were more ridiculous than what the Webelos had. The Webelos might look like a Little League team made up of park rangers, but at least their uniforms fit properly and looked like actual uniforms. Civil Air Patrol uniforms were baggy pieces of shit that looked like pre-packaged Army costumes from one of those inflatable roadside Halloween stores shaped like a giant pumpkin.
Putting on that uniform and leaving the house during daylight hours ended up being the hardest part of Civil Air Patrol. Occasionally, we’d do these weird drills like lying on our backs and holding a two-by-four over our heads for five minutes straight. To this day I don’t know what the purpose of that drill was: Simulate an Amish barn raising in zero g? Your guess is as good as mine. I remember one afternoon the instructor trying to get stern with us and saying, “Can you fellows give me twenty push-ups?” As a kid who wanted to be the tip of the spear, I was starting to feel distinctly like the shaft.
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.