Not Enough Tears

BASIC TRAINING The red line at the Oakland Induction Center finally led to a large room where we swore an oath to officially become members of the elite fighting force known as the U.S. Army. Actually, I never did officially complete the ceremony. At one point we were supposed to step forward to indicate our concurrence with the proceedings. Just for the heck of it, I stayed put. Safely hidden in the mass of bodies, I knew no one would notice, so I initiated my own little act of defiance, a weakness that persisted throughout my short, but illustrious career. It allowed me to feel like an individual with some control and not just an insignificant part of a huge uncaring machine. Processing wasn’t completed until early evening. What happened to lunch? What happened to dinner? What kind of outfit was this? A booming voice broke our roster into bus-sized groups headed for the airport. We flew north to Seattle and were then bused back to Tacoma, arriving at the main gate of Fort Lewis, Washington about 1:30 in the morning. We were deposited in the middle of row after row of white, two-story wooden barracks that had served out their useful life during World War II. Tired, hungry, and disoriented, we became fresh meat for the training cadre. They seemed to take a special delight in our misery and didn’t finish until 3:00 A.M. We split into platoons and “marched” to our new barracks where we’d spend the next eight glorious weeks in basic training. We picked our bunks and fell into them. My body sighed; finally a chance to rest. They’ll let us catch up on our sleep and maybe start training after lunch. The amplified strains of reveille jolted us awake promptly at 5:30! The following days and weeks were a continuous comedy of the military mind versus kids who were home with Mom just a few days earlier. We lost our hair, got our OD (Olive Drab) uniforms, OD underwear, even OD socks. It was surprising how much everyone looked alike. Of course, that was part of the psychology of our training; no one was an individual. Everyone was equal, reduced to a homogeneous blob that ate, slept, and suffered together. The military strategy was to get everyone to act as a cohesive unit while learning a range of basic skills from how to brush our teeth to shooting, bludgeoning, and bayoneting the enemy. Most of our training was administered by that common enemy of the new recruit, the drill sergeant. What a job! They got paid to be bullies. The more they scared us, the better they were doing their job. A scared recruit paid a lot more attention than one who was allowed to daydream. They did have important things to teach, so I put up with the “occasional” over exuberant outburst. For the first few weeks nobody could do anything right. They yelled at us for not being able to march, for not being strong enough to endure the daily physical training, for not moving fast enough, for not eating fast enough, for not doing just about anything we were told to do in the way we were supposed to do it. We were new recruits! What’d they expect? That wasn’t the point, of course. The Army just wanted us to give up thinking and automatically do what we were told. A drill instructor would try to motivate us into trying harder by stepping up nose to nose, yell in our face, and poke the brim of his hat into our foreheads. Unfortunately, there were a few souls who took the insults very personally. They were marked and harassed even more than the rest of us, both as an example, and to see if they would break and become compliant. If not, they had to be “recycled.” If they didn’t understand it was just a game (a serious one), they were destined to start basic training all over again with a new company. No one wanted to repeat this hell a second time! Most learned to give the required performance. Some enjoyed being made into men and honestly worked to excel. Others were not quite as smitten by the Army’s ideal man and put forth a tad less effort. Most of my platoon fell into the latter category. To embarrass us into doing better, the drill sergeants would grade each of the four platoons in our training company on how well we did the preceding week. The platoon with the lowest score got special recognition in the form of a big black rock painted to resemble an “eight ball.” This rock stayed in front of the substandard barracks for the entire week, and that platoon would be ridiculed until the next evaluation. Military logic was, “Everyone will work harder to avoid getting the eight ball.”