IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN
D.A. Madigan
Copyright D.A. Madigan 2012
Published at Smashwords
IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN:
A Military Memoir By The Worst Infantry Trainee In The History of Mankind
INTRODUCTION:
I can't, at this moment, remember my specific moment of arrival at Fort Benning, GA in March of 1985 for Infantry Basic Training. I had been recruited by the downtown Army National Guard unit in Syracuse, NY, although my lack of aptitude for or proficiency at anything vaguely military was phenomenal. And I should have known better. But at that point in my life, I felt at a dead end, unappreciated, and was chafing for some vast, transformational experience that would kickstart my existence and help me move toward some more fulfilling destiny, and I guess I figured what the hell. The military had been a vital, life altering crucible for many before me, and I seemed to be otherwise trapped, so why not?
I'd find out why not.
Still, as I say, I can't remember actually arriving at Benning. I remember bits and pieces of the plane rides down there, of the Atlanta airport, and I remember quite well the first barracks I was put up in, with a bunch of other equally uneasy new recruits, still in our civilian clothes and civilian haircuts, thinking that the way the reception sergeant had chivvied and herded us around that afternoon and evening was kind of brusque and rude, and wondering how much worse it would get. Wondering if this would, indeed, be some major turning point for my life, or just turn out to be a prodigious, incomprehensible mistake.
I believe, the morning of that first full day there, they actually got us up at six a.m. I'm sure that whenever they got us up, other guys in my intake group grumbled about it being too early, and I wasn't thrilled about it, either, but even then, I was pretty sure that actually being allowed to sleep until six a.m. wasn't something we should get used to.
I clearly remember how quickly hierarchies seemed to be set up in the process... not just regarding the actual rank structure, but how fine and distinct the gradations between intake groups immediately became. Guys who were three days or so ahead of us, but who already had their uniforms and equipment and Army haircuts, seemed infinitely more experienced and knowledgeable in the lore of the system than I did. (This was to remain a constant throughout my training, as I would infrequently come into contact with training groups farther along in their cycles than I was, and to me, they always seemed like ancient, weary veterans, sophisticated and informed by a dreadfully won acumen of just how things worked, footsore and world weary travelers of a dreadful road that still lay before me, and that I myself would inevitably have to traverse myself, whether I wanted to or not.)
In fact, it's worth noting at this point that one's 'willingness' to be in the military is really only valid as a moral argument, once one arrives and military indoctrination begins. Sure, there is no draft and we were all volunteers. Yet we were all also, nearly to a man, completely unaware of the realities of what we were getting into when we signed that piece of paper and took that oath. We'd seen a few movies at that point and thought we understood, if only vaguely, the mysteries of drill and discipline. We felt we had a grasp on what would be expected of us, and obviously, we all felt we could handle it; we all knew other guys, whom we considered peers, who had gone through it and survived.
And none of us, not one, had even the slightest real idea what we would be going through, and none of us, not one, would have stayed past the first week of real Basic Training if we'd been allowed to quit.
(When I say 'none of us', I am exercising a deliberate poetry, because in point of fact, there was one fellow in my intake group who knew more or less exactly what he was in for, because he had deserted from the Marines, and for some idiotic reason, had joined the Army under a false name, perhaps thinking he wouldn't get caught and could have a chance to start over. He honestly seemed to like the military, or at least, he seemed to prefer it to whatever else he'd had. It took them a few weeks to process his fingerprints, but eventually, they figured out who he was and took him away. As with anything else in the military, though, it happened inefficiently, and he was under company arrest and assigned to work details and CQ duty for a few weeks before they finally came and got him. On one occasion, when I was doing my laundry, I overheard him talking to another guy, and I remember him saying plaintively "Yeah, I don't know what guys complain about. This isn't that bad." For me, it was plenty bad, and going to get worse, but still, it was a relief to hear someone say that.)
'Volunteering' for the military, for the vast majority, is an act of utter ignorance, encouraged by recruiters with quotas who are very aware that if they tell you what you're really in for (systematic anti-humanistic degradation and humiliation designed to break down most overt, learned behaviors, and virtually all sense of individual identity not connected with your military unit, in order to replace them with the sort of ingrained discipline necessary to turn the product of a civilized society into, not simply a killer, but a trained, focused killer who would, hopefully, kill only on command and in the 'appropriate' context), you won't sign up. The system is equally aware that the vast majority of young sheep herded into it by recruiters want no actual part of the actual military; therefore, they make it extraordinarily difficult to back out of what you will have, almost as a matter of course, foolishly and unwisely decided to embark on, and will quickly come to see as a colossal error in judgement.
And so it was that, played like a violin by a maestro of a recruiter, I found myself in a barracks in Georgia, still in my civilian clothes, bemused by the thought that military food wasn't really as bad as I'd been led to believe and awed by guys a few days further along in their own cycles, who already had the uniforms, the equipment, and the haircuts. Although they knew barely more than I did (the couple I'd seen around the induction barracks were, at that point, waiting a few days to be assigned to a training company) they seemed nearly lordly in their apparently far greater experience.
