Carlos Velasquez

Initiate Carlos Velasquez

INITIATE is a story about a young soldier waiting for his discharge at the Army processing center in Fort Bragg, N. C. 'Val' the main character remembers and reflects over some of the events during the past three years. Uncertain, patiently and anxiously waiting on this last day, the final hours as the clock counts down to the process center's closing. Having joined the Army at seventeen, Val recalls some of the memorable 'coming of age' experiences. Each year of the past three years of enlistment service, corresponding to each chapter. Chapter one -Year one, starts with the family collapse that leads to voluntary induction; basic and advanced military training (the good times) that places Val, on a troop transport carrier headed for Vietnam. Year two -Vietnam starts with a near death experience and the "kid" begins a journey that passes him through an 'initiating' portal into the world of adult sex, drugs, racism and violence. Year three, stationed at Fort Bragg, the Army post sympathetic to the KKK, conditions have severely deteriorated leading up to these final hours. Initiate is told from a 'window' introspection about a late teen, racial minority soldier from the Bronx; coping with coming of age, sexuality and a 'war within a war' during three years of active military service in the tumultuous sixties, Vietnam and the civil rights movement. A 'fiction' only in the context of names changed and literary presentation, the story is factual.