Mama Adams...

The last thing one is obligated to give is comfort in basic training. As long as your ass is where they tell it to be and when, the powers that be could care less how the trainees feel about each other or themselves. The thought of healthy dynamic only went so far as function dictated and barely even to that. As for myself, I really couldn't have cared either except I would have preferred less screaming and more time alone. Then there was Mama Adams. Nearly forty, joining the guard to attempt to care for the children she loved more than anything. She was broke down before she started but stronger than any of the yelling, testosterone pumps let loose in that place. Her knees were shot and her back was bad at the beginning, and it proved to nearly kill her those nine weeks, but there was grace and solidarity in her suffering. While in reception, she took a handful of us into her confidence and trust and care and didn't let us out from those soft black arms until the day we left. Many nights, she would come trundling down to my bunk with icy-hot patches in her hand, and I would place them as strategically and gently as possible on the wide agonies of her shoulders and ribs. My meager offerings.

She had attempted basic before. Young and spry and perfect youth almost a decade before I knew her. The kids she was still fighting for when I met her were her reason back then too. The army is many things, but it is also stable and full of benefits that fill a mother's eyes. She was at reception for a week, not able to call home and dying the small deaths of moments without the love that was like air to her. One night, she woke up in her bunk not able to breathe. Terror was on her so thick she could barely move. But she knew she had to get to a phone. No matter that they were off-limits and that a drill sergeant would like nothing more than to catch this young black woman breaking curfew and the rules to get to one. She knew nothing except she must call home and now and no one could stop her. She managed somehow to elude the watchful malice and dialed home...and her mother answered where her husband should have been. There were long tears in her voice and she was saying, "He's gone baby. He's gone." Mama Adams barely needed the details of her husband getting in the car with his younger friends. Of the reckless speed in a friend's new car. Of the railing that could not hold the momentum and delivered the vehicle and her love without mercy to the ravine below. She had known that he was gone when she woke to a world without air for her lungs.

Mama Adams told this to a few of us as we started basic, her facing these old hauntings and horrors that our trifling terrors could not even imagine. And when my Tom found mirroring circumstances with the miracle of safety at the end instead, she listened to my hysteria and did not even rebuke my tears in comparison to what could have been. She held me and let me know that, yes, the imagined fear was bad enough and her happiness for the outcome was unsoiled by her own forever mourning.