However, the military moves fast, except when it doesn't move at all, and before the end of that first full day, we'd all been crammed into a bus and taken off for mass inoculations. While being moved around, our induction sergeant tried to instill in us a little basic sense of marching and formation, but without any of the murderous, vicious haranguing, verbal abuse, and quick disciplining through push ups and other humiliating physical tortures that would be used to enforce obedience and punish errors once we arrived at our training platoon. I tried to listen, and when it seemed tolerated, to ask questions, as I was feeling desperately insecure and grasping after any kind of reassurance that additional knowledge might have brought me. However, everyone who might actually know something about what was in store for me was vague, which I found maddening at the time, but looking back now, can see simply came from the fact that I had no vocabulary in common with the people I was asking my questions of. They couldn't tell me what it would be like in any adequate way; you could only really describe it to someone who had been there... or at least, that would have been the problem of the average non-articulate Army soldier. Clearly, I hope to do better.
There was also the fact that, even had anyone described clearly what I was in for, it would only have scared the shit out of me. Much later on, while my company was running through a particular obstacle course on a rather swampy, muddy training range, one of the drill sergeants (not one of my platoon's) who had generally shown himself to be comparatively friendly and accessible, and who apparently chose that moment to resent the fact that many of the recruits in his platoon seemed to perceive him that way, dropped everyone in his eyeshot, in ankle deep mud, for an apparently endless series of pushups. "You people seem to have mistaken me for someone who cares about you," he bellowed out over the chaotic, bobbing, panting array of shoulders, helmets, and asses in mucky camouflage. "I'm not your mama. I don't love you."
That attitude is a typical one, or at least, it was, when I went through Army Infantry Basic Training. It's obviously and honestly not true, of course. Most drill sergeants are relatively decent human beings and, just as in the movies, they do tend to form some sort of bond with their recruits. It's human, and you can't help it. (Some drill sergeants, on the other hand, are genuine sonsofbitches and a few are out and out psychotics, but in my experience, they're in the minority.) However, they're taught to act cold and uncaring, so that when they threaten you with imminent bodily harm, curse at you, tell you you're worthless, and act as if they're about to kill you with their bare hands, you'll believe it, and be motivated by their scorn, and their anger, and their contempt.
Beyond that, being a drill sergeant means being cruel, and for most human beings, cruelty is part of our nature. Compassion, empathy, kindness, consideration... the notion that other people have feelings too that are just as important as ours... these are things that seem to be, for the most part, learned social responses and behaviors. Babies don't feel them, and a child who isn't taught to feel love and gentleness and kindness fairly early often won't learn at all. On the other hand, no one seems to need to teach even the youngest kids to be cruel and mean; that seems to be something that simply comes naturally. I suppose this is all a product of the essential and inescapable solitude and loneliness of the individual human condition, but whatever the case may be, the vast majority of human beings have cruelty and mean spiritedness somewhere within them... and when one is a drill sergeant, one is not merely allowed, but actually encouraged, to be an utterly evil prick. In fact, one is told that in this particular context, being an utterly evil prick is more than simply one's job, but one's duty, and that in fact, by being an utterly evil prick, one is not only serving the abstract concept of one's country and one's military branch, but you're also actually helping the poor schmucks you're being a complete bastard to.
I mean, you can't beat that deal with a stick... you get to be a total asswipe, all day, every day, to a bunch of hapless twits who are utterly dependent on you... and you get to feel proud of yourself for it, too.
The best drill sergeants I knew... Sgt. Dennis, Sgt. Aguirre, Sgt. Lozano... seemed to be able to rise above it, and although they certainly simulated uncaring brutality well, there was an ephemeral line I felt they never crossed, and I never got the feeling that they truly relished and reveled in their power to humiliate and their authority to degrade. Deep down inside them, I felt, they still retained a certain respect for the innate humanity and dignity of their charges. They did what they had to do, and I'm sure they felt justified in doing it; I have no doubt they thought it was their duty, and would someday even save the lives of some of the men they trained.
I'm sure the worst drill sergeants I saw there... Sgt. Robbins, a truly vicious prick in Fourth Platoon named Sgt. Collins, and others whose names I can't remember right now... told themselves the same things. But those guys also undeniably enjoyed their authority and they liked making people crawl in a way that Dennis, Aguirre, Lozano, and most likely Sgt. Laffey, our company's Senior Drill Sergeant, and Captain Lambert, our Company Commander, simply didn't have in them.
Yet enjoy it or not, a drill sergeants job was to establish and keep authority through brutality, an utter lack of empathy, and a constantly maintained façade of ferocious contempt and vitriolic hostility. In some, the façade was thinner than in others, but they all had to do it, and would do it, and did do it... otherwise, they wouldn't have been there.
All of which means that, if any induction sergeant early on in the process had had the capacity to clearly articulate what lay ahead for the group of saps and chumps he was in charge of for a few days of outfitting and initial orientation, he still most likely wouldn't... for the good and simple reason that it's terrifying. Basic Training is at its most fundamental level a season in hell, and a primary element of that hellish experience lies in the fact that the authority figures you are given no choice but to rely upon expend an enormous amount of energy behaving as if they not only don't care about you, but on many occasions, actually despise you and would like nothing better than to see you suffering or dead. And some of them mean it, too.
