1-5 day was a day we'd only heard horror stories about. The 5th day of our first week of bootcamp was the day we were all medically cleared to participate in whatever was to come. Yes, several went home with unexpected pregnancies and one girl even found she had cancer!
This is the Rudder - sort of like a high school yearbook, but for our company, K027. This is where I grabbed the next photo from, since words could NOT describe what I saw that day!
Crap, I thought I could find a picture of the "before" barracks. 2 identical rows of bunk beds with lockers at the foot and tables down the middle that we had to earn the right to sit at. Anyhooo, most of the other company commanders (CCs) came to visit that day to "inspect" our barracks. Let me tell you - NOTHING passed inspection. We had to stand at attention at the end of our racks and couldn't move unless told to (usually to do situps and/or pushups), no matter the screaming, yelling, things being thrown around, beds being overturned, etc, etc. I'm pretty sure it was a test to see how well we would handle stress. It was stressful, yes, but also pretty damn hilarious! But we couldn't laugh, since that would be moving!
This girl, who was the sweetest girl I'd ever met, had a t-shirt that was folded less than perfectly. When an inner edge of the shirt stuck out, it was called dog-eared. So she had to go around and stand in front of each of us and say "woof woof, I have a dog-eared t-shirt, woof woof" and we could NOT laugh. She stood in front of me, and I made the mistake of looking at her instead of focusing past her. I lost it. I bent double, snorting with laughter! One of the visiting CCs spun around, clearly ready to come screaming at me....until he laid eyes on poor Theresa. He started laughing just as hard as I was! After that. I think he showed mercy to me since I didn't have any pushups or situps to do (for that anyway)!
I don't remember the rest of the day, other than cleaning up so I must have just done my share of situps / pushups and the ever horrible 8 count body builders (similar to Burpees today) and not had to do anything as awful as admit to a dog-eared t-shirt!
#AtoZChallenge
My husband's book is The Keel (1994) from RTC Great Lakes. Several friends were CCs - very stressful job.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered where the CCs lived, since they were there so early to wake everyone up and were usually there til after taps. It had to have been close, I would hope.
DeleteI bet it was stressful on their end, too. That's our CC behind Theresa in that photo - he looks pretty frazzled. He also almost single-handedly trained us, since the other CC was an overweight b*tch who never showed up except occasionally. She couldn't PT and it showed.