When Gardner goes to naval bootcamp in Orlando, he has to be clean-shaven and disciplined. He graduates from bootcamp into “A” School, a kind of medical training for the Navy, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where “Jim Crow seemed like he was alive and well anytime we stepped foot outside the base” (129). Nevertheless, in the college atmosphere of Camp Lejeune, he played football and received a medical education on the job. He realizes that his desire to see the world will have to wait as he commits to life as a navy medic. He also enters into a relationship with an older woman who gives him an appetite for adventurous sex.

At the hospital, he is trained by Lieutenant Commander Charlotte Gannon and takes the opportunity to learn as much as he can by asking questions. Gardner excels at his work and earns the title “Doc,” despite having no formal medical training. He is able to overcome patients’ racial prejudice with his competence and also to alleviate his own prejudices about people of other races:

They seemed to be really changed, not because I changed them, but because they changed themselves by challenging their own beliefs […] For the first time since I had learned that the world wasn’t all black, I really began to see people as people (133).