Much later, Sgt. Aguirre, who was a drill sergeant for Third Platoon, after I'd been through weeks of training, would confide to me in an off guard moment, "There's a reason for everything we do". While I doubt that that's true... or if there is, the reasons are things most drill sergeants don't even know... I'm sure that there is indeed a reason why drill sergeants are trained to behave at all times as if the only emotions they feel for the confused young men suddenly thrust into their care are scorn and disgust. In fact, I'm sure there are many reasons, some of which I've already mentioned. Nonetheless, it's a terrifying thing, to suddenly find yourself in an utterly alien place, surrounded by people you don't know, and where the authority figure you are forced to trust and rely on tells you every day, through explicit words and implicit behavior, that he thinks you're worthless and wishes you were dead.
To me, memory is rarely a linear thing for very long, but generally functions as an associative mosaic. Therefore, since I don't have anything like a journal from this time period, and have mercifully forgotten many details of my Basic Training, this account of my season in hell, undergoing Army Infantry Basic Training as a member of Second Platoon, Company C, Sixth Battalion, First Infantry Training Brigade, at Fort Benning, GA, will be meandering and disjointed, as I move from one topic to another, writing everything interesting I can think of on each. That's how I remember my time there; as a patchwork quilt of vivid images and emotional snapshots, and as a seemingly endless, suffocating nightmare. Hopefully, I'll be able to convey at least the essence of the experience to any readers this account may one day have.
One last note: the Army experience does not so much embrace profanity and vulgarity as it is simply immersed completely in it; words like 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'goddam' and various sexually charged insults like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' are as inescapable in nearly every spoken sentence in Basic Training as they are in any fifth grade public school boy's lavatory. Therefore, I've chosen to include such language in this account. There may be members of my potential audience who will be shocked and even offended by this. If so, don't read any further.
Bald Headed Motherfuckers -
On my second full day in Basic, me and my intake group... and we were already down by one at that point; one guy simply hadn't been willing to take orders from our induction sergeant, had constantly had to mouth off in even the loose parody of 'formations' he had us shamble around in, and, well, he wasn't there after dinner my first full night... were again stuffed into a bus... a normal, green painted bus like most kids have ridden to school on at some point... and taken off to have our hair cut, and then, to get our uniforms and other equipment issued.
On the subject of haircuts, I should note here that many movies about the military, especially the Bill Murray - Harold Ramis comedy STRIPES, get this bit wrong. In Basic Training, they do not cut your hair short. They cut it OFF. In Basic, there are two haircuts for recruits... the 'quarter pounder', which supposedly leaves a quarter inch of hair all over the scalp, but which effectively renders you bald as a cueball, and the 'high and tight', which shaves the entire head all the way around, but leaves a strip of hair like a patch of grassy turf on top of your head half an inch long. Recruits get no choice about what haircut they're going to get for their first eight weeks of training; everyone gets a quarter pounder, which means, basically, everyone is bald. (If you think that this makes the 'high and tight' more coveted to trainees than an Oscar is to an actor on a WB show, you're quite correct.) One result of this was that for much of the first two or three weeks of Basic, in our little 'free' time, or given the opportunity to talk while on the way to various training ranges, we would call each other 'bald headed motherfuckers' (profanity and vulgarity are as common in Basic Training as they are in any public school fifth grade; if it bothers you, put this book down now). Another was that a few weeks later I wound up with the first case I'd ever had of sunburn on the top of my head. It's odd, though, what you get used to; by the time I'd been there for a few weeks, I no longer looked so strange to myself in the mirror, nor did my fellow trainees look so alien to me.
General Issue Shit -
I mentioned getting equipment issued after we got our haircuts. In fact, equipment gets issued over the course of the first two weeks, but on the third day, you get the basic issue of uniforms and such like, with things like your bedroll, shelter half, and other field equipment coming a bit later in the cycle.
On the uniforms and equipment... it's all a little bit overwhelming. They take you to a large concrete building, herd you through a maze of hallways, and at various places, various bored people who seem infinitely older and wiser than you hand you shit. Most of it isn't anything you'd much want, but at each stage, you have it impressed on you, loudly, that if you lose any of this stuff, you will be killed, or at least, horribly, horribly maimed. The longest amount of time is spent in a vast, dusty, dimly lit warehouse like room, where they take your measurements and fit you out with four sets of camouflage uniforms, two winter jackets, one jacket liner, one set of black leather gloves, two sets of green felt glove liners, two pairs of combat boots, various brown Army issue sets of underwear, and other annoying accessories.
There's a certain undeniable thrill, of course, in putting on the uniform for the first time and taking on the outward seeming of a soldier. However, the people in charge seem very aware of that and work hard to make certain that you understand that you don't deserve to wear that uniform yet, and you probably never will (I'd like to think I never did). And by the time you're done being fully outfitted and equipped, you're carrying around so much useless crap that it would be worth your life to lose any small component of, that there is no longer any thrill involved at all.
Calling the equipment 'useless crap' is something of a misnomer, because it indicates that the equipment is all arcane, incomprehensible, or otherwise baffling. In fact, the equipment is all pretty prosaic... L shaped flashlight with various colored lenses that they never teach you any purpose for, (but which I'd intuit is for signaling in a tactical situation, reading maps in the dark, as well as other, more prosaic things like finding the fucking john when you wake up at 2 a.m. and have to take a dump), foldable entrenching tool, folded poncho, sleeping bag, rolled up foam rubber sleeping pad, backpack, web belt with shoulder straps, two canteens (plastic, if you're lucky; they don't hurt quite as bad when you hit the dirt and roll over them as aluminum ones do)... these are all things that you know very well the purpose of, if not exactly how they're used in a military context, and that bode ominously for the sorts of activities you are going to find yourself embroiled in at some point in the near future.
