Saturday, February 9, 2008

[ReCap] Book Of Blood: Episode II: Crawl Before You Walk

"Since the beginning of time, there has been only two things you
can trust-- your own two feet. You will need to get far in this world, and
damnit you'll need them to do it."

Part I: A Drill Sergeant, By Any Other Name...

It had been nearly a week of no sleep as we went from one thing to another, as per our inprocessing sequence, and frankly, I was tired as hell. I was mad at the fact that no matter what we did, there was always one of us who screwed something up, causing us to get in trouble, and with our temporary drill sergeant being a female, she kept a case of the ass all the time, and ruthlessly smoked us for anything done that wasn't directly by her standards (No, she did not inform us of these ...invisable standards, but yes she got us for not being within them), we easilly lost morale, causing us to sometimes even cause ourselves collectively to be smoked, and laxly doing the corrective training, or not sounding off in general, as if it just didn't matter anymore. Personally, I didn't really loose my morale or nerve, I just enjoyed watching the morale of our platoon change so fast as the soon-to-be soldiers began to realize what they now thought to be what they signed up for, which was apparently something they really didn't want. Anyway, today, we were standing in formation after an interesting day of sparce smoke sessions in the gravel road to and from the DFAC which sat on, not a hill but a slope, we stood at the company area, at attention, extremely quiet (For the first time since we got to BCT), so quiet, we actually looked like we knew what we were doing. Then out of no where (yes, everyone's facing front, so noone could see around them, and since none of us were even worrying about peripheral vision, as we'd been standing there for atleast twenty minutes prior, and was pretty sure nothing would change, noone bothered to do anything but look at the grass in front of the concrete drill pad) walks a drill sergeant hat, the first one we'd seen in alittle while, drawing people's attention (after seeing DS' for every minute of the day for the last week and change, it was abit odd to go more than ten minutes without one), this hat sat on top of a lankey man which stood every bit of five foot, eight inches... my height, but thinner, wearing ACUs that practically swallowed him. He had, not the classic stiff, "I am the shit" walk that most of the other DS' mantained, but more of a chillaxed stride, similar to my own as a civilian. This immediately caught my eye, almost giving me nothing to make of him, I wasn't sure wether to under-estimate him or to cower in fear at the fact that he'd be one of those seemingly-calm people that randomly bursted out into anger and utter hatred for the army and the rest of the world, including it's inhabitants. So he strides up to post infront of the platoon, and introduced himself as the senior DS of our platoon, but that he'd also been in a class for most of the time we'd been inpro, so he couldn't be here for the introduction, and that he wouldn't be here for another week or two. The calmest voice we've heard in nine days, it almost put us at ease, right before he called "Half-right, ...Face!". After days of playing around with our temporary DS, we already knew what was about to take place, but what we didn't know was that he was slightly different from the rest of the DS', more ...creative.

"Front-leanin' rest position, ...Move!" and with the command of execution, we tirelessly moved into the pushup position. as we did, he'd began talking... more like egging us on... "Ohh, so you don't wanna get down when I tell you to? you wanna do it on your own time huh? okay, that's okay, ...we can square that away... no big deal at all, just do it whenever you want..." even though he was all calm and stuff, and he kept saying that, we all knew he was being a synical little prick, and therefore attempted to motivate the rest of our platoon to move quicker, but he wasn't trying to see that, he would've rathered do it his way. "Position of attention, ...move!" at this point, I'd actually thought he wasn't going to make us push, then he called us into the pushup position again, and back and forth between attention and the pushup position untill we'd all decided within ourselves that it was enough arm, shoulder, thigh, and foot work for the day... but as if it wasn't, he'd got us down, and then made us push... diamond pushups. Then afew staggered pushups, which noone knew what they were untill that little session which tired us out abit. Oddly he didn't exactly smoke us, but more like poked us abit, then called us back to attention and told us that he doesn't take shit. Then, just as calmly and collectively as he walked up to post, he called a half-left, putting us back at our original position, and walked away... it was so questionable, that people was still wondering what they did wrong that time, and I'd already figured it was supposedly the classic DS introduction, a premable to more DS' on our asses.

...But this one was different.

Guess we'll see what happens, till next time;
-Sayin