Spring of 1997 found me stationed in Pensacola for the Navy’s three-month long Officer Candidate School. The fire ants on the parade ground — where we assembled for our pre-dawn workouts—were emerging in great numbers, their bites leaving behind bb-sized welts on our hands, arms, and backs as we worked through longer and longer sets of leg-lifts, push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, mountain climbers, and on and on and on.
If at any point during OCS a candidate did not feel like continuing, that candidate could say, “DOR” (short for “drop on request”) and the instructor