Every day is a training day in the Army, even when you are at war. There is always room to learn something new. The Army even calls it a “training holiday” when soldiers have a three- or a four-day weekend from training. Training is very important to the combat readiness of the soldier and the unit. The Army has schools that soldiers attend to learn how to do their job, to learn how to lead, and to learn specific skills. The basic soldiering skills have to be mastered in order to have a successful army. Every soldier has his or her own unique basic training experience. Officers in the US Army get their initial training through a variety of different means: some do Reserve Officer Training in college; some are accepted to the West Point Military Academy; some go through Officer Candidates School; and if the Army is desperate to fill certain jobs, they will commission people like doctors and lawyers off the street to become officers. The course of the enlisted soldiers is much more straightforward; every enlisted soldier has to complete basic training.
I grew up as an Army brat, and I remember hearing some of the soldiers that I had been around talk about how their drill sergeants would beat them up, slap them in the face, and generally humiliate them. I was expecting that kind of treatment. In a way, I looked forward to this abuse just to see what I was made of. My basic training took place in the desert at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the fall of 1989. Fort Bliss was right outside the city of El Paso, on the Mexican border. All the potential soldiers are processed and issued their equipment before starting the training. I say “potential soldier” because at this point, trainees are not soldiers yet. The first thing that we had to learn was how to dress like a soldier. In its history the Army has gone through many different types of uniforms. When I enlisted, soldiers were wearing the green camouflage battle dress uniform or BDU. The battle dress uniform is the blouse and pants that a soldier wears during every day at work and in combat. They came in both a winter and a summer version. However, I did not know that the Army had two different types of battle dress uniform, and I could not make out the difference in the material of the fabrics, so the first time I wore this uniform I showed up in formation wearing winter pants and a summer blouse. I thought nothing of it; some of the other guys were looking at me in a strange way. I did not know why.
The actual first day of basic training started when we marched from the processing center to where our basic training company was located. All the leaders of the basic training company introduced themselves to us and then they divided us into separate platoons. Everyone in my platoon consisted of trainees who were going to work in the medical field. Most of us were going to be medical specialists, but I was the only one in my platoon who was going to go to Airborne School after I finished my medic training.
After establishing what platoon we belonged to, the drill sergeants began the process of making our lives miserable for the next eight weeks. The first training exercise we did was a stand-up and sit-down exercise. One drill sergeant would yell, “Stand up!” and another drill sergeant would yell, “Sit down!” This stand-up / sit-down exercise lasted for a couple of hours. I was getting so sore from doing something so simple. The next event that occurred was to meet our drill sergeants face-to-face. The drill sergeants talked to each individual soldier for a few minutes. I heard what the drill sergeant was saying to the other soldiers. He commented on their facial features, places they were from, and questioned their gender. A drill sergeant asked a basic trainee where he was from; the guy just answered, “Yes drill sergeant,” and said nothing more. The drill sergeant stared at this basic trainee expecting an answer, and the trainee started to cry. The drill sergeant just shook his head in disbelief and went on to the next guy in line. It was my turn to meet one of the drill sergeants. The drill sergeant was inspecting our personal gear for “contraband.” He found my electric razor and threw it onto a pile of other contraband items. I looked at the drill sergeant with my eyes squinting – I really liked that razor. He said to me that everyone around here shaves with a regular razor and shaving cream. When he asked me where I was from, I did not want to tell him that I just came back from living on an Army base in Seoul, Korea. I knew that these drill sergeants would make life harder for the Army brats. I said I was from North Carolina. The drill sergeants selected four of us to be the squad leaders for the platoon. I was chosen for the job.
We had some pretty interesting fellows in my squad. One private looked a lot like Hoss Cartwright from the TV show Bonanza. He was a tall, pudgy fellow and was easily flustered. Because of his size, it was funny to see him cry. One of the drill sergeants used the old “Steer or Queer” routine on him. The drill sergeant went up to the private and asked him where he was from. The private told him he came from Oklahoma. The drill sergeant then responded with, “I don’t see any horns on your head, so you must be a queer.” This made the private cry. The drill sergeant just stared at him. I don’t think that today’s drill sergeants can make comments like that anymore. After the shakedown and getting to know us, it was time to eat. The drill sergeants painstakingly marched us to the mess hall to eat lunch. I had learned the basics of marching already, but some of the other men had no idea how to march; it must have hurt our drill sergeants’ eyes to watch us march out of step initially. The drill sergeants explained how to sing cadences and we started to sing our first cadence. This was a good way to keep in step and march together. Keeping in step means that everyone’s left foot hits the ground at the same time. That way the formation does not look like everyone’s heads are bobbling up and down.
