Pretty Sure I'm Dead

Chapter 2.5 TMI (Too Much Information)

My academic life, however, was somewhat unusual. I loved learning and by the time I was in middle school, I already knew more than most of my instructors ever would. Yes, I was one of those kids who was a little too smart for my own good.

I was never hesitant about sharing my superior knowledge and many of my teachers did not appreciate being corrected during their lectures. As a result, I was frequently thrown out of class. Fortunately, I was still allowed to take tests and so my grades rarely suffered.

My ejections were not always about correcting the teacher. Once I was thrown out of a Civics class during a mock United Nations General Assembly debate. I was representing West Germany. The East German delegate just happened to be a girl who liked me. I bribed her with chewing gum into agreeing to unify the two countries. I was clearly ahead of my time. The Civics teacher did not agree and I was ejected from class for making a mockery of the mock UN.

Sometimes, teachers would remove me from their classes under the guise of having me work on special projects. One English teacher let me spend two weeks in study hall working on a short story. She said I had potential. All my teachers did. They just didn't say potential for what. I'm sure most of them thought it was the potential for a disaster. I did not disappoint.

My science teachers would let me do whatever I wanted and I never got into trouble. Well, except for the time in the science lab when I hooked up the Bunsen burner gas line to the water line to see which had the greater pressure. The rubber hose I used to connect them blew apart and sprayed water all over the chalk boards. The anger in the teacher's face, threatened a rather severe punishment, but how could she punish me for pursuing my basic scientific curiosity? It also helped that my great aunt was the most respected science teacher in the school and a very close friend of the teacher whose chalk boards I had ruined. And after all, I had potential.

My High School academic transgressions generally resulted in my spending time in the school counselor's office. He was a very wise man who tried in vain to explain to me that you can't teach old dogs, new tricks. The only thing I took away from this was that my teachers were a lot of old dogs.

I left high school my junior year because I was able to talk a college into accepting me without a high school diploma.   

Yes, as a child I was quite precocious, but as is often the case was also quite conceited and obnoxious. And as you may have noticed, I was also somewhat prone to rash actions. Recently, these traits have lessened. I certainly hope, I am less obnoxious.  I've always had better friends than I deserved and they seem to have had a mitigating effect on my obnoxiousness.  

As far as conceit is concerned, I sort of had that beat out of me my first year of college by some guys from New Jersey. Fortunately, my roommates from Chicago came to my aid and beat the conceit out of the Jersey boys instead. To this day, even hearing the name New Jersey makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, I have an abnormal fondness for everything Chi-town except maybe Chicago style pizza. Admittedly, after that metaphorical and literal black eye I was a lot more careful about mouthing off. As for whether or not I'm still conceited, I'll just refer you to the Author's note at the end.   

I am definitely less rash. So much so that someone even commented that if I were any more laid back, I'd probably be dead. That was when the idea first occurred to me that maybe I was.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. There are a few more rash incidents I need to tell you about.

I never really got the hang of just sitting in class. This followed me to University where fortunately for me they didn't care if you attended class. You just had to pass the tests. I am very good at taking tests. I also had a lot of good friends who were willing to share their class notes with me to cover material that wasn't in the texts. Once I missed so many classes, the dean of students' office sent the Atlanta police to my dorm room to make sure I was still alive. I had a friend who worked in that office, and I think she intended it to scare me into attending more classes.  It didn't work.  

Despite all my efforts to sabotage my life, I graduated from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at the age of twenty. I really was quite smart, at least academically speaking. Math has always been intuitively obvious to me and my near photographic memory allowed me to excel in most other subjects. But there are all types of smart. After all, I had put a turtle in my own mouth, and apparently, I was not smart enough to realize that without my student deferment I was facing the Vietnam war draft. Story of my life – simultaneously really smart and really dumb. This is further evidenced by my choosing to dodge the draft by enlisting.

After all these details of my youth, I fear you are thinking TMI; so, I will try not to bore you with too much of my varied military experiences, but some is necessary to complete your perspective which at this point should indicate I was a completely obnoxious brat.

I enlisted in the navy and trained as a Hospital Corpsman to be assigned to the Marines. After my training, I decided I might be better off as an officer. Since I already had a college degree, I didn't think it would be too difficult to make the switch. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of corpsmen (corpsmen being a favorite target of the Viet Cong); so, I had to find a skill set the military was even more desperate to fill. The Air Force needed navigators (aircraft also being a favorite target.) Navigators get to run all the same risks as pilots, but get none of the glory. Combine that with the requirement that navigators must be rather proficient in math and the result is that there were just not a lot of people standing in line for those positions. The Air Force was willing to transfer me out of the Navy, send me to OTS (Officer Training School) and then to Navigator training in exchange for a six-year commitment. I jumped on it. Yeah, all kinds of smart and all kinds of dumb, but fortunately also all kinds of lucky. At any rate, the war was winding down and in training I certainly had it better than those who were still being sent to the actual war zones. Ironically, while I had friends fighting for their lives overseas, my own next brush with death occurred stateside.