After Basic Training, Tech School, and working with my US Air Force Recruiter in my hometown for two weeks, I was finally ready to report to my first duty assignment… the 314th Airlift Wing, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas.

As a single Airman, I was assigned to a co-ed dorm to live. I didn’t have a roommate, but I did have a suitemate. A suitemate is where we each have our own room but share a bathroom. We both had to keep the bathroom clean, but I was responsible for my room, and she was responsible for her room. We had a dorm master who inspected our rooms once a month and we were on rotation so each week he would inspect but because there were so many it rolled around that each person or suite was only inspected once a month and we knew when so we could make sure it was clean for inspection. He would also pick a suite or room that was the best for the month and that Airman would get an Air Force Award. I did get an award while I lived there.

The dorm was co-ed so there were men and women who lived in the same building and on the same floor, but men were suitemates with men and women were suitemates with women; we did not mix the sexes on sharing a bathroom. When I first got there, I had a suitemate, and she was loosie-goosy like my sister. Meaning that she never remembered to lock or unlock the door, so I was often locked out of the bathroom because she locked my side of the door and forgot to unlock it. She often left her side of the door open when she had people over for a party and since I worked shift hours, when I would work 3rd shift, I would sleep at odd hours when others were awake. It would be awkward when I would wake up and go to the bathroom in my night gown and she’d have her door open to the bathroom and people would be there looking in to see me going into the bathroom. I was in a fallen state then, so I did have anger and this type of thoughtlessness annoyed me.

One Friday afternoon, I got off work and went to the gym and worked out. I went back to my dorm to grab a quick shower because I was meeting some friends to go out and realized that my suitemate had locked me out of the bathroom, and she was gone for the whole weekend. I had to go down to a guy in my unit’s room and ask him if I could use his shower. He was on his way out too for the weekend and I barely caught him, but he let me use his shower and just asked me to lock up. I am thankful that he trusted me to be in his room with him not being there. My suitemate was transferred out to a new duty station after a while and from that point on until I moved out, I did not have another suitemate.

There was a guy that lived in the room right across from mine who always played his music really loud, and he only played one song over and over again all day long and all night if there was a party in the dorm. It annoyed me and everyone in the whole dorm. He drank like a fish all the time and played the song, “A Country Boy Can Survive” by Hank Williams, Jr. When I was on shifts where I had to sleep at odd hours, he would turn the song up so loud that it would wake me up and I’d go over and ask him to turn it down, but he would not, and we always had beef about it. I never reported him to the dorm master, but he did eventually get written up over it and he even got reprimanded at work for being a drunk. I think they made him go to rehab. But he accused me of ratting on him. I told him, I wasn’t the one who ratted him out and that I never told on him, but I was the only one who would confront him about it while everyone else would go behind his back and complain about it. I told him that one of those people probably ratted him out. The reason I believed that was because when I had dorm duty one week everybody came to me and told me that they were so annoyed with him over playing that song over and over again, but they didn’t want to start any fights with him, so they just let me argue with him. I was thinking, ‘yeah, I could use some backup here…’ But he did try to do better after he got back from rehab. I moved out not long after that because I finally got my BAQ / BAS. That is the basic food and housing allowance so that I could live off base. When I first got there, I had to apply for it and then be put on a waiting list because they give preference to families, and then to married couples and then to singles.

For a long time, I hated this song… I would not listen to it at all for years after this experience. But now I like the song and have it on my iPod and listen to it in several playlists. I don’t know what changed my mind about it. I think it was forgiveness. Holding on to unforgiveness makes you hate anything related to a memory of someone that you hate. But true forgiveness causes you to forget and then you are free to enjoy things that really are not related to that experience in the slightest. I don’t know where this guy is, but I do wish him well and hope he has a better life today than he did back then. Whatever was making him drink like that was torment, so I pray that he found peace.

Dorm Duty

Dorm duty is a week that each Airman that lives in a dorm gets to be off from their normal job and gets to help out the Dorm Master around the dorm. We had to clean the common areas like the kitchen, the breakroom, the game room, the hallways; buffing the floors, emptying the huge trashcans that was always full of beer and pizza, and we got to mow the lawn… which was the best part because we got to drive the riding lawnmower. For some reason I loved riding the lawnmower. I just felt like I was doing a man’s job and it was something that was easy to me not like emptying the huge trashcans that were really too heavy for me to empty.