Bullets in Burn Pits - Part 2

Last week I shared the first part of my work in progress memoir, Bullets in Burn Pits, and this week I want to continue that work by sharing the second chapter of the book.

This one covers my time in basic training, and while it is a little longer than the first chapter, my hope is that it paints a strong picture of what life was like for me in Fort Jackson, South Carolina in the fall of 2008.

As always, I encourage you to leave feedback below and I'll plan to share the next chapter in due course!

Don’t Thank Me, Thank Your Recruiter

My first flight on an airplane was on October 13, 2008.

After a brief visit to the processing station, I was loaded onto a bus, taken to the airport, and before my mind could catch up to tell me how crazy the decision was, I was on a plane taxiing down the runway and leaving the life I knew behind. There was a brief layover in Atlanta where I switched planes and as evening was coming on, I found myself walking off a plane in Columbia, South Carolina. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew when I found the man in the army uniform, I was in the right place.

There was a bus waiting outside the airport, and as I climbed on I wondered if joining the army was the right decision. I knew I wasn’t a strong person mentally or physically, and I couldn’t run two miles to save my life or do many pushups or sit-ups.

And the doubts would only grow over the next few hours.

I have no idea what time it was when we pulled up to the in-processing center at Fort Jackson, but I know it was dark. As we came to a stop, I could feel the tension in the air. Then the door on the bus opened and a man in a wide-brimmed green hat appeared, speaking much calmer than I expected.

We were told that we needed to have our paperwork ready and that our cell phones were to be turned off and put in our bags. Within moments we would be disembarking the bus and lining up on the lines painted on the ground, our paperwork would be in our left hand and our bags would be in our right.

As he spoke I couldn’t help but wonder how many times he’d given that exact speech. I was also surprised that we weren’t being yelled at, since that was the one thing I knew to expect from basic training. I wouldn’t be disappointed for long, however.

As we started getting off the bus, I could hear the voices outside. Drill sergeants screaming at each and every person as they stepped down, telling them to move faster and to put their paperwork in the correct hand. I moved as quickly as I could when my turn came, bolting behind the person in front of me and standing as still as possible when I’d reached my spot. It didn’t really matter what I did, though, as we all paid the price for even minor transgressions committed by any and all individuals.

When we were all lined up, using our arms to measure the correct distance to stand behind the person in front of us, we were briefed on some basic army protocols that pertained to basic training.

For instance, we learned that when the drill sergeant yells “half-right, face” we should expect some kind of exercise. That particular command was typically followed by “front-leaning rest position…move”. You only moved when you heard the word “move”, and that was reinforced as we did it over and over thanks to one person or another going too soon or waiting too long.

Once we more or less got the basics down, we filed into the main building to start our journey. There was a shakedown, checking for any contraband and making sure we had all the right paperwork, and we spent some time getting the first set of what would eventually be a lot of gear and clothing.

Then there were the immunizations. I had to get one of everything because my mom had fallen into the “vaccines cause autism” camp when I was a baby. Thankfully, the side-effects were minimal for me and the worst I dealt with over the next few days was a slightly runny nose.

When all was said and done, it was about 2 AM and I was beat, but by the time I actually started drifting off to sleep it was time to wake up and live through my first full day of military life.

The majority of the first few days of basic training was in-processing. We’d get up super early, do PT, shower and eat and then stand in line for one station or another as we worked through everything from haircuts to eye exams. This is where I first learned the phrase “hurry up and wait” as we were instructed to hurry from station to station and the lines very rarely moved faster than a snail’s pace.

After what felt like a month, which in reality was 3-4 days, we were all set and packing our gear into duffle bags in preparation for the bus ride to actually start basic training. While most of us were uncertain, yet ready to get started, there was at least one person who realized too late they’d made a mistake. I’ll never forget overhearing the conversation.

Private: “Drill sergeant, I don’t think I can do this.”

Drill sergeant: “Do what, private? Pack your shit in a bag?”

