MONTEREY — Most high school seniors don’t get out of bed before 4 a.m. on a Saturday.

But once a month, Lucien Bean is not only out of bed but also on the road to Vicksburg, where he’s not known as Louie but as Pfc. Bean.

The 18-year-old senior is enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Future Soldier program, which allows him to serve in the Reserve while still attending school.

And his weekends are a contrast to his weekday life.

By 7 a.m., he’s cleaning and sanitizing trays and utensils for his unit. On a weekday, he would be getting ready for school.

By 11:30, he’s cooked meals and started serving lunch to the other soldiers, and by 12:30 he’s started cleanup. In school, he would have finished the first four of his five classes.

The day lasts until 5 p.m. He spends the night in a nearby hotel, and Sunday he repeats the schedule.

But working in the kitchen of this man’s Army doesn’t really phase the teen, who on Feb. 4, 2008, enlisted before he even attended his junior prom.

“It’s like working at the kitchen of a regular restaurant,” Bean said. “The only difference is you only have to worry about the ranked (servicemen).”

The decision to enlist took him about a week, and while Bean had the support of his parents, other family members weren’t initially behind him.

“I joined because I wanted to go to college wherever I wanted and not just in Louisiana,” he said. “My brother and my aunts told me, ‘Hey, we’ll pay for your college if you don’t join.’”

But he did join, and — after visiting his unit a couple of times before school ended — Bean spent the summer before his senior year at basic training at Fort Sill, Okla.

After weeks of drilling, running with 80-plus pounds of equipment and armor and being subjected to his drill sergeant’s insults, Bean returned to Monterey to start school on Aug. 22, nine days after the school year began.

“It was kind of weird at first,” he said. “I was kind of silent and I had to make myself not rush to eat like they do in the Army.”

When he’s not serving his one weekend a month with the Army, Bean works at the Jonesville Sonic, trying to save a little money for the future.

“That’s pretty much my life right now — school, work, Army,” he said.

Between work and his service duties, Bean spends a lot of time in the kitchen, but he doesn’t mind.

“I chose cook because I want to be a chef one day,” he said.

“When I get out of the Army, I would like to be the chef at a resort.”

Because he’s still in high school, the Army is flexible about arranging his weekends with them around things like graduation, but after graduation Bean is headed to Advanced Individual Training in Fort Lee, Va., to further hone his Army cooking skills.

From there, he plans to go to Ohio and enroll in a college there before attending cooking school.

But the fact that there are two wars on hasn’t escaped his attention.

“More than likely, I am going to be deployed,” Bean said. “I guess I am going to be ready when that happens.”

In the meantime, though, he’s still got his senior year to finish.

“I’ve tried to talk a few people into enlisting, and they just kind of laughed at me and said, ‘All you do is cook,” Bean said, grinning. “It doesn’t bother me, though. I’ll get the training I want one day.”