Imagine it is right after high school; so soon after graduation that you can almost hear your friends talking in the hall and locker doors slamming shut and you can smell the aroma of lunch cooking in the cafeteria. Now, image you are picked up and dropped into a totally foreign environment, away from your family and friends and the safety of home, to a place that feels dangerous and hostile, where you are constantly pushed and prodded, and almost threatened; a place where fear and intimidation are the order of the day. Welcome to boot camp.
The first day there began with our training instructor (TI) flipping on the lights at 5am while banging on a garbage can lid and yelling at the top of his lungs for us to “Get the hell out of bed and fall out on the drill pad downstairs.” And he was only giving us 5 minutes to do it. Those 5 minutes was all the time we had to go to get showered, get dressed, make our bunk and secure our area for the day; in military order of course. To this day, when the alarm clock goes off, I am up and headed to the shower. I have never used a snooze button in my life.
The antagonist in all this, the TI, left no doubt in your mind that he was one mean SOB. It didn’t matter if you were 6’5” or 5’6”, he put his nose as close as he could to yours and started screaming. How you reacted was his first clue of whether you were going to require a little or a lot of his attention. In retrospect, it is amazing how efficiently it worked.
For the next two weeks, he was after us almost every minute of the day, and our entire world consisted of him, the other guys in my unit and a few acres of ground that he used to drill and drill and drill and drill us some more. Then, when he began to like the way things were progressing, he lightened up a bit. He no longer treated us like we couldn’t find our butt with both hands without his help, but instead he treated us as a group of guys who were coming together as a team, and we could be trusted to stay within the limits he set for us. We got more breaks and they lifted some of the restrictions. Breaks now came regularly with him shouting the command, "Fall out! Smoke 'em if you got 'em." If you didn't smoke, you just relaxed. Either way, it was a sure sign things were getting better.
Our second weekend there we actually got to spend a couple of hours on Saturday down in our squadron area. We could drink a coke, eat a pizza, play pool, ping pong or pinball, or sit and watch TV. It was nice to spend some time relaxing, but it also gave you more time to think of home and everyone you missed, so it was bittersweet. On Sunday I got to go to church for the first time and live up to those silent prayers I had made over and over when things were tough --- “God, get me through this and I will go to church every chance I get!” Only I didn’t bother checking the schedule outside the church and walked into a Catholic mass, but that is another story.
One ironic incident occurred about this time. The TI was chatting with us one day during a break. I had shipped out to basic with a guy from Morristown named George Taylor, while everyone else in our flight was from the northeastern part of the country. Our TI asked us about Tennessee and mentioned he had a brother who lived near Maryville. He said his brother worked in a small town near Maryville at a muffler plant called Maramont. For the first time I looked closely at my TI and his name tag and realized his brother was my old supervisor at Maramont. The one I had some issues with. I didn’t mention I knew his brother.
Another event with ties to back home came back to haunt me. During senior year, military recruiters came to the school to administer tests to those of us who thought the military might be an option. I fully realized that the military might be in my future, but being the immature one who was thinking more of the moment, I saw it as a day out of class and the tests didn’t get my best effort. Sure enough, during the 3rd week of training they marched us into this big room with all the jobs the Air Force offered listed on one of the walls. They told us there were no guarantees, but they would try to give us what we selected from the board. The jobs list was in order by the grade on the military tests we had taken before coming to basic. Yep, those same tests that I had lazed my way through back in high school. It was also the first time I had seen my scores for those tests, and they were embarrassing. No matter what job I looked at, it was way above my test scores. Finally, out of frustration I found something called ‘Rubber Raft Repair’. In my scrambled brain I thought, “How may rubber rafts can the Air Force have?. That’s Navy stuff.” Take my word for it, they have a lot.
From there on, basic actually wasn't all that bad. During our last week we had to qualify on several things, including fitness tests, marksmanship, and the obstacle course. But overall it was fun; even counting the two rounds of KP we had. The last weekend we were there, they let us go to downtown San Antonio. The bus dropped us off right in front of the Alamo.
Even my job selection turned out okay. After graduating from boot camp, most guys went on to another training base for training in their particular field. Some of those assignments could be up to a year. Mine was considered on the job trainable and I was sent directly to my next duty assignment where I would be trained while actually doing the job; but more important than that, I would get to go home for two weeks first.
No comments:
Post a Comment