Private: “No drill sergeant, I don’t think I can do basic training.”

To this day I have no idea what happened to that poor soul, but the drill sergeant was not happy to say the least. I had my own doubts about my ability to complete what lay ahead, but I wasn’t about to go telling the drill sergeants or anyone else what was on my mind.

Once that situation was dealt with and we all had our stuff packed up, we loaded onto a bus. The only thing we carried with us was a backpack with basic gear. Our duffle bags were loaded onto another vehicle, and we were told to put our heads down with the threat of doing push-ups until our arms fell off being used to incentivize obedience.

The bus drove around for what seemed like 45 minutes, with not a sound to be heard on board. I later found out they took their time and drove around the block several times to make us think we were further away than we actually were from the front gate. Apparently, this was a strategy employed to prevent those who might be inclined to run away from doing so.

When the trip finally came to an end, the silence on the bus was broken by drill sergeants screaming for us to get off and run up a hill toward what turned out to be barracks. Our bags were already there, and we were instructed to find our own bag and lift it above our head. This process took longer than the drill sergeants wanted, and as soon as everyone had their bag, we moved straight into pushups, sit-ups and flutter kicks.

I should take a brief moment here to explain that I was unfamiliar with a lot of the exercises we were introduced to over the course of the 9 weeks I spent in Fort Jackson, and I don’t want to assume that you, dear reader, would know them any better than I did. While some, such as pushups and sit-ups might be obvious, flutter kicks aren’t something the average person would ever even consider. I count myself among that group, and the first time we were told to do them, I found myself very confused.

Thankfully, whenever you’re confused about what to do in basic training, the drill sergeants are there to help.

“Lay flat on your back, with your feet six inches off the ground and hold them in place. Just like that private. Now, when I say ‘in-cadence, begin’ you’ll start kicking your feet up and down, one foot down and the other higher in the air. No more than twelve inches off the ground and no less than four inches above it. Your feet should never hit the ground.”

Flutter kicks in particular were the bane of my existence when I started, mainly because I was what they called a ‘fat body’. I wasn’t too overweight to join, and I was able to pass the tape test, but my stomach did protrude out more than it should have. I absolutely hated flutter kicks because, often, we would be told to just lay there, our feet six inches off the ground, for several minutes. While it did help tone my core by the end, I was always miserable afterward.

When the drill sergeants were done with the exercises and giving us more basic instructions, we were told to head upstairs. Fort Jackson was co-ed, the male barracks were on the second floor and the female barracks were on the third floor. The ground floor was ‘the pad’ where we formed up and started PT each morning.

Walking into the barracks for the first time, I was a little surprised. I’d known ahead of time there would be an open floor, but seeing it in person was a completely different experience.

Wall lockers lined the length of the room on either side, with bunk beds sitting against each one. There were two pillars in the middle of the floor, one on either end of the room as if placed to hold the ceiling up. The floor was tiled, with the outside, where the wall lockers and bunks were, being white and an interior section being black. Red tape around the interior section divided the black tile from the white, and the drill sergeants instructed us to line up along this red line with our toes on the edge facing the black tile.

“When any of us tells you to ‘toe the line’, this is what we want. You will be standing, with your toes on the line at the position of attention.”

The middle of the floor, the black part, was deemed off-limits with some exceptions. We were told it was to be mopped and waxed every night, and the only time we were allowed on it was when we were told to be there. We followed this rule, for the most part, for the entirety of basic training. You had someone on the other side of the room you needed to talk to? You walked around the floor on the white part.

The first day was all about getting situated.

We started learning the basics of the barracks, the standard the drill sergeants were expecting for cleanliness, and getting our wall lockers straight. We were also told to put our civilian bags, with any and all civilian clothes, into a closet. This included cell phones and anything that wasn’t issued by the United States Army. Remember this for later.

The first couple of weeks were the hardest. I missed my wife and daughters more than I thought possible, and I was incredibly irritated with every aspect of the day.

