Background and Enlistment

Five weeks after Billy Milligan turned seventeen, with his older brother Jim due to leave for the Air Force in a week, Tommy and Allen joined the Navy. The decision came after Billy had been expelled from school, a change that had made conditions at home worse. Dorothy had mixed feelings about her younger son’s enlistment, but she saw it as a way to get him out of the house and away from Chalmer. Her presence at the recruiting office was practical as well as maternal: on March 23, 1972, she accompanied Allen, and when the recruiting officer worked through the paperwork and questions, she did most of the answering.

The book’s account presents the enlistment through its changing inner identities. Tommy and Allen signed the papers, but Danny’s uncertainty soon appeared during the General Education and Development Test. Allen had looked over the test and judged it unrelated to Tommy’s abilities or knowledge; when Danny arrived and did not know what to do, the proctor explained how to mark the answers. Danny filled in the response spaces without reading the questions and passed. The episode underscores how the apparent continuity of one recruit concealed abrupt shifts in who was directing his actions.

Allen’s Early Success at Great Lakes

Within a week, Allen was on his way to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois. He was assigned to Company 109, Battalion 21, and his Civil Air Patrol experience led to his appointment as Recruit Petty Officer in Charge of 160 young recruits. He took the post seriously and enforced discipline. When he learned that the company most proficient in the sixteen-count manual would become the honor company, he and Tommy looked for ways to save time in the morning routine.

Allen devised a coordinated shower procedure so that recruits could wash while moving through the rows of showers rather than waiting in place. He demonstrated it himself, still wearing his uniform, and calculated that each recruit could finish in forty-five seconds. The aim was to get all 160 men showered, dressed, and onto the parade grounds in less than ten minutes. The plan worked: Company 109 was first out on the parade grounds the next morning. Allen was pleased with the result, Tommy continued looking for other efficiencies, and Allen received the Service Medal for good conduct. At this point, his organizational skill and command of routine seemed well suited to military life.

Home Crisis and Changing Conduct

Two weeks later, Allen called home and learned that Chalmer was beating Dorothy again. The news affected Tommy, Danny, and Allen deeply. Ragen became angry, while Arthur was described as largely indifferent; the distress among the others brought on another mix-up time. The immediate effects were apparent in the conduct of several identities: Shawn wore his shoes on the wrong feet and left them untied, David became slovenly, and Philip discovered where he was without showing concern.

The changes also disrupted Allen’s performance as recruit leader. Company 109 saw a sharp contrast between the crack leader who had organized its morning routine and the man who sometimes sat talking while paperwork accumulated. At other times, he tried to boss everyone after losing the RPOC position. The shift was not presented as a gradual failure of military competence alone: it followed the call home and the inner group’s distress, and it brought the previously effective routine into conflict with increasingly erratic behavior.

Evaluation, Discharge, and the Detour

On April 12, two weeks and four days after Tommy joined the Navy, Philip was assigned to the Recruit Evaluation Unit. The company commander’s report described the decline from the earlier RPOC: after Allen was relieved of the position, he repeatedly went to sick call, found reasons to miss classes, fell behind the rest of the company, and appeared to require watching. A Navy psychiatrist interviewed David, who did not understand what was happening. Checks of records from Ohio showed that Milligan had been in a mental hospital and had lied on the recruitment papers. The psychiatric assessment concluded that he lacked the maturity and stability needed to function effectively in the Navy and recommended discharge as temperamentally unsuitable for further training.

On May 1, a month and a day after his enlistment, William Stanley Milligan was discharged from the U.S. Navy under honorable conditions. He received his pay and an airline ticket to Columbus. That discharge ended the military attempt, but the planned journey home did not proceed as expected. Traveling from Great Lakes toward O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Philip learned that two recruits on leave were going to New York City. He abandoned the airline ticket and joined them on the bus, heading for a city he knew he was from but had never seen. The episode thus ends with a second departure: after the Navy sent Milligan away from service, Philip chose a different destination rather than follow the return itinerary.