I mean, obviously, if they're giving you a shovel, they mean you to dig; if they're giving you a poncho, they're planning on having you out in the rain, and, most appalling of all to me, if they're giving you a sleeping bag, clearly, they're planning on having you camp out somewhere and sleep on the goddam ground.
I, personally, loathe camping out nearly as much as I loathe chopping wood or doing dishes; I am of the personal opinion that 200,000 years of social evolution has culminated in a general state of civilization where only a vanishingly small fraction of the population ever has to sleep on the ground or outdoors, and therefore, anyone who voluntarily chooses to do so for 'recreation' just plain ain't right in the head. However, I was unaware that by the time we actually got around to sleeping outdoors, I would find myself perfectly capable of sleeping while laying down on or even leaning back against any surface, flat or inclined, wet or dry, hot or cold, smooth or irregular, and that I would one day prove it by digging a six inch deep trench in a piece of ground so soaked and muddy it was very nearly in a liquid state, rolling up in my poncho in the middle of a cold, drenching downpour, and falling soddenly, utterly, blissfully asleep... for one wonderful hour, until wrenched awake by someone kicking me and telling me we had to get to formation because we were moving out. ('Someone' being our Platoon Guide, a fine and overwhelmingly competent trainee soldier and natural leader of men named something or other Stewart, whom hardly anyone disliked, and who never ridiculed me, and whom I myself found so generally affable that at that very moment, as he kicked me awake after maybe 57 minutes of blissful slumber in the middle of a bog during a drenching, teeth chatteringly cold downpour, while I did certainly wish him a vile, horrible, and vicious death, I wouldn't have insisted that it be drawn out or excruciatingly painful... those last two components being intrinsic to nearly any other vile, horrible, and vicious death I would have wished on anyone else waking me up in similar circumstances, or, for that matter, nearly any circumstances not involving Yasmin Bleeth in a bikini, or better, half a bikini. )
You're in the Army now -
On my third full day, we were moved over to our permanent training companies. Not everyone in my induction group went to the same company. When we got to mine, we were put into one of our typically inept formations...and the screaming began. Through some system I still don't even vaguely understand, we were all divided up into platoons (I wound up in Second Platoon) and spent our first hour or so there standing at attention while our various drill sergeants informed us at the top of their lungs that we were without a doubt the most worthless, disgusting, utterly useless pieces of shit, garbage, and maggot infested vomit they'd ever seen, that not one single one of us would graduate from this training program, and that we'd be lucky if they didn't kill us personally with their bare hands before we got thrown out. As you'd expect, everything about us, from the way we wore our uniforms to the way we stood behind our piles of equipment to the way we answered their bellowed exhortations was wrong, and worse than wrong, clearly indicated how stupid, inept, brainless, weak, awful, and generally disgusting we all were.
This basic conceptual approach - 'everything you do is wrong' - is worth noting, because it is fundamental to the military training experience... at least, as I went through it, maybe things have changed since then. The U.S. Army, at least in 1985, had an official way to do pretty damn near every human activity... walk, talk, get dressed, sleep, make your bed, arrange your closet, fold your clothes, polish your boots, even eat... and a lot of other stuff that there was no official Army way to do was simply forbidden. There was, I should note, no official Army way to eat candy bars or drink soda, because any recruit in his first month of Basic Training caught doing either was in a lot of trouble, and there sure as shit was no official Army way for recruits to get laid.
The main thrust of critiquing everyday activities, punishing a recruit for doing them in the same manner as they always have, and forcing the recruit to instead do these common activities in an entirely different manner, is a simple but profound one: it forces recruits to actively pay attention to and think about things that have become second nature to them. In other words, it forces you to change your thinking, and changing your thinking is a big part of what military training is all about.
In other words, when you subject yourselves to military discipline, you accept thought control as a part of your life, not just on a day to day basis, but on a minute by minute basis. Trust me, if anyone had told me that before I signed up, I'd have stayed home.
YES, DRILL SERGEANT! -
On our first day in our actual training platoons, we of course met our drill sergeants - Sgt. Clay Robbins and Sgt. Dennis. (I'm sorry; I once knew Sgt. Dennis' first name but I've forgotten it in the last 16 years, and full names aren't given for the training cadre in my Basic Training yearbook.) Dennis was an experienced drill sergeant on his last cycle at that time as a D.S., a smart, tough, extremely competent man who made us thoroughly miserable for much of our training cycle, but whom everyone in my platoon, as far as I know, had enormous respect for. He had swarthy skin and may have been Hispanic, although I could never be sure. Sgt. Dennis was a bastard, but he obviously believed the work of training infantry soldiers to do a dangerous and demanding job correctly was important, and he did his best to do it right. I hated Basic Training and continue to think that the military is an utterly evil institution, but Sgt. Dennis was and continues to be an ongoing lesson to me that good people can serve a rotten organization. Dennis was married, in his late 30s, I think, and generally seemed overwhelmingly competent to handle nearly any situation. Towards the end of the training cycle, I actually had occasion to speak with him informally and in private a few times, and in private he was soft spoken, intelligent, articulate, decent, courteous, and always treated me with respect, even though, to be perfectly honest, I was such a walking disaster throughout my basic training that I have to assume he was merely being polite to me. Still, I'm perfectly aware that the only reason I managed to graduate from Basic at all, much less on time, was that Sgt. Dennis at one point pulled me into his office after I'd failed the pushups section of a diagnostic PT test and told me if I didn't work harder, I was going to get recycled. The thought of having sweated out 13 weeks of Hell only to get dumped back into another training cycle for yet another unknown time period motivated me like no other, and I think I spent the last three weeks of Basic doing little more than dropping and kicking out sets of pushups whenever I had a free moment.