Basic training included mass punishment, meaning that when one person messed up, we all paid the price. There were a couple of people who seemed to take this as a challenge, talking back to the drill sergeants and just being as stupid as possible on a consistent basis. I tried to avoid those people as best I could, and wound up falling in with a couple of guys that were in a similar situation as I was.

One of them was coming in as a specialist, and he wound up being the platoon leader, called the PG or Platoon God, for most of our time in Fort Jackson. This relationship worked in my favor on multiple occasions, but the most memorable one involved chow time.

See, there was a rule in the chow hall that when the PG was finished eating, everyone was. This normally worked out alright, especially if you got your food first, because the platoon leader would get their food last. If they took five or even ten minutes to eat, everyone had plenty of time to finish their own meal at a pretty leisurely pace.

I say leisurely, but realistically it usually worked out to maybe five minutes to cram as much food as possible in because the drill sergeants were watching and you didn’t want to be seen as dallying.

As much as I liked to be near the front of the line, I would usually hang back with the platoon leader and chat. This kept the drill sergeants off my back and helped me make a few friends over the course of training. On one occasion, it even provided me with a bit of a laugh.

I don’t remember exactly what all had happened, but there was a day where it seemed everyone was just being absolutely stupid. The drill sergeants had been yelling at us, and we’d been doing pushups, sit-ups, and flutter kicks all morning to the point where even those of us who were a bit more mature were getting angry.

This group included the platoon leadership, who wanted to make a point that the kind of behavior that had been going on wouldn’t be tolerated. As we were standing in line to enter the chow hall, the platoon leader leaned close to me and whispered, “I hope no one’s hungry.”

I took that as he meant it.

He wasn’t going to eat, and he was going to make sure everyone else went as hungry as possible as well. We all filed through the line, and the moment he and I sat down, he gave me a quick look before both of us stood up and he shouted, “PG finished”.

At that pronouncement, I followed him out the door as chaos erupted behind us. A few people had gotten up as they were supposed to, but many refused to move. That drew the ire of the drill sergeants, who proceeded to rip a new asshole in anyone that remained.

He and I shared a very quick laugh at the situation before the rest of the platoon came reeling around the corner back to the pad. That was one time I was more than happy to do the exercises that came with the actions of the platoon because it felt like a kind of payback.

In case it isn’t obvious, our unit in general wasn’t the most disciplined, and some days were worse than others.

There were supposed to be four phases to basic training, each with varying levels of freedom and responsibility. Red phase was the first and it involved having no freedom while the drill sergeants were as hard on the group as they could be. White phase came next, with things easing up a tiny bit. Blue phase was where you were almost to graduation and the final, combination phase, called red, white and blue phase was the final couple of days where you can finally call yourself a soldier.

Our group spent the entirety of basic training, up to the day before graduation, in red phase.

It wasn’t all bad though.

For as difficult as some moments were, the experiences like victory tower and the gas chamber were actually a lot of fun.

Victory tower was a 50-foot-high climbing wall that we spent an afternoon climbing and rappelling down. The drill sergeants actually showed their human side on that day as one of them, drill sergeant Walker, pretended to fall off the top.

We were all gathered around the bottom, getting instructions on what we were supposed to be doing there, and drill sergeant Walker was the demonstration. As she looked over the top, she said she was really scared and didn’t know if she could do it. One of the other drill sergeants laughed and told her to stop being chicken, and her head briefly disappeared back over the edge. Before we knew what was happening, a body came flying over the side of the tower, falling straight to the ground and landing with a thud.

It took us all a few seconds to realize it was only a dummy, and by the time we looked back up, drill sergeant Walker was laughing as she started making her way down the wall. It was an experience I will never forget, especially because I was already terrified of heights and was really worried about falling.

Despite that worry, I made it through Victory Tower without issue, overcoming my fear and learning a bit more about what I was capable of. It helped a lot to see the drill sergeants having some fun with it as well, as it made them seem more human and relatable.

