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25 The Expulsion of Oronte Churm My final duty station as an army diver was the Republic of Panama. Our detachment lived on Fort Kobbe, the tiny army post on Howard Air Force Base, outside Panama City. We were attached to an engineer company but spent most of our time working independently from them in the canal or Gatun Lake or Portobello Bay. Sometimes we went to the jungle with the airborne infantry battalion that lived across the street or cross-trained with Special Forces. It was good duty, with two warm oceans full of living reefs, and smart, creative people who could have been doing just about anything but had volunteered, three or four times over, to be military frogmen and deep-sea divers. I joined the service to get the money for college. In my era it was called veap, Veterans Educational Assistance Program, to differentiate it from the free ride that the gi Bill had been since World War II. Still, the government put in two dollars to my one, and after I had saved a set amount there was a bonus, and the total would be enough to get me through a state school after I got out. I achieved that financial goal when my original three-year enlistment was up,but I re-upped for an additional year to get the chance to go to Panama with my team and open the dive section there. There were even more adventures to be had in army diving after a tour in Panama—Korea, Germany, and later, all over the world—and Frenchy, who’d left diving to become a command sergeant major by then,begged me to stay in. I agreed to do so, thinking I’d take it a year at a time. But when I talked to the reenlistment nco, he played a sales game with me and said 26 the expulsion of oronte churm I’d have to reenlist for four years or nothing. He couldn’t do anything about that, he said; it was the way the system worked. I told him I’d think about it and walked straight to the education office on Kobbe to get some help with college applications. Frenchy went to the command headquarters on Fort Clayton and talked to them about the recruiter. They said I was welcome to re-up for any length of time I saw fit, but I’d already decided on what I was calling freedom. The educational office on Fort Kobbe was, like everything else, housed in a multistory colonial building with a red tile roof. Most of the common areas and hallways in the buildings were open to the tropical breeze; bedrooms and some offices were air-conditioned behind closed doors. This office was usually locked. A bulletin board in the hallway held a few humidity-wrinkled, fly-specked sheets announcing a limited selection of beginning college classes, across the isthmus, and extension degree programs through, I think, the University of Maryland. They were impossible for soldiers whose jobs took them to the field regularly, but that’s the way it was. I had to return several times before I found a “counselor” on duty. I really had only one question: Did I have to list the community college courses I’d taken several years earlier on my college apps? My good intention was to get a fresh start; I wanted to take the courses over again as refreshers and wouldn’t try to claim the credits.Anyway,I had another course of study in mind.The counselor said to leave them off my applications. A couple of years into my undergraduate studies at nhsu-Tundra, my advisor,an older professor who would soon become the English Department head, asked where I had learned what he called my “whorehouse Spanish,” and all this came out. He got excited for me and said I must get the old community college transcripts to him, so I could transfer those credits and get my degree done more quickly. If I was going to get anywhere in life, I must learn to work the system, he said; I was doing magnificently with my studies, and he was thrilled that I was an officer in the English honor fraternity, but I had to see to my career. Shortly afterward some administrative computer processed my request, and I was expelled from the university. My crime was falsifying my original application by not listing every institution of...

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