I, Hacker: Chapter 3, Part 1: “Basic Training”

 The bus rolled into Fort Leonard Wood before dawn, its headlights carving weak tunnels through the Missouri fog. A long, low building sat ahead — beige concrete, windows blacked out, the kind of place that looked like it had never laughed.

The doors hissed open. The smell hit first — wet asphalt, diesel, and the unmistakable sting of bleach. Then came the yelling.

“MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!”

Drill sergeants don’t speak; they detonate. Every word a concussive blast. Forty of us stumbled off the bus, duffel bags slung over shoulders, trying to look invisible. I remember thinking that invisibility was the one thing I was already good at.

They herded us into a formation that was more statistical than geometric, barking names, counting heads, separating the loud from the quiet, the useful from the hopeless. I landed somewhere in the middle — too scrawny to impress, too composed to antagonize.

A sergeant with a voice like a chainsaw and a jaw you could hang laundry on paced in front of us.

“You belong to me now,” he said. “The government owns you. You’re property. You’re inventory with legs. You understand?”

We yelled “YES, DRILL SERGEANT!” in a single, ragged chord.

He smiled without humor. “Good. Property that answers back.”

The next weeks were noise, motion, and repetition. Wake at 0500. Run until your lungs turn inside out. Chow at 0630 — powdered eggs, fake bacon, coffee that could dissolve paint. March until the sun stopped pretending to care. Repeat commands until the words lost meaning.

I followed orders because it was easier than fighting them. My body learned what my brain already knew: systems reward compliance. The trick was to obey just enough to stay under the radar.

My bunkmate was a guy named McBride — tall, red-haired, from Tennessee, with a voice that could sing even when he talked. He called me “Professor” after I corrected his math once during a navigation drill.

“You look like a guy who sleeps with a dictionary,” he said. “What the hell are you doin’ in the Army?”

“Judge’s idea,” I said.

He laughed so hard he nearly choked. “Hell, that makes two of us.”

We bonded over mutual resentment — his for authority, mine for inefficiency. McBride had a knack for radios. He could strip and reassemble a field transceiver blindfolded, and he understood the poetry of static. 

“Noise,” he said once, holding a headset to my ear, “ain’t random. It’s just information you don’t understand yet.”

That line stuck with me. I started thinking of the Army that way: a wall of noise. My job was to find the pattern underneath.

They put us through aptitude testing halfway through basic. The kind of thing designed to slot you into a MOS (Military Occupational Specialty): language, logic, mechanical reasoning. I went through the motions, half-asleep, filling in the bubbles mechanically.

Two days later, I was called into an office. An older officer sat behind a steel desk, tapping a pencil against my file.

“You aced the electronics and coding sections,” he said, half-accusation, half-curiosity. “You have prior experience?”

“A little,” I said.

He grunted. “How much is a little?”

“Enough to fix your typewriter,” I said before I could stop myself.

He didn’t laugh, but he didn’t kick me out either. Instead, he flipped a page in the file, scrawled something in red pen, and said, 

“You’re being ssigned to the Signal Corps. You’ll be working with communications systems. Computers. Programming. Stuff above my pay grade.”

I nodded, keeping my face blank, though inside I felt the smallest flicker of triumph. Every system has a way in.

Six weeks later, they put me on a bus again — smaller, quieter. We drove through a drizzle that turned the world to static. McBride was reassigned too, different unit. We shook hands at the gate.

“Keep your head down, Professor,” he said. “And don’t rewire the Pentagon.”

“No promises,” I said.

The facility they sent me to wasn’t much to look at — a low brick building surrounded by chain-link and barbed wire. A sign read U.S. ARMY COMMUNICATIONS CENTER — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Inside, the air was cold and dry. The floors hummed with fluorescent buzz. Rows of metal desks lined the floor, each with a terminal, each terminal with a man in uniform typing quietly like an obedient machine.

I was introduced to Sergeant Walters, a man carved entirely from procedure. His haircut looked regulation down to the molecule.

“You’ll be assigned to systems maintenance,” he said, handing me a stack of manuals thick enough to stun cattle. “ADA and LISP. You’ll learn both. You’ll debug our communications protocols and keep the message relays clean. You’ll log everything you do. No exceptions.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” I said.

He looked at me, squinting like he was trying to see what kind of soldier I was. “You a fast learner, Private Smith?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Good,” he said. “Because the machines don’t tolerate slow learners.”

That night, I sat at my assigned desk, staring at the terminal. Green letters blinked against a black screen. Lines of code scrolled by as I ran diagnostic checks, correcting syntax errors in old relay programs. The sound of the mainframes in the next room filled the air — a deep, steady thrum, like a pulse you could live inside.

Walters walked past behind me, muttering something about schedules and reporting chains. But I barely heard him. My hands were already moving, translating commands into shapes, shapes into systems. The old logic came back instantly — loops, conditions, recursion. Clean. Perfect.
And when I hit ENTER, the terminal responded with a calm, obedient prompt:

> OK

No yelling. No orders. Just acknowledgment. Immediate, precise, honest.