Chapter 9: Hand to Hand Combat “This is no cake-walk.  This might end up saving your life.” Halfway into basic training, we began a series of training called “combatives”. Combatives is the Army’s form of mixed-martial arts.  It combines the arts of Brazilian Jujitsu and other various fighting forms to prepare soldiers for hand to […]

Chapter 8: Insomnia “Every action has consequences.  Every failure to act has consequences.” A platoon of us were standing outside at 2145.  We were now working “overtime”.  Too bad you don’t get extra pay, just extra work. We all had our weapons ready, locked and loaded with a 30 round magazine.  I hadn’t slept in […]

Chapter 7: Are we there yet? “Oh I wonder what she’s doing now.  As we march all day, and we march all night, singing the same sad songs.  Oh I wanna go home.” – Marching Cadence The final stage of basic training was Victory Forge, an 8 day field training exercise (FTX).  In order to […]

Chapter 6: A Widow’s Tears “No matter how many people you bury, it never gets any easier.” Have you ever tried to tell someone that a loved one close to them died? I guarantee you that it would be the hardest thing in your life that you would ever try to do. I had to […]

Chapter 5: Leadership with Fear “Don’t fear me, fear my superior.  The Drill Sergeants.” I mentioned before in “The Punishment” about how I managed to motivate people to listen to me.  As I said before, I was a squad leader, and no one would listen because they felt like there was nothing I could do […]

Chapter 4: Smoke Sessions “Half right, face.  Front leaning rest position, move.” – Army Command to get into the pushup position People often wonder what sort of punishments we get during basic training.  Here is one incident. These two females (thats what we call girls in the army) in our platoon were lined up in […]

Chapter 2: Sleep, Sweet Sleep “Many of you were selfish.  You wanted to get some sleep instead of breaking up the fight.  That is how people get killed overseas.”  – Drill Sergeant Riley 2100.  Lights out.  Every hour during lights out there has to be two people up at all times, patrolling around the sleeping […]

Chapter 3:  Meet Mary Jane “Your weapon is an extension of you.  Master it, and it will save your life.” – Drill Sergeant Duffy It’s around noon.  We are sitting on the bus heading towards our basic training site.  Inprocessing is complete.  Drill Sergeant Johnson is yelling at us to keep our heads between our […]

Soldier Life in Basic Training   Chapter 1 – Inprocessing “Hurry up and wait.” – Army Saying I started a major chapter of my life on June 20th, 2008.  They swore me in (defend this country from all enemies, both foreign and domestic, and so on) and it did not hit me until January 6th […]