For me Army Basic Training is a blur of mostly bad memories: frustration, fear, sleepiness & loneliness. It was my first time away from home and my family. I was eighteen. But amidst all the trauma, I can remember getting into the back of that truck with 1/2 a dozen others very clearly. We had been through the grenade qualification training, but failed. The drill sergeant commented on this to the driver, "These losers flunked the training grenades. Everybody else in the battalion passed, but we gotta make a special trip back to the range for them. I think they'll flunk again. They look like ReCycles to me."It hurt to have been spoken to like that. But something else rose inside me after his quips.I was angry for them, my fellow trainees. I didn't even know the names of all these guys from various squads and companies. But when that drill sergeant spoke about us, in my mind, we became a unit--bound together as underdogs, unified to pass this course and avoid the hell-like fate of Recycling! When you're in the prison-like brainwashing of Basic Training, nothing is worse than the idea of starting all over again with another six weeks of physical exhaustion, shouting, mind-games, smelly weirdos and the worse food ever.
I'm not ususally seen as a leader, but depending on what the situation needs, I step in if I think a leader is needed and no one else has. In the back of that truck I did. I don't think I said anything, no rousing speech like in the movies. Maybe I balked at what the Drill Sergeant had said to one or two of the guys. And when we got to the grenade training course, I felt at an advantage having been through it before. The first time I was intimidated by the sports reference the tester made, saying, "you who think you are baseball all-stars will have to learn a new technique for these babies!" I always assumed the weird worlds of sports and teams were beyond me, and that I was missing some vital secret handshakes and unspoken passwords that guys exchanged in locker rooms and at The Game. The physical and athletic challenges of Basic Training scared me plenty.
But something else canceled out the fear on that day, and I aimed to show these Drill Sergeants that we weren't losers. We wouldn't be recycled. Hauling ourselves out the back of that rusty old transport truck, we went through the various stations of the course in twos.
We threw grenades into a target area, like a huge dartboard layed flat in a field. We had to pull the pin and throw our little pineapple shaped firecraker so that it landed inside the ring layed out as the "Go" area. When my buddy took his first throw, I checked the Drill Sergeant wasn't watching--so I could pop up to see where his grenade landed. Sometimes I could peer around a crack in our "cover" which we'd been told we must stay well behind and under (because in combat we could get or heads blown off!" When I thought I could get away with it, I'd steal a glance at his throw so I could coach him to improve his next throw.
We had bunkers to blow, shouting, "Fire in the Hole" first. I felt silly like I was playing army or pretending to be in a Rambo movie. We had a telephone wire kinda rope strung out in front of us, probably 15 feet in the air. We had to get the grenade over it for a "Go" on that station.
A weird thing was happening. I was so enjoying helping these other guys that I didn't have time to be nervous myself. The buzz of putting one over on the Drill Sergeants gave me a thrill and my confidence bred success and more success. My buddies and I sailed through the course, qualified and ready to join our squads as equals again. We may have been underdogs, but we were not Re-Cycles!
