Last Days at USAFA – Bully and Blackness – Military Memory Book

We all have those moments of doubt in life.

Periods of darkness, where nothing feels right, things are off and out of place. You don’t know where or how to be.

After reviewing many of my journals during my USAFA years last night, that’s where I was.

Beginning shortly after 4th Class (freshman year) and for the rest of college, there’s a detached melancholy in my writing. With 20 years of hindsight, my heart bleeds for the kid that I was. He never found his place there.

Bully

At the center of the experience was a bully who made an already difficult experience even harder. He’d been a teammate of mine on the cheerleading team. We were mascots together. For some reason he decided he didn’t like me. He put me through round after round of hazing (the mental kind).

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

He’d give me the wrong time or location of practice. Talk shit behind my back to the coach. Yell at me when I made mistakes. Make me carry shit…just cause (it was funny). Turn the rest of the team against me. Give me the shittiest shifts during football games. Through his action (or inaction) I was kicked off of the team twice. Yeah it was bad.

What made it worse was I was happy to do and deal with these things…I was a hardcore people pleaser.

Hayden, Brave – USAFA Years

A black chapter in an already dark point of my life.

Blackness

This came at a time when I was beginning my search for identity, being Black was a big part of that. I remember feeling a huge disconnect between me and other Black cadets.

Growing up in San Antonio, there wasn’t a significant amount of Black culture to absorb. My parents hadn’t forced “the culture” on me and for the most part had a balanced (and in hindsight very healthy) approach when it came to being accepting of people who looked different than us. While this would be great in the long run, it did me no favors in college.

The result was I was an outsider among other Black folk. I didn’t get the jokes, movie references, or style. In many of their eyes I was too hard to deal with because I didn’t fit neatly in what their definition of being “Black” was.

This same thing occurred with many non-Black cadets. I was too confusing to get along with. That left me with no one I felt comfortable with getting close to at school. Being “cool” with people wasn’t being “close”.

Throughout my time as a cadet, the gap widened. By graduation, I was completely alone.

An excerpt from the book:

By Firstie (senior) year, the slow glacial drift from my core relationships that began at the beginning of first BCT had become glaringly apparent to me…I was floating on a cold island alone and wasn’t taking it well.

Hayden: Brave, USAFA Years

What came after was a low point in my life. A pit that would take years to climb out of.

Pre-order and get full chapter sections of Hayden: Brave here.