As we marched to the mess hall, it dawned on me that this was going to be the first cadence I would sing as a soldier. It gave me goose bumps. I remembered hearing all those cadences when I was growing up on different Army bases:
Eight more weeks and we’ll be through, I’ll be glad and so will you
Am I right or wrong? You’re Right!
Are we weak or strong? We’re STRONG!
Sound off, One, Two
Sound off, Three, Four
Break it on down One, Two, Three, Four. One, Two Three, Four
I was the squad leader for the first month of basic training. When one of the members of the squad would mess up doing push-ups, the drill sergeants would make the squad leaders do pushups along with that soldier. I didn’t think that it was fair; in fact, it really was a pain in the ass to have to babysit some of the other members of the squad. I was fired from the position when I loaded a magazine into my M-16 rifle the wrong way. It was a simple mistake that anyone could have made; however, my life in basic training was a lot easier after that point. The only time that our drill sergeants pushed us around and gave us a hard time was when we went to the gas chamber – an airtight building where we would train with our gas masks and chemical protective suits. We all had to go through the gas chamber in basic training; we went into the building with our gas masks on and they shut the door behind us. The drill sergeants used a concentrated form of tear gas pellets to simulate the nerve agents that our chemical suits and mask were supposed to protect us from. The mask worked just fine and I had no difficulty breathing. But then we had to take our masks off. The drill sergeants started pushing us around in the small building. The tear gas caused a warm tingling sensation on my skin, made my nose run, and burned my eyes. It burned my chest as I took a breath in. After what seemed like an eternity, the drill sergeants opened up the door and pushed us out. They told us to run like chickens to get the tear gas out of our clothing. It was a great way to clear nasal and chest congestion.
The basic training that I went through back in 1989 was nothing compared to what the soldiers have to go through today. The training today is geared towards preparing new soldiers for combat. When I was going through training, no one knew that less than a year later our nation would be preparing for war against Iraq. My drill sergeants were not combat veterans, so what would they have known about combat anyway? Some may say that preparing for war and learning how to be a soldier are the same thing, but I would tell them no. We trained on older weapons and received very little in terms of basic infantry tactics. We spent too much time learning garrison skills such as marching in parades in our dress uniforms. Instead, we should have been learning how to conduct and participate in combat patrols. The drill sergeants spent days teaching us how to prepare for a room inspection and to tuck our sheets in really tight on our bunk; instead we should have learned how to perform perimeter security. Out of my eight weeks in basic training, we spent six weeks on post, sleeping in a warm bed, and two weeks in the desert, sleeping on a green Army cot. I spent those two weeks in the field at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico. We stayed in a large tent and had a place to shower every night. It was out in the field, but nothing harsh.
Looking back, I wish we would have spent six weeks out in the desert and only two weeks on the post. This would have prepared us more for actual desert warfare. We could have learned to live, fight, and survive out in the desert that way. I had warm comfortable bed to go to sleep in every night when I stayed on the post. A soldier learns by doing, the more time spent out in the field environment would have made for a better trained soldier for combat.
I went to Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in March 1990. I had been looking forward to this opportunity for a very long time. I had just finished my training to be a medic, and jump school was the next part of my journey. The bus from the airport dropped us off in front of the barracks where we were going to be staying. Our rooms were already assigned to us. I really did not know what to expect but they talked to us like gentlemen instead of yelling at us. We had a formation and they assigned us roster numbers; my jump roster number was 111. After that, the rest of the evening was ours to relax. The sergeants at jump school were called Sergeant Airborne. Sometimes some of the newer soldiers would get nervous and call them something other than Sergeant Airborne. They did not take kindly to when soldiers called them “Sergeant Airplane” or “Sergeant Airport.” The Sergeant Airborne would respond, “Do I have a landing strip on my head?” or they would say, “Do I look like I have a fuselage anywhere?”
Airborne school has been around since the 1940s and a lot of traditions have evolved since that time. One tradition was the running. During training, whenever we were running, every time our left foot hit the ground we would have to yell “Airborne!” If the Sergeant Airborne did not hear the students yell “Airborne!” they would have to do push-ups. I yelled it out when they were around, but if no one was around I wouldn’t say anything; I wasn’t crazy.