The gas chamber was another experience I’ll never forget.

I had no idea what to expect, as the only thing I’d been told was that it would clear my sinuses out. They use CS gas, a type of tear gas, and each of us had to put on our gas masks and make our way inside this small room. Once inside, the drill sergeants would walk around, stopping at each of us and checking that the mask was on properly before telling us to remove it, say our name, rank, and social security number, and recite the Soldier’s Creed.

No one made it past their rank before being moved toward the door because they couldn’t go on.

Walking out of the chamber, into the fresh air, we would wave our arms and try our best to keep the snot that was now pouring out of our noses off our uniforms. I was glad I only had to go through it once, but I actually enjoyed the experience overall.

Weapons qualification took up what felt like a couple of weeks and consisted of marching out to the range, sitting around while waiting for the chance to fire, and doing it all again the next day. I was more than a little irritated because on what turned out to be the ‘practice’ round of qualifying I shot 38 out of 40. Thinking that was it, I went about cleaning my weapon until being informed everyone had finished practice and now it was time to do it all again.

Try as I might, I only achieved 28 out of 40 on the ‘real’ qualification and I found myself more than a little disappointed. As nice as it was to qualify, I wanted that higher mark to be official. But weapon qualification is only one part of being a soldier, and I had to move past that feeling of disappointment and know there would be other chances down the road.

And that’s when I realized what basic training really was for me.

The whole point of basic training in general is to take average civilians, break them down and build them back up better than they were in every way. For me, this meant taking the insecure boy, who felt like he wasn’t good enough and had failed everyone in his life, and turning him into a man who could be there for those he loved and who could do the right thing even when no one was watching.

As the weeks went on, I found myself changing. I was becoming more physically fit and finding that most of the things we were going through, like long ruck marches, didn’t bother me nearly as much.

But the physical aspect was only a piece of it.

A good portion of our time was spent outside, in the weather both day and night. This included walking wherever we needed to be for training that day and even sleeping in little tents overnight in the woods.

Now, South Carolina doesn’t typically get too awful cold, but it does get to the freezing point at times. This is especially true in November and December as the heart of winter begins taking hold. I’d never really been camping much as a kid, with a sole week at a church camp being the lone experience that stuck out, and even then, it was summer and the lowest temperature we experienced was well above the freezing mark.

The first night we slept outside in tents I was shocked at how cold it got. To the point where I didn’t think I’d be able to climb out of my sleeping bag, where I was actually quite toasty. But basic training shows you what you’re capable of, and I found myself crawling out into the cold, despite protests from the logical side of my brain, when my turn for fire guard came.

If it wasn’t fire guard I was being called to do, it was the drill sergeants tossing simulated mortars or yelling for everyone to get up and get moving. Suffice to say, I found out real quick just how in my head the worry about being cold was.

Speaking of fire guard, that duty might’ve been universally the least favorite thing about basic training. Whether we were out in the field, or back in the barracks, someone had to be awake at all times and keeping an eye on things. This fell in the form of hour-long shifts, where you’d spend an hour either sitting at the desk in the barracks or walking around the tents before waking up the person in the bunk or tent next to you so they could do their shift.

This normally went fairly smoothly, especially since one of the general orders we had drilled into us clearly stated, “I will guard everything within the limits of my post and quit my post only when properly relieved.”

It’s that last part that got us all into big trouble one night though.

One of our fellow recruits had spent the day at sick call for one ailment or another and found himself returning well after the rest of us had turned in for the night. Normally, the fire guard would have let him in, but on that particular night they were not opening the door.

Unsure of how to get in, he wound up at the CQ desk (staffed by drill sergeants overnight), and a drill sergeant promptly came upstairs with their keys to let him in the room. The reason the fire guard had failed to open up the door was mainly due to the fact that they were sleeping. One of the early shifts had failed to wait on their relief, choosing to only make a brief attempt at waking them up before laying down and going straight to bed themselves.