Sgt. Dennis was also honest enough, at the end of Basic Training right before graduation, to temper the usual "you're the best platoon I've ever trained" speech with some truth... he told us that first, drill sergeants were supposed to give that speech to every platoon, which he didn't like much, but, second, he could honestly say that we were the best platoon he'd ever trained at the things we were good at ... which, since we had won Honor Platoon on the strength of our inspection scores, aided rather a lot by the fact that our Platoon Guide, Private Stewart, had been chosen Honor Graduate... well, what he was saying, but not in so many words, was that we might not be much as soldiers (our scores on training ranges in the soldierly arts had been consistently less than spectacular, helped in no small part by the negative contributions of Yr. Humble Author), but we were the best goddam maids he'd ever seen. (We learned pretty quickly to get that barracks so spic n' span you could have safely eaten off any smooth surface in it. The reasons we learned to do this quickly will be gone into in more detail in the 'Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval' section.)
Sgt. Clay Robbins, on the other hand, was a short, red haired, banty rooster who, we found out immediately (because he told us) was the company martial arts instructor and a former Navy SEAL, and we found out later (because in a moment of disgust, Sgt. Dennis told us) was on his first rotation as an actual drill instructor, and had never actually been a Navy SEAL, but had crapped out during SEAL training due to an injury, and after physical rehab, had joined the Army. (The first part Sgt. Dennis told us all during a formation late in the cycle when Robbins wasn't there, and Dennis was infuriated with us for arranging our equipment in our lockers in a non reg way Robbins had shown us previously. The second part Dennis told me, personally, very late in the cycle when I pulled CQ duty and he and I were alone in the office. ) The entire platoon, and fairly soon thereafter, the entire company, learned that Robbins was a blowhard and a bullshit artist, and one of my platoon-mates, fairly late in the cycle, used to crack us up regularly doing spot on imitations of Robbins recounting yet another completely ridiculous anecdote in which he had singlehandedly saved an entire battalion during his mostly fictitious service in Vietnam.
One of my clearest memories of Sgt. Robbins' fictitious memoirs was when he related a story about a recruit in a previous training platoon he had drilled named 'Tingle', who had, apparently, loved to call cadence. Obviously, 'Tingle' was entirely fictitious, since we later found out that our platoon represented Sgt. Robbins' first training experience. Sgt. Robbins also had some favorite phrases like "Okay, Second Platoon, you want to get stupid with me, I can get stupid with you".
What should be noted here is that my particular training cycle fell victim to a policy that may have been experimental at that time, whereby for our first 8 weeks of Basic, our regular Army drill sergeants actually spent very little time with us, and instead, every two weeks we got a new two man team of Army Reserve drill sergeants, who were serving their two week summer duty by screwing up our training. Our regular drill sergeants hated the program, which Sgt. Dennis later told me he thought had nearly ruined our entire company. For what it's worth, I'd have to say that while some of the 8 Reserve drills we had during that 8 week period seemed pleasant enough, none of them struck me as overwhelmingly good at their jobs. However, one of them did give us some extraordinarily good advice that helped me, at least, get through a very bad moment of training, and I'll go into that in more detail in 'Better Living Through Chemicals'.
In the ninth week of Basic, at which point, we were all actually considered to have graduated from actual 'Basic Training' and moved on to AIT or Advanced Infantry Training, our Regular Army drill sergeants took over teaching us full time. Feeling we'd been spoiled by our Reserve Drills, they spent the first couple of days putting us through a bastardly hell similar to what we'd gone through in our first few days... actively seeking out the most minor infractions or lapses in discipline and using them as excuses to punish everyone standing within earshot of the offender with grueling PT... mostly just to make us understand that now, the honeymoon was over and our asses belonged to them. It was during that early period of our AIT that the event I've related well above, where one particularly affable drill sergeant dropped a vast mass of us in the muck and set us to doing push ups while loudly declaring that he did not love us, took place. Apparently, it was felt by most of the RA (Regular Army, as opposed to AR, Army Reserve, or NG, National Guard) drill sergeants that we had become unconscionably spoiled during our eight weeks with AR drill sergeants. I suppose they may have been correct; god knows, we didn't learn much from them.