Jump school was three weeks long, three aching weeks. The first week consisted of learning how to do a parachute landing fall, and a lot of running. The second week consisted of more parachute landing falls and jumping off a 250-foot training tower to simulate jumping out of an airplane. The final week of jump school was when we made our actual jumps out of the airplanes. The instructors would grade us on how well we jumped out of the mock towers or how well we did our parachute landing falls. We had 5-mile runs and if we fell out of the runs, we would get kicked out of school. They were not particularly fast, and it was more of a mind game than anything. I was never a really fast runner, but I wanted to earn my parachute wings.
Several years passed. I was a combat veteran of Operation Desert Storm and it was February, 1992. I was going to attend one of the Army Special Warfare Schools called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE. I was fortunate to be able to go to this school, as I was just a regular Army medic, but I was assigned to a pretty elite unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Incidentally, my war criminal number during the course was again 111, the same number from jump school. We were called war criminals during the field exercise portion of the training. Anytime I wanted to drink water or go to the bathroom, I had to ask like this, “Sir, war criminal number 111 requests permission to drink water or to use the porcelain facility.”
The survival part of the school went over some very basic survival skills that if they had not been taught, would have been lost to time. Most of the stuff we learned was common sense. This part of the school was what I would call the Boy Scout portion of the training: we learned how to feed off the land, what plants and animals we could eat, how to use Mother Nature to find water sources, and basically how to stay alive both mentally and physically out in the wilderness. It was the ultimate in wilderness training.
The evasion portion constituted a review of basic patrolling techniques; how to stay away from the enemy in the first place was the ultimate goal of this part of the school. Again, a lot of this was all common sense. If you don’t want the enemy to find you, use common sense – don’t give the enemy the opportunity to find you. Humans have a tendency to want to find the easiest way out when doing any task. Knowing this helps the evader when trying to avoid the enemy.
The resistance portion of the training challenged us as to what we would do if we were captured and became prisoners of war. We learned that not everyone plays by the Geneva Convention regarding the humane treatment of prisoners. We learned how to repel interrogation techniques. There is no right or wrong; there was no checklist to passing this portion of the class. Ultimately, how a person resists has much to do with his or her own internal will.
The escape component of the school dealt with how to get away from the enemy using whatever means possible after being captured. The program taught us how to escape, when to escape, reasons why we should escape, and the consequences of not escaping.
I turned 21 in SERE school. Instead of finally drinking some beer legally at a bar, I was in the thorns and bushes in the backwoods of North Carolina out on a patrol doing the best I could in this school. It was both physically and mentally exhausting. One time I was filling the canteens for everyone on my team on the banks of a small stream. I walked up to the stream and put the canteens in the water. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out why no water was going into the canteens. I thought I was losing my mind or hallucinating. It then dawned on me that I had never opened the canteen caps, the result of physical exhaustion.
The final portion of the school was a controlled “laboratory” environment similar to a prisoner of war camp. I won’t go into any more detail than that as the prisoner of war training is considered to be classified; they are a secret of the Army. The situations and decisions that we were faced with forced us to look at what were made of, not just in the physical sense, but as an emotional, spiritual human being. This school did teach us about survival skills, but even more importantly, it taught me about myself. I learned what my limitations are as a human being and this for me was the most important lesson.
After SERE, in August, 1993 I attended a Primary Leadership Development Course at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The course is taught in the backwoods of this army base, pretty much out in the middle of nowhere. It teaches the leadership skills that army specialists need in order to become sergeants. To me, the basic premise about leadership is simple: lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. All the students would wake up in the morning and take turns leading the platoon doing daily morning exercises and then we would go on a run. After that we had daily inspections. The sergeants teaching the course would inspect our uniforms and try to find gigs on them. (A gig is a mistake on the uniform, such as having your ribbons out of order or spaced apart incorrectly.) If they couldn’t find something wrong with our uniform, they would always say that our boots were not shiny enough. It was hard to keep them shiny because all the shoe wax we put on them would melt in the heat. The rest of the time we spent in classrooms learning basic leadership skills. The Army has a manual on how to do everything, and of course it has a manual on how to lead soldiers. The instructors would evaluate us every week on our leadership potential. They called us sergeants in the class, but really we were treated like we were going through basic training again. All the soldier students in the class had to take turns being in charge and we were graded on how we did. My leadership evaluation started several days before our platoon was to go out to the field, and lasted for two days into the field exercise.
