How funny. We missed each other by four months. I was in from 5/84-7/84. The grinder in June was interesting.
Here’s one for you…
“Port side, right oblique! Starboard side, left oblique! Push up position! Hut!”
Heh. “Push up position” was just the start. What sucked about those push ups was that you didn’t just pump them out, you had to hold each position as long as the CC felt like making you hold it:
"Push up position, hut!
[waits a while]
“Down!”
[waits a while]
“Up!”
[waits forever. CC smokes a cigarette. Scratches his balls. Talks about how hot it is]
“Down”
And so on. Ten push ups could take twenty minutes.
Remember those fake rifles they made us drill with and carry around all day? I hated those things.
Just like in WWII except these are volunteers who want to be there as opposed to mostly draftees who didn’t.
And it saves the military all the trouble of doing a better job of pre swearing-in screening.
I think the problem with this sort of thing is the propensity for those petty tyrants who are given authority to abuse it. Fraternity house, and in fact sorority house, hazing somehow just seems to go too far too often.
I went into the army as a naive, small town, movie projectionist and went through basic and cadet training with mostly postal clerks, grocery store stock boys, etc. I think most of us benefitted greatly from the experience and it was done in a business-like atmosphere without a lot of verbal abuse at any point.
I realize that the military training is more structured and at least a little better organized and controlled than the fraternity/sorority cases. But then there is that prison in Iraq which supposedly operated in a structured and controlled environment.
Its credited to Rommel, but apparently Patton said a pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood. Its also apparently the motto of the 18th Artillery
David Simmons, with apologies to the OP, a slight hijack. My dad served in the European Theater in WWII, and though he died in '83 he has been much on my mind with the dedication of the memorial this past weekend. To you, to him, and to all the others who served, I would just like to say “Thank you.”
Back to topic, but still directed to you, Dave. When you went through boot camp, was it later in the war when the turn-around time was shorter than the usual? It has always been my impression that the need to get lots of bodies into uniforms quickly meant there were some compromises made in the traditional training regimen, and that once the war was over the branches returned to the status quo ante.
Actually the desparate shortage of pilots happened at the beginning of WWII. And the shortage of artillerymen, infantrymen, engineers, medics, signal corps and everything else. The regular army was about 150000 and there were a bunch of draftees who had come in in October of 1941 for one year’s service. Late in 1942 the word went around that the draftees would be held in longer than their year and their slogan became OHIO or Over the Hill In October. It didn’t happen, they stayed in and the war came in December.
I enlisted on 22 September 1942 (age 20) but wasn’t called until February of 1943. There was no shortcutting in pilot training. The requirement for at least two years of college was dropped and a period of up to 3 months of college training was added. Toward the end the college training you got 10 hours of flight training in Piper Cubs. This made the total training period of as much as 15 months to get out of cadet training. I and some others were moved out early after about 6 weeks in college at Beloit, WI and sent to Pre-flight and classification in Santa Ana, CA.
After cadet training was finished that was an additional 3 months of operational training and transistion into operational aircraft.
Nothing was rushed in the program that I’m aware of.
I wrote 1941 for the draft which really should have been 1940. And the war started in 1941.
My fingers slipped. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Who said they weren’t allowed to quit? Granted, it’s not like you can just say “I quit, can I have my plane ticket home?”, but quitting is actually pretty easy. However, you will be given time to re-evaluate that decision, you will be counseled, and you will be examined very carefully by people for what your problem really is.
The reason why people don’t quit often is because it’s easier just to suck it up and do it, they had the proper motivation before they signed up, and they know that when it’s over they’ll be better for having done it. Quitting entails considerable hassle, and if you’re going to have to endure that you might as well just finish Basic.
One thing I learned in Basic Training, is that if you suddenly find yourself with an astonishing 3 minutes with nothing to do, you can either take a short, refreshing nap, or you can have a cigarette break, but you have to be really good to do both.
Heh. With us (if you’ll allow a non-U.S. POV), they’d shout at us, cheerfully, and we’d have to repeat each word while giving a pushup.
“You!” - “YOU!” [pushup] - “Don’t!”-“DON’T” [pushup] - “Talk!” - “TALK” [pushup] - “Back!” - “BACK!” [pushup] - “To your!” - “TO YOUR!” [pushup] "Sergeant! - “SERGEANT!” [pushup]… ad nauseum, sometimes literally. Also, they called the push-up position “Position 2” for some unknown reason.