Livin' On Dream Time -
One of the things most military training movies I've seen consistently gets wrong is the wake up time in Basic Training. In STRIPES, for example, I seem to recall Murray & Ramis whining like little babygirls over the fact that they had to get up at 6 in the morning... or maybe it was 5:30. I'm here to tell you that this does not reflect the reality of the military experience as I myself underwent it in 1985. When I was in Basic Training, you were allowed to stay in bed until 6 a.m. on SUNDAY morning, as a special dispensation. The rest of the week, if it was a GOOD day, those lights in the barracks came flashing on, and the Most Hated Monsters In The History Of Humanity started walking up and down the aisles yelling abuse and kicking people through their blankets, at 4 a.m. FOUR. A. M. And for those of you out there with no military experience who think I must be kidding, let me further astonish you by telling you that it was 4 a.m. on a good day. At least two days a week, sometimes three, we got up at 3:30 a.m. Yassuh. THREE THIRTY IN THE FUCKING MORNING.
That this is insane, deranged, abusive, and in any civilized society would be criminal, goes without saying and I'm not here to argue the point. But the fact remains, standard wake up call in Army Infantry Basic Training during my time in the hole was 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. Those who are quick at math will now have realized that, with a 9:00 p.m. lights out (militarese would make this 2100 hours, but fuck 'em), this meant that at most, assuming you were out like a light at 9 and slept through until wake up, you got 6.5 to 7 hours of sleep per night.
Many of my hypothetical audience may well be thinking at this point "hell, that's plenty of sleep! I've gotten by on less than that for most of my adult, working life! What a bunch of whiney sissyboys!" For all sitting there thinking such things, I have only two words, and those two words are not "Happy Birthday". I myself get by often on 6 or 7 hours of sleep most nights during a work week, but on the other hand, I, like most people, tend to crash and soak up zzzzzs on the weekend. Furthermore, that old Army commercial which states 'we do more work before 9 a.m. in the morning than most people do all day' is absolutely true, especially in Infantry Basic Training. In fact, I'd be willing to extend that to the average work week of most civilians (which I happily and gratefully am and hopefully always will be from this point on in my life). Kids in Infantry Basic Training run around like insane beavers on gorilla adrenochrome for about 12 to 16 hours of every day, cleaning and exercising and digging big holes and hauling around weaponry and crawling on their elbows and stomachs on the ground and climbing ropes and leaping over insane giant Tinker Toy obstacles and wading across rivers and quickmarching 20 goddam miles and occasionally, late in the training cycle, getting shot at. 6.5 to 7 hours of sleep per night is not enough.
And, as another little bonus, you rarely or never get that much sleep. Things have to be done, often after lights out, like shining boots, doing laundry, and if your platoon has the short end of the stick that week, and your squad caught the shitty part of the short end, C.Q. duty (Charge of Quarters, I believe; it means a five or six man squad takes turns taking two hour shifts in the office downstairs all night, in case an emergency comes up, and what you'd do in an emergency I have no idea).
The end result of this is that very very quickly, people become sleep deprived, and they stay sleep deprived for their entire 13 weeks, with the exception of a couple of occasions I'll most likely get to in another paragraph or so. However, leaving aside those exceptions, what you end up with is a bunch of mopes who, as long as they're in reasonably vigorous motion or otherwise kept physically and mentally occupied, are more or less fine (if somewhat glassy eyed) but who, if allowed to lie or sit down, lean up against something, or even stand still for any appreciable time, find themselves helplessly nodding off.
The training cadre is aware of it, of course, and they should be, since it's done on purpose. If put in a position where providing some sort of explanation is necessary (later on in the training cycle, I had a few opportunities to speak alone with certain drill sergeants when chance and assigned duties through me into those situations, and I asked), the line a drill sergeant or other training officer will generally spout is that they need the extra time to get all the training in. This sounds good, and in point of fact, the first few weeks of Basic Training are pretty crammed... but not so much so that wake up couldn't be shifted to 5 a.m. every day to allow for a nominal 8 hours of sleep, on the relatively few nights when a recruit could actually turn in at 9 and sleep through until 5.
The real reason is simple, so simple that, when someone first mentioned it to me rather matter of factly during Basic Training, I didn't want to accept it, if only because I didn't want to think my government, and especially its military, was either that inhuman or that coldly intelligent: sleep deprivation is a basic, fundamental, and overwhelmingly powerful technique in any and all forms of brainwashing.
I've deliberately used 'brainwashing' there, knowing it's a shocking and scary term to most people, because, well, I think it's a shocking and scary thing. But this is what military training is. While modern American culture has many flaws, there is one thing that I feel is indisputable about it... it is the most advanced and civilized culture that has ever been created in human history. By 'advanced' and 'civilized', in this context, I mean that we have done a remarkable job, as a cultural whole, in educating the majority of people away from their natural and innately simian tendency towards instinctive violence. Humanity is a naturally aggressive, territorial, and confrontational organism, and while certainly there are still many naturally violent American individuals, nonetheless, we have been, and remain still despite irrefutable social decay over the past several decades, a society where the truly violent individual who cannot socialize those impulses appropriately is still an anomaly, usually a criminal one, and who generally gets dealt with fairly quickly after those violent impulses manifest unmistakably, by our social justice system. These people are enormously less than 1% of our population, and they generally become outlaws and usually end up in prison or dead if their behavior becomes too egregious to be tolerated.
