Here’s a story that hopefully gives you a chuckle.
Early in my time in the Air Force, I tried out to be a survival instructor. The class only started twice a year at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington. While waiting around for the next class to start, we did lots of exercising and other physical training to prepare our bodies for the rigors of the upcoming course.
One of the things we did on a weekly basis was load up our ruck sacks and go on long hikes in a state park or some weird trail or on public land out in the boonies. The idea was to keep our bodies accustomed to bearing heavy loads for a long time as we moved over miles of terrain, and along the way practice some land navigation. We were fortunate enough to have some pretty relaxed superiors while waiting around for training to start, and since we’re talking the Air Force (not the Army or Marines), they told us “hey, as long as they’re decent, you can wear civilian clothes during this ruck; the only guidelines are that you wear the issued boots you intend to wear during the course and you must bring a loaded ruck.”
Now, when you go for long hikes once a week, it doesn’t take long before you start repeating trails. One of the sergeants in charge of us had an idea to help break up the monotony. He had family an hour or two away from the base; his parents lived in Idaho somewhere, I think. He worked out a plan to have us go for a hike near their location, then we could spend the night at his parents’ house, and we’d come back to base the next morning. As far as training goes, this was very casual and actually a really generous thing for his parents to do. (Would you be willing to host 20-30 very fit and very hungry males with an extra dose of testosterone at your home? I wouldn’t.)
When we went on our hikes, we physically took up a lot of room. There were a lot of us, and we each had a large ruck sack, so we normally took a big bus that was pretty much a navy blue school bus with a very “for official use only” look to it. We piled in, drove off to whatever trail we were going to hit that day, and did our hike.
I don’t remember the details, but for some reason, when we finished our hike and got back to the bus, we needed to kill some time before we could go to the house. We ended up driving into town where a high school baseball game was going on. I think maybe the sergeant wanted to say hi to the coach, who was an old friend or something. We didn’t really know, our attitude was “hey man, I get on the bus when they tell me, I go where it takes me, and I get off the bus when it stops.” Well, they told us to leave our rucks on the bus and come outside to watch the game.
As we spread out on the grass, dozing in the sunshine, shooting the breeze, or watching the game, we looked around and started noticing some of the locals looked uneasy. None of us could figure out why. We hung out for maybe 20 minutes to half an hour, then got back on the bus and rolled out to wherever we were going next. We later found out they thought we were from a nearby prison and were out on a work detail whose very limited supervision was chatting up the baseball team’s coach and not paying much attention to the bunch of rough-looking guys, wearing the same boots, with similar haircuts and no facial hair, all piling off the government-issue bus.
I guess if I had to pick a moral to the story, I’d say even though it might not be your fault, sometimes people are going to make assumptions about you based on how you look or the vibe you give off. Before you get mad at them, don’t be afraid to step back from the situation and maybe even laugh at yourself a little. Cut them some slack. You might’ve jumped to the same conclusion if you were in their shoes. Or boots.