Before anyone knew what was happening, the lights in the barracks were on and we were all towing the line. The drill sergeant spent a few minutes yelling and figuring out how long we’d been without a fire guard, before deciding it was time for some fun.

It turned out, we’d been sleeping for nearly 2 hours with no one at the desk, meaning we needed to make up for that time. Naturally, this meant 2 hours of push-ups, sit-ups and flutter kicks, but it also meant, for some reason, drinking a lot of water. We found ourselves running to the bathroom to fill up our canteens between exercises and chugging down several quarts of water as we worked.

By the time all was said and done, several people had gotten sick from drinking water, and I felt like I was going to explode. Falling back to sleep wasn’t easy, and by the time I did, it was time to wake up anyway.

That was definitely one of the rougher nights, but it was also pretty typical for how things went in our unit. Even when things seemed to be going good, someone would find a way to mess it up and we’d find ourselves working out or doing some other form of stupid activity like cleaning already clean weapons or mopping and waxing an already spotless floor.

As bad as it could be, however, there was one day where things seemed almost normal.

Being at basic training through October, November and December meant being there for Thanksgiving. While the military doesn’t really have “holidays” as a rule, refusing to allow those more civilian traditions to get in the way of things like deployments and training, they do still try and observe them in their own way.

For basic training, that meant a more relaxed atmosphere where things were more toned down and where the drill sergeants themselves served us dinner. After eating, we even got to lay around and watch a movie!

The movie of choice was Full Metal Jacket, and though I’d never seen it before that point, I recognized many of the lines as phrases of my drill sergeants used often. I thought he’d invented the term “skull-fuck”, but it turns out he’d merely repurposed it.

While we enjoyed the movie and what amounted to a day off, there was a general unease throughout the platoon. The main worry was that the drill sergeants would be busting in while we slept that night, waking us and having us do hours of exercises to make up for the downtime. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, and we found ourselves able to sleep through the night, resuming training as usual on what would have normally been black Friday.

The drill sergeant who stole the lines from Full Metal Jacket was one of my favorites. I honestly didn’t think I’d like any of them, as outside of Stockholm Syndrome it’s unusual to like people who yell at you constantly, but I was wrong. As much as they yelled, they also spent a great deal of time teaching, and they actually cared about each of us.

On more than one occasion, I found myself listening intently as a drill sergeant calmly explained how to do one thing or another, and I found that as long as I took their advice to heart and actually implemented it, things actually went pretty good.

The key was to not make the same mistake more than once.

As a quick learner, who tends to get things right pretty fast, I wound up on the good side of most of the drill sergeants, and that actually helped me a lot, especially as we drew closer to the end of basic training and one of the trainees brought on the worst day we’d seen.

We were all set to graduate just before Christmas, and as such we were given the chance to borrow some of our future leave and go home before heading to our individual advanced training units. Normally, when you graduate basic training, you go straight to the next unit, so going home for nearly 2 weeks before heading off for more training seemed like a great option. The catch was that we had to pay for our own plane tickets rather than having the army pay for our travel between duty stations.

As we prepared to go down to the travel office, however, an enormous problem reared its head.

Most of us were using bank cards or credit cards to make our arrangements, but a select few opted to withdraw a bunch of cash and pay that way. I probably don’t need to explain why carrying around hundreds of dollars in basic training is a bad idea, but I suppose you gotta do what you gotta do.

As a general rule, though, those who were planning to use cash didn’t make a big fuss out of it. If you’ve got a large sum of money lying around, it’s probably best to not mention it to many people. That message fell short for one guy, however, and he made a point to brag about how much cash he was hiding away.

So, the day to book our travel comes and the guy who’d been talking up the wad of money in his wallet can’t seem to locate it. This, of course, gets brought up to the drill sergeants and we find ourselves towing the line and being berated once again for the actions of a single person. One of the worst things you can have in your ranks is a thief, and it appeared we had one that was dedicated to hiding their identity.