The fact that such a vastly small percentage of our population is actively, aggressively, and confrontationally violent is an enormous accolade to our basic social structure, education system, and cultural ethic. However, such a high level of civilization and socialization creates a profoundly difficult task for the military, because the military is based around the concept that occasionally it's necessary to break things and kill people. Our culture teaches, with overwhelming success, from a very early age, that we're not supposed to break things or kill people. Some natural atavists... the vanishingly small violent individual... do join the military, but most are not psychologically suited to such a structured environment (which is yet another reason they become outlaws). In general, those who join a volunteer military are either financially desperate (but still socialized, or else they'd be robbing banks) or patriotic (a trait that any conservative will tell you is the absolute zenith of all civilization). In other words, the overwhelming majority of recruit trainees are highly socialized. They instinctively (it's a learned instinct, but one learned from infancy in our culture) are disinclined to break things, and are especially disinclined to kill people.
The Army (and other military organizations) has to decondition this basic socialization training. In the rare cases where a naturally violent and asocial freak actually joins the military, the military still has to brainwash him; in this case, while they don't have to decondition the social training that teaches said individual it's innately wrong to blow stuff up and shoot people, they do have to condition in an entire array of special inhibitions to make sure that this throwback to a more primitive era only blows up the stuff and kills the people that the Army wants him to.
For all this, sleep deprivation is an invaluable and extraordinarily effective tool, and therefore, no one in military training ever gets enough sleep.
(Another explanation I can recall being given for the lack of sleep people are allowed in Basic is that it's very rare for anyone to get enough sleep under combat conditions, and this basically trains you to function under similar circumstances. Again, this sounds good until you think about it real hard - which is admittedly difficult to do in Basic, because you're so fucking tired all the time - when it becomes clear that one cannot really ever adequately learn to function without sleep. It's just something you do if you have to, but it's not something that you can really get better at.)
I was one of the fortunate few who had a natural capacity to get along with less sleep than most people. I say I was, because while this was a trait I had had all my life up to Basic Training, my military experience utterly burned it out of me, and now I like to get as much sleep as I possibly can and find myself become cranky and fatigued rather easily. However, for the first two weeks of Basic Training, when everyone else was falling asleep in class and our drill sergeants and the range training sergeants were constantly warning us not to go to sleep; that if we felt sleepy, we should just stand up at parade rest until we were awake again, and we didn't need permission to do that (which was an amazing thing in and of itself in Basic), I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I felt fine. Of course, by the third week it caught up with me, and after that I was as exhausted and ready to conk out at the slightest relaxation on my part as anyone else... in fact, I wound up being so damn sleepy during my company's final training exercise in the field, that I became one of an unfortunate elite few who has ever dozed off under simulated combat conditions and had the wonderful pleasure of waking up sitting in a defensive position (foxhole, for you non military types) immersed in a cloud of CS gas.
I may as well explain the sequence of events leading up to this, as it's both an interesting and humorous story, assuming we accept the traditional definition of humor as being something either unpleasant, surprising, or both, that happens to anyone but you. As it happened to me, I don't find it particularly funny, but everyone else in my training platoon seems to have regarded it as hilarious.
Our last field exercise prior to graduation involved spending a weekend (I have no idea if it was actually 'a weekend', but it took about two days) in the woods, staging a simulated attack under simulated combat conditions. What this meant in general, we were told, was that we would be fair game to be field tested on any and everything we'd learned up to that point by anyone of higher rank (i.e., anyone) who happened across us. In specific, it meant we were going to hike about ten or fifteen miles out into the fucking Georgia woods to a large range that was used for this purpose, and our company was going to divide into two separate two-platoon teams. The lucky platoon would get to be the attackers (the bastards) while the unlucky platoon got to prepare a defensive position and then, well, defend it. All combat would be fought with MILES gear (Military Issue Light Emission Sensors, the early, bulky, prodigiously expensive and not overwhelmingly effective Army precursors to Lazer Tag, which worked by emitting a laser beam in response to the report from a fired blank, and which, according to persistent mythology, would therefore allow an empty weapon to 'fire' if you slapped it on its butt correctly, making the correctly pitched clapping noise).
The other specific thing that 'simulated combat conditions' meant was (as we were told over and over again by our drill sergeants) WE WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SLEEP WITHOUT PERMISSION.
That's called foreshadowing, by the way.
So, there we were, hiking out to this damned range in the middle of the goddam woods, where we were going to go through at least a day and a night of 'simulated combat conditions'. We were in route step march, which meant we were not marching in sync, but were, instead, simply keeping position in long, two by two files along the side of a dusty country road winding ever deeper and deeper into the boonies. 'Route step march' basically means 'all you have to do is keep up with the guys in front of you'. The guys in front of you, of course, are trying to keep up with the drill sergeant pacing the march, and drill sergeants, as anyone who has any military experience already knows, are not actually human beings, but are, in fact, some sort of biologically engineered form of synthetic life made of metal and plastic which no actual human being can keep up with.
It may be worth noting at this point that transportation from Point A to Point B during basic training, at least, at Fort Benning, GA, undergoes a steady process of technological devolution. In your first few days, when you're still pretty much a civilian, they haul you around in what are basically school buses, with actual seats inside that have actual cushions on them. Once you get to your training platoon, these school buses vanish, and for the first four weeks or so of Basic, you get hauled to the various training ranges and back again in these weird looking high narrow truck-buses that look like nothing so much as bizarrely angular armored cars. There are no seats inside, but there are metal benches, thoughtfully studded with rivet heads to keep anyone from being too comfortable sitting on them for too long, into which generally around 50 to 60 trainees are crammed... so you stand up, often on some random body part of the fellow who was unlucky or foolish enough to get on the damn bus before you did.
