Are You a Spy?
By Marina Viscun

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In 1998, my dad won the Green Card lottery, and we moved from Moldova to Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. 

(Where the heck is Moldova? Ask away, don’t be shy, most people don’t know. Moldova is situated between Ukraine and Romania and was part of the Soviet Union until 1991.) 

When I graduated high school in New York, I knew my parents couldn’t afford to pay for my college, so, in the hyped-up Y2K, I enlisted in the US Navy. Boot camp was all about marching, eating, running, eating, running, memorizing all things Navy, and some more running. Then it was A-school, in Meridian, Mississippi, where I learned my military trade: personnel man, a human resources professional. 

Most people think all the jobs in the Navy are like the recruiting posters: guns, ships, headsets, drones. But the military is a giant corporation. And like all corporations, it has thousands of employees who generate a ton of paperwork. So, someone needs to handle that stuff. And they gave it all to me - the “Russian Girl,” File, copy, review, stamp, shred, and watch out for those paper cuts. 

My goal when joining the Navy was to travel, and I worked hard in my training to get assigned to my first duty station abroad. It was on the small island of Santa Stefano, part of the Maddalena Archipelago, next to the bigger island of Sardinia–one of those chunks of land that the boot of Italy kicks. 

I was barely 18. This was my first time away from my parents, away from anyone speaking Romanian or Russian, my first time away from the comforts of the “hot-box” cable TV and my mother’s cooking. My mom made many dishes, but the one I craved the most was курица в сметане – chicken in sour cream soup. And now, all grown-up, alone, and in the middle of the Mediterranean, I would have to figure out a way to make it on my own.

I spent my waking hours inside a floating chunk of metal: the USS Emory S. Land, AS-39, “The Land of Opportunity.” Our mission was to resupply with food and weapons on other US ships. (And one-time a Canadian boat full of bearded men–something so bizarre after seeing no male facial hair for months.) 

Our living arrangements were small: fifty women stacked in a bunk space the size of a two-car garage. And these women became my new family and taught me things I still knew nothing about. 

They taught me that people wear shoes in the shower and call them shower shoes. 

They taught me the word booger. (We have boogers in Moldova too, but we call them kazyafka, which translates to something like a “little goat.”) 

And they taught me that English was quite a versatile language: one single word can be used as a verb, a noun, and an adjective! Fuck!

And they also acquainted me with the shopping mall. (Living in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, the shopping facilities consisted of food stalls along 86^th Street, the newly opened Marshalls for lavish clothes, and either Rainbow or Dee & Dee for everything else, including knee-highs.)

From my itty-bitty island, I had to make a four-hour round trip by a boat, followed by a minivan, then a bus, plus a short walk to discover that a shopping mall was just a big box of stores under one roof. My shipmates were ecstatic about it; that was their only chance to have a Big Mac once in a while with the requisite beer that European McDonald’s offered. But for me, the mall was a disappointment. I wanted to make my mother’s chicken in sour cream soup, and I specifically journeyed to the mall to buy sour cream at their sole large supermarket. But that sour cream was non-existent; there was just their fancy Italian mascarpone. 

The toughest part of the military was not the lack of sour cream or the weird shower shoes; it was the looks I got from my shipmates, like I was a spy. Here I was: a Ruski, barely in the States for over a year with a heavy accent and serving a country that was still shaking off the Cold War. 

It didn’t matter that I was from Moldova, a Republic cobbled out of Romania and Ukraine to fabricate a sleepy region suitable for retirement by the Soviet politicians. Some people on the ship flat out asked me: Are you a spy? 

Prior to boot camp, I actually assumed I would be a spy. (An American spy, da!) Because I spoke Russian, I imagined they’d want me to eavesdrop on Russian conversations. It would be dumb not to keep spying on the Reds. But to my surprise, I was told that Russians were now our friends, plus as a non-citizen with no security clearance, my job choices were either an air mechanic or a personnel man.

I chose the latter. And here’s the irony: I had access to all the enlisted files - social security numbers, mothers’ maiden names, addresses, phone numbers, wills, everything! Good thing I wasn’t a Russian spy! 

And after a few years in the Navy, living on a ship and having no other cultural interactions except with my new military family, I felt just like one of them, an American. (Who still craved my mother’s chicken in sour cream soup.)
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Marina Viscun is a Moldovan American writer who mines her varied background and experiences as a female immigrant, college instructor, filmmaker, activist, traveler, and US Navy veteran for her storytelling. She likes good company, mostly all animals, single-origin dark chocolate, reading, mindful walking, and culinary explorations, and is trilingual (English, Russian, and Romanian).