days off that he could raise these concerns with the rest of the platoon. A few months later, a man who I had gone to boot camp with had also taken his own life just on the other side of the wall from me, and about another month after that a gal from a different part of the unit had also taken her life. In signing up for this job I knew I would become intimate with Death, but I never would have expected that out of the approximately 25+ deaths I’ve had in my life 10 were intentionally self-inflicted, five were due to accidents, and three involved drugs/alcohol while only one was combat related.

During my five years of active duty service with the United States Marine Corps, I had many challenges ranging from a horrid command to living next door with Death. These are challenges that most people in the military will experience one way or another. It’s important when making major life decisions such as enlistment/commissioning into the military that you do your due diligence. Find veterans to tell you about their time; ask for the good and the bad in order to make the most informed decisions about your life. While it may seem like my time served was negative, they hold some of my fondest memories and my closest friendships.