High Price

would be many chances for me to fall down and be pulled back—but the first day of what we were told to call “basics” turned my head. We were all relieved when the instructors dismissed us and we finally were allowed to get a couple of hours of sleep.
    And once I resolved to put in the effort, there was not much else to do other than submit to the experience and do the work. Although most people find the constant exercise in boot camp to be physically grueling, I found that I faced a different challenge. At home, I’d played a minimum of several hours a day of basketball in games and practice, constantly running and doing specific drills to keep my edge. That didn’t include pickup games and other athletic activities I did just for fun. In basics, we were being trained so that after six weeks, we’d be able to run a mile and a half as a squadron. And we had to go at the pace of the slowest man, who was seriously slow.
    To be fair, it was San Antonio, Texas, at peak summer heat and not everyone had grown up in Miami and become acclimatized to intense exercise in high temperatures. But I felt like I was teasing my body. When we were done working out, I’d barely even be warmed up. As a result, I wound up running push-up and sit-up contests with my bunk mates at night: I told the guys that we could all get out of here looking good if we made some additions to the routine.
    Back home, brothers who had spent time in prison would typically return looking amazingly buff. They said that in the joint, they’d done those exercises constantly—so I reasoned that we should do the same in the air force. Pretty soon almost everyone in my squadron was doing it. We’d take bets on who would win with the highest numbers.
    The only other thing to do at night was write letters home, which became another way to compete. The more letters you wrote, the more you would get back when the training instructor handed them out at mail call. Receiving lots of mail was a sign of high status. I wrote to all my girlfriends, as well as my sisters and brothers.
    And as with its use of psychology to break us in with exhaustion and boredom, I found that the air force was far more adept than I expected it to be at dealing with racial issues. In their history of how the army (and by extension, the rest of the military) became the most integrated institution in America, All That We Can Be , sociologists Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote that the service is “not race-blind, it is race-savvy.” That’s how I felt about it. The air force had been the second of the services to desegregate and was the first to become fully integrated.
    I was amazed by how quickly the military got everyone—black, white, yellow, brown—to work as a coordinated unit. They imposed rules to ensure we would get along and by giving us the common enemy of the training instructors and their strict command, united us in a shared experience. That created a bond. I first got a real sense that things worked at least somewhat differently in the military when I saw our dorm chief, a black guy, get demoted for giving favors to some of the guys in our squadron. Someone had dropped a dime on him (snitched)—a black guy. It simply blew my mind that a brother would give up another brother: when you grew up where I did, that just was not done in any setting that had real-world consequences.
    Of course, the idea of being loyal to a mixed-race team wasn’t new to me—that had been part of athletics for virtually my whole life. Off the field, however, I’d always found that those allegiances were not as strong. Race was still foremost in people’s minds when it really came down to it. No one I knew believed that American institutions could really be fair to us. We’d all seen people who had faith in that get violently upended, whether through experience of police brutality or employment discrimination or just daily experiences of lack of respect.
    There were peculiarities and misunderstandings, too: for example, the term homeboy was banned after white guys mistook it for an insult. They thought we were using it to demean people, to say they were homebodies who never went out and were antisocial. Of course, we were actually referring to friends, particularly people from our neighborhood that we liked. But it made whites uncomfortable, so it had to go.

    Basic training photo.
    Still, such incidents were not as common as they were in the civilian world and overall, I