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 | Rob Terrell's Brief Autobiography
(Through the First Grade)
by Rob Terrell
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At the age of 6, I deferred entry into the Coast Guard and attended preschool on the GI bill. Each summer and school vacation was spent swabbing the decks, slinging hash, and playing cabin-boy to the men and women of the U.S.S. Tricky Dick, the finest group of junior-high-school dropouts to ever protect our nation's recreational boaters.
For me, those summers are awash with fond memories of intense bonding with my peers over bouts of sea-sickness and malaria, which we were given in one of the medical officer's "experiments."
During a failed drug interdiction (where six high-school boys in a dinghy boarded our vessel under cover of day and stole the crew chief's snuff-tin of dry-erase markers and the captain's emergencies-only dime bag) it was determined that I had made a terrible mistake (by inviting them aboard) and although I still owed our country eight years of service I was swiftly discharged, having been given a thorough beating and enough cash to pay for the first grade and a bus ride home.
Everything since then has been a blur.
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