Our basic training was fairly intense in a disciplinary sense, although not nearly as bad as what I’ve sen in American movies. Lots of saluting everything that moves, status reports, shouting out times, and remembering to generally shut the hell up, but no personal insults or outright cruelty (in fact, later, in Squad Leaders School, they showed us a tape of the first half of Full Metal Jacket as an example of how NOT to behave with new recruits). It was the physical stuff that really got to us - 18 weeks of PE classes, life-fire assaults (sometimes 3 a day), raids, physical testing, sleep deprivation and generally running everywhere. It was the forced marches that got to us the most, of course, both physically and mentally.
Anyway, it was really, really tough, but there were also some good laughes and lots of camaraderie. I think it helped that unlike some other armies, the IDF does not have professional Drill Instructors, at least in combat units. Instead, a company (or team, for SF) starts out fully formed at the first day of Basic - officers, NCOs and grunts - and mostly sticks together for the first year and a half (at least) of service. The same sergeant who has you running around the latrines will find himself leading you through the Gaza allyways or the Lebanese hills six months later, so he has to be tough and professional (after all, you’ll be watching his back, so you better be good) yet decent and respectful.
The general theory is not to break a boy down and rebuild him as a soldier. Each person is diiferent, with his own inherent strengths that need to be polished and redirected; besides, the strongest willed ones, the ones who are hardest to “break”, are usually the ones with the most potential, so why destroy a good thing? The Army wants warriors, not machines, and warriors need a free mind, spirit and general chutzpah - tempered with professionalism - more than they need blind obedience. That’s why we rarely saluted oficers after basic. If they were good, we did what they said because we trusted them. If they weren’t, they had no business being officers.
P.S. The IDF version of the phrase is “Hard in training - easy in battle.” It sounds better in Hebrew.
Now that you mention that, I’m left to wonder how the “hard-ass” BT regimen we’re now familiar with may have been influenced by the period of the 1950s/60s where there was still a draft, but there was not universal service (or a war with ample popular support).
Alessan, if I understand my history correctly, the US military (Army, at least) used the single-unit training regimen during most of its pre-WW2 history. A regiment would raise new companies using the long-timers who had risen to NCO to work in the newly arrived lieutenants and privates. But eventually it became unsustainable due to (a) sheer numbers and (b) geographic dispersion, and centralized training was adopted as the standard. (Full Metal Jacket is a peculiar example to use, of course you already understand it was played up for show purposes, but a lot of what’s in it is genuine, R. Lee Ermey having been a real Vietnam-era Marine DI; however the story takes place in an era of major morale problems in the US military.)
Possible I guess. However, the so-called Spartan basic training smack too much of the attitude that these people are a bunch of schmucks so we’ve got to beat it into them. In fact, the justification is often made that they want to break down the individual so that he or she can be remolded into a proper soldier.
Although the scale of mistreatment is different, and the ultimate goal is different and the two cases are not equivalent, I am reminded of the intelligence community’s attempt to have the Iraq prisoners “softened up” to make them better subjects for interrogations.
Another thing to remember:
You aren’t just training the soldiers to keep each other alive;
You are training them to KILL PEOPLE (did I stress that enough?)
This isn’t only the physical training of point and shoot, or squad tactics. You’re dealing with some serious psychology here. We are raised our entire lives to believe that killing someone is one of the worst things you can do. That has to change. The stories always go - the replacement or rookie gets to the front lines, and can’t handle his weapon. He is paralyzed for hours while the battle rages around him. Someone puts the rifle in his hand, forces his finger onto the trigger. Then it all fades into a blur.
You are desensitizing death. The soldier’s own death. His friend’s deaths. The enemy deaths. Civilian deaths. The soldier can’t be afraid of it.
How do you do this? You beat the mind into jelly, and rebuild it to be trained, honed, and focused at the task at hand. Focus on the process of acting, not on the action.
I really think this is nonsense. The desensitization is automatic, in my opinion.
Automatic from what?
By the time you actually get in combat, probably not at first but very shortly, your main goal is survival and you simply don’t consider the enemy except as a hinderance to being safe. So you kill them without any compunction. Not everyone of course, but then not everyone is conditioned to kill by the “beat their brains to jelly and then remold them” either.