At first you complain about these 'ass-haulers', because in all honesty, it is a pretty undignified and uncomfortable way to ship American citizens in the service of their country from one spot to another. However, eventually, you get used to it, and finally, there comes a point when you honestly and sincerely enjoy riding around in these damn glorified hearses, and that point is right after the training course where you are taught how to move under fire (the dreaded low crawl) and how to camouflage yourself in the brush... because, as you assemble to eat your goddam MREs in the area where you disembarked from the meat wagons that morning, you get more and more anxious, milling around, talking to your buddies, listening to the rumors and passing along rumors yourself, as it more and more sinks in that tonight, the goddam ass-haulers aren't showing up... and you're at least ten miles from your home barracks.
This is the final devolution (no, the Army doesn't eventually take your boots away from you) and it's a permanent one; from this point on, you will never see those big tall stupid looking metal ass-haulers again. From this point on, if you're going somewhere... and as a general rule, you're always going somewhere in Basic Training... you're marching there.
That first night without the ass-haulers is the night of the Dreaded Death March. There are three marches a recruit trainee has to successfully complete in order to graduate from Basic Training. I can't remember the distances, but I think they're something like 5, 10, and 15 miles. (At the point I typed this, it was true I couldn't remember; since then I've dug out my Basic Training Yearbook and discovered that the distances of the required marches were actually 10, 12, and 15 miles.) The first one is made at route step, and as it would later turn out, the last one is, too. The one in between is what they call a speed march; you not only have to go the distance, you have to do it in a certain minimum time, or you do it all over again. And I'll get to more horrible details on all this under 'Marching Through Georgia'.
Anyway, we marched out to the range where this simulated combat exercise was going to take place, and about halfway through that first long day's march, the word filtered back, in that inexplicable way that rumors spread through any large group of essentially powerless people, that this particular march WAS the last, long dreaded, 15 Mile Endurance March. As it turned out, it was exactly that; we were coming to the end of the training cycle, time was short, and apparently it was decided to kill two birds with one stone. So, as we hauled full backpacks and gear, and carried our M16s at port arms the whole way, we were also, supposedly, taking care of one of our last, mandatory graduation requirements.
Apparently, we didn't make great time, so we wound up hiking late into the night... much later than we normally would have, until around 10 P.M.... and then finally turned into a spot to crash for the night that, as we found out, was not the actual training range itself. I've always been reasonably observant of what's going on around me as far as the human element goes, so I'd been aware during most of the march out that our NCO's seemed worried and harassed about something... there'd been quite a lot of scurrying around, with the company's Senior Drill Sergeant working his way up and down the marching line quite a lot more than normal, conferring in low and, to my mind, furtive looking whispers with the various drill sergeants. Apparently, we'd fallen well behind schedule, and putting things together in retrospect, it would seem that most likely, the original plan had been to ship us out there in ass-haulers so we'd have most of that first day to set up our defensive positions and the attacks could be staged the following day... which was important, because we later found out (Sgt. Robbins bragged about it) that some high up Army brass was planning to come out and watch the exercises the next day. It would seem that the bright idea of getting the last required marching exercise out of the way by having us walk out to the range had screwed up everyone's schedules.
Whatever the case, what I know first hand is that we walked for hours after it was pitch dark, arrived at a range that was densely covered in trashy little pine trees growing out of a gluey, ashy Georgia soil around 9:30 or 10 P.M., trudged through a labyrinth of back roads for another half hour or so, finally fell out and sat on our asses in a clearing for another half hour, got back up just as it started to pour down drenchingly cold rain, and in the cold wet utter dark, marched another fifteen minutes to a spot where, apparently, the higher powers had decided we could crash for the night. It was about midnight by then.
We were divided up pretty much haphazardly into two man buddy units (the Army does everything by team and nothing individually if they can help it; the lowest conceivable unit in the military is the two man team) and told there was no time to set up a proper bivouac, so we should just dig a hole to lie in (for some obscure reason I can't recall right now, but it was what we were trained to do if we had to sleep on the ground), roll up in our ponchos, and crash. However, we were also told that we were under simulated combat conditions, and only one member of each team could sleep at a time. Finally, we were told that we'd be moving out about six a.m. the next morning, and we should work out amongst ourselves how we would split watches.
Being an idiot, I volunteered to take first watch. I should note here that this was not so much heroism or altruism as it was, well, idiocy, and second, guilt, because I really was a horrible soldier, and not only that, but on our first Endurance March, as I've detailed under 'Marching Through Georgia', I myself would have fallen ignominiously into an exhausted heap by the side of the road had it not been for the absolute and unutterably selfless heroism of our Platoon Guide, Private Michael Stewart, who let me grab hold of the back of his belt for probably a good mile or so of it as I got past the worst part and into the psychological downhill slope. Naturally, who did I somehow wind up teamed with that night? Good ol' Platoon Guide Stewart. So, I said "You get some sleep, I'll wake you up at 3".