Even given a chance at amnesty, no one was willing to come forward and things started to escalate in a bad way. We were all forced to empty our pockets, spilling everything out on the floor in front of us, though even then the money remained missing.

When conventional methods didn’t work, the next step involved the drill sergeants going from wall-locker to wall-locker, throwing everything out and searching every crevice. While I knew they weren’t gonna find any cash in my wall-locker, I was worried about getting in trouble for something completely unrelated.

Remember when I said earlier they told us to put all our civilian clothing in our personal bags as we put those bags in the locked closet? Well, I somehow missed a few pairs of underwear and socks, and those had been sitting at the bottom of my drawer in my wall-locker ever since.

Besides civilian clothes, I also had some contraband.

See, we weren’t allowed to have any newspapers or anything related to the outside world while in basic training. This was to help keep us focused on the task at hand as we morphed from civilian to soldier, but my grandmother didn’t know this. She had been sending me clippings each week from The Columbus Dispatch Sunday edition so I could keep up with how the Ohio State Buckeyes were doing through the season.

I kept these clips in my wall-locker, hidden deep down with the civilian clothes, and prayed each night I’d graduate before any of the drill sergeants had the chance to see them, so as the search for the money unfolded, I was starting to sweat bullets.

The head drill sergeant for our platoon, the one who liked to quote Full Metal Jacket, was the one who searched my locker. To this day I’m convinced that was my saving grace because he seemed to like me, even laughing as he threatened to make me do push-ups until he was tired when my wife misspelled his name in an email she sent asking him to have me to call home.

As he searched my locker, I heard a little chuckle. My fears of getting in trouble, however, were assuaged when he walked away, giving me a knowing grin as he moved to the next locker. When I was finally able to clean up my stuff, I realized he had seen everything but hadn’t really messed up too much. While other people’s lockers were tossed all to hell and back, mine was relatively unscathed.

After a long search, and several threats of losing our ability to go home for Christmas altogether, the guy magically found the cash strewn about one of the stairwells. This was after we had all come together as a platoon and offered to pitch in money for him to go home, and to this day I’m convinced he simply misplaced the money to begin with and was just too embarrassed to tell anyone. Pretending to find it in the stairwell was probably easier than admitting he found it somewhere in his locker.

That little hiccup aside, the last few weeks of basic training seemed to fly by. Before I knew it, we were in the final field training mission and graduation was drawing near.

The next to last week of basic training consisted of an exercise where each platoon would be more or less on their own, with the drill sergeants merely observing as we ruck marched across difficult terrain and put all our training to the test. I don’t remember a lot from that week, as I was too tired to really think about much, but I’ll never forget the feeling of accomplishment as we finished that last day.

From there, it was a couple of days of graduation prep and a family day. No one in my family was able to make it down, but I did get to spend the day with the family of one of my battle buddies so it wasn’t all bad. The only thing I could really think about though was walking across the field and finally being called a soldier before making my way home for Christmas.

Graduation day came and went, and to be honest it wasn’t really that big a deal for me. It was cool in the moment, and I was super proud to have made it through what had been the most difficult ordeal of my life to that point, but it doesn’t even really stand out as one of the top 10 moments of my life.

I think that’s because, while I did see basic training as a huge thing, I’ve never been one to celebrate myself. It felt good to have completed what amounted to a hurdle in my military career, but I saw it mainly as just a stepping stone to what would come next. I didn’t like the pomp and circumstance that came along with marching in front of a cheering crowd, hearing the speeches, and saluting. In my mind, I’d completed training and I was just ready to move on.

And move on I did.

Climbing on a plane for only the second time in my life, I made my way home. Seeing my wife and daughters after what felt like an eternity was euphoric and over the next couple of weeks I’d spend time with various family members and try not to think too much about what was coming next.

But the days flew by and before I knew it I was saying goodbye again and making my way to the next phase of training. By early January I found myself learning the difference between humid cold and dry cold in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

(To be continued in part 3!)