I think that waiting until they are in combat to see if they are going to panic, run away, choke up, go into shock, or otherwise fail as a military unit is an absurdly bad idea, since combat vets tend to be fairly rare and you tend to like soldiers you can rely on. O_o
All I can fall back on is that in WWI I think, and WWII I know, there was none of this bullying and I don’t think running away was a big headache for us.
Can we really compare modern American military training to the Spartans? Spartan males of the citizen class lived in barracks from the age of seven and ate in communal mess halls all their lives. They were also landed aristocrats, supported by serfs.
The Spartan way of life also included a lot of homosexuality in the ranks. Achilles and Patroclus, you know?
A few thoughts about basic training with a disclaimer. I never went through BCT since I was a ROTC type. I did, however, go through the ROTC equivalent of basic training as well as infantry school and jump school. I did my share of push ups and put in my share of days and nights without sleep. I was stationed at a BCT post for 18 months (three cheers for US Army Training Center and Fort Leonard Wood) in the middle of Vietnam War. It was not a volunteer army. Few people were there because they wanted to be. Nothing that I ever did and nothing that I saw or heard of was more than remotely comparable to the first half of Full Metal Jacket. One of my jobs at Leonard Wood was to prosecute cadre that got out of line by doing stuff like laying hands on a trainee and to review administrative discharges of trainees who just could not cut it – perpetual malcontents, bed wetters, guys who would not do what they were told and the fundamentally unsanitary and the hopelessly clumsy.
Clearly the experience of basic training is radically different that the ordinary life of your standard high school or college student or entry level employee. I suppose the opening weeks of high school football practice is close to the emphasis on physical conditioning but only if the conditioning drill went on for 16 hours a day for eight weeks. There were some things that took some getting use to, like doing chin-up before you could get into the mess hall (I did miss some meals, but I was too tired to eat anyway).
What I saw of BCT, however, was hardly brutal and was clearly necessary to introduce novices to a whole new way of doing things, the Army Way – a way to keep your self and your gear clean and organized and functioning, a way to use and care for extraordinarily dangerous weapons, a way to live in relative harmony with 30 or 40 other young men in a space no bigger than your standard two bed room house. It had to be done fast and on a massive scale and it was done by a system that had developed by trial and error and found to work.
My brother-in-law came to visit us a Ft L Wood. He was enjoying a draft deferment as a seminary student. He expected to see every horror story he ever imagined or heard of acted out before his eyes. What he say was a relatively efficient and humane program. He even got to the point he wanted to drive my car because the blue bumper sticker rated a salute for the car’s driver. The experience was a eye opener for him. He expected a Spartan Hell. That is not what he found.
Maybe BCT in the modern all volunteer army is different than it was in the old fashion almost all conscripted army but I doubt it. For a person of normal intelligence and physical abilities BCT was no picnic but it was certainly not the sort of dehumanizing experience that our friend tracer seems to think I to be.
I’m not sure but it seems to me that there is a feeling among some posters that people go directly from basic training to a combat unit. Not so. There are specialized schools, including Infantry School where further training and testing take place. In fact the use of live-fire training originated in WWII and the need for constant feedback from the combat units to the training command was recognized and acted upon. The replacement infantryman was as well prepared as was known how to do it, not only in skills but in what to expect. In spite of the talk about having to psych up to kill, which might be true out a clear blue sky in civilian life, in an action were everyone around you is shooting it isn’t all that hard. And in point of fact, you really don’t see all that much of the enemy in most cases. Just a glimpse now and then, a shadowy figure that you shoot at. In fact, by far the greater number of casualties are from artillery and indirect fire from mortars and machine guns where you don’t see the enemy at all.
It is true that in WWII the rate of casualties among recruits was quite high as compared with those of more experience. But that is doubtless also true today. In fact one of the things in Iraq that was worrisome, when there was still some talk of rotating units home, was how to handle the overlap of experienced Iraq hands and their replacements so as to pass on what was learned insofar as that is possible.
As to “running away.” The AWOL rate in the ETO was high as compared to, say, Vietnam. However I’m not sure that all that many AWOL’s were from combat units. The support units in the rear area were surrounded by people pretty much like themselves and it is easy for a leaf to hide in a forest. In Vietnam and AWOL had a harder time disappearing into the general population. That would account for some of the difference in rates and I do agree that today’s soldiers are better prepared than in WWII. They should be, we’ve fought Korea and Vietnam as well as several smaller actions and have learned a lot. But I don’t believe that better preparation is because of brutality in basic training.