The whole field exercise was only five days long. I had been out in the field plenty of times with my own unit on patrols so this was nothing new to me, but a lot of the soldiers had never really been in the field. Sure, they took their tanks to the field or they set up tents in the field, but they didn’t have to live just out of what they could pack in their rucksack. I did pre-patrol check offs, which meant I made sure that everyone had everything that they needed for this little exercise. Since I was being evaluated, I gave a pep talk to the members of the squad. I pointed out some key points about patrolling, and we rehearsed how we would walk out in the woods. The patrol was standard file formation, one soldier behind the other. I had assigned each soldier with different tasks during the movement. The point man was about 10 meters in front of the squad, and his job was to look out for anything dangerous ahead of us. I had a compass man holding the compass to make sure that we were walking in the right direction. We had a soldier in the squad who was in charge of the pace count. The pace count is important because the team needs to know how far we have traveled. The soldier in the back had to make sure that the area behind us was safe. The rest of us had security to the left and to the right of us. Every time I made the squad come to a halt, they all knew to get down on a knee and pull their assigned security. This was for show, but I was being graded on this. We arrived to where the rest of the platoon was and were assigned to our fighting positions.
We all had to dig foxholes in the ground, which would become our fighting positions. Typically digging out a foxhole is a pain in the ass; we had to use our small shovels called entrenching tools to do this. However, the area that we were digging into had been dug up in the past, so the dirt was not compact, which was an advantage for us. Two soldiers manned the foxhole at all times, and at least one soldier had to watch out for the enemy. We dug out a sleeping area underneath the ground that was rather comfortable. We would take turns sleeping and pulling security. My foxhole buddy drove the Abrams tank as his normal job. His version of going into the field meant living with his tank for months at a time. He was not very experienced when it came to dismounted training. He had some chewing tobacco; he said that it relaxed him. I tried some of it and found myself getting high off the tobacco chew. At the same time as I was enjoying my buzz, one of the other platoons had a squad out patrolling around our perimeter. It was in the middle of the afternoon. This was too easy; they were walking around in the woods like they were on a Sunday stroll in the park. I clicked my rifle from safe to semiautomatic and started shooting at them. Other members of the platoon joined in on the mock attack. It was like shooting fish in a tank. One of the squads in our platoon went outside our perimeter to finish the job. We used blanks, of course, and had on this bulky laser tag equipment called MILES gear. I graduated and was promoted to sergeant in February, 1994.
I stayed a sergeant for the rest of my military career. I was satisfied with the rank and the responsibility of that role. I was a good medical sergeant and content with taking care of soldiers. I joined the Army National Guard after my active duty time; attaining higher rank was not mandatory in order to serve in the National Guard. In all honesty, I was a good medic, but I had no desire to be a platoon sergeant or become an officer. Some say this is called being stagnant, but I disagree. I was good at what I did and wanted to stay at that level.
ARMY SONG: BLOOD ON THE RISERS
He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,
He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;
He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar, “You ain’t gonna jump no more!”
(Chorus) Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die, Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die, he ain’t gonna jump no more!
“Is everybody happy?” cried the Sergeant looking up,
Our Hero meekly answered “Yes,” and then they stood him up;
He jumped into the icy blast, his static line unhooked, And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
He counted long, he counted loud, he waited for the shock,
He felt the wind, he felt the cold, he felt the awful drop,
The silk from his reserve spilled out and wrapped around his legs,
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
The risers wrapped around his neck, connectors cracked his dome,
Suspension lines were tied in knots around his skinny bones;
The canopy became his shroud; he hurtled to the ground. And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
The days he’d lived and loved and laughed kept running through his mind,
He thought about the girl back home, the one he’d left behind;
He thought about the medics, and wondered what they’d find, And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
The ambulance was on the spot, the jeeps were running wild,
The medics jumped and screamed with glee, rolled up their sleeves and smiled,
For it had been a week or more since the last a ’chute had failed,
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
He hit the ground, the sound was “SPLAT” his blood went spurting high,
His comrades were all heard to say “A hell of a way to die!”
He lay there rolling round in the welter of his gore, And he ain’t gonna jump no more.
(Chorus)
(slowly, solemnly; about half the speed of the other verses)
There was blood upon the risers, there were brains upon the chute,
Intestines were a’dangling from his Paratrooper suit,
He was a mess, they picked him up and poured him from his boots,
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.