Part 2: The Upside of Basic Training
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In bad situations or tough times, what do you do? Can you find the humor, or anything positive? Well, I try to be an optimist in all situations; I don’t always succeed, but I do try. I’m no professional but I would consider Army Basic Combat Training a tough situation. I did my best to find the positive aspects in every situation. Here are some of my stories.
Basic Training was hard; it was physically hard, mentally hard, and emotionally hard. I had the best time of my life, but that didn’t come without effort.
One day, I was in the Squad Leader position; my squad leader was sick. Squad leaders are in charge of about 10 people and are the lowest supervisors. We were headed to the Bayonet Assault Course where we were going to attach a small knife to the front of our loaded weapon and run through the woods as fast as we could. We would then ram the knives into little, green, foam targets that resembled Martians. Not only was this a timed event, which made everyone run faster, but we had obstacles; we had to climb over and under logs and fences, through ditches, under barbwire and hurdle walls. We did this all at top speed.
By 6 a.m., we had finished a 5K march to the assault course, and the temperature had just reached above 90 degrees to put us into a Heat 5 Category. The heat index was so hot that we were required to redo our uniforms to allow for better airflow. We were in for a very long day. We were already worn out, and we were feeling the heat.
My platoon had finished its portion of the assault course in record time and had done really well. My platoon even won the banner for the fastest times. Once everyone finished, the drill sergeants would give “down time.” However, we weren’t allowed to sleep, talk loudly or get rowdy. Try finding something to do that meets those requirements, in the middle of the woods, with nothing but a pen and paper in your pocket – that’s also going to entertain a group of 20 plus males. It’s not easy!
So our platoon got rowdy, and people fell asleep, and it became a big problem. The drill sergeant did what he did best – punished people.
Surprisingly, the punishments only effected the leadership. So myself and the seven others that were in charge picked up a log, but not just any log; it was the size of a telephone pole, and we, as a team, carried it through a pit of sand the size of a football field. Sand is fun on a beach, but it’s not fun to walk around in for very long, carrying several hundred pounds. You sink. I was one of three females in the group that day, and I was the shortest.
The tall people carried the bulk of the weight on their shoulders, causing us shorter people to have the weight in a bench-press style above our heads. It took us almost 20 seconds to realize that the particular set up we were using wasn’t going to work well; so we rethought and decided a line from shortest to tallest would probably work better. After a 30-minute hike around the football field in the sand, we were told to do sit-ups, with the LOG!
With everyone in a line, very carfully sat and laid on our backs in the sand with the log lying on our stomachs. While the platoon leader counted to keep us in sync, we performed sit-ups simultaneously with the log crushing our stomachs. Now, I hate sit-ups, but doing them with a log on my stomach in the sand was morbid. I was not a happy person.
All of this occurred within the first few days of training. I decided at that point that I wasn’t going to say one cuss word the entire time I was at Basic. I knew that if I let something upset me that much, I wouldn’t be able to control my rants. So, I decided I wouldn’t let myself get there. Instead I used the “motivating-others-is-actually-motivation-for-myself” method, and that’s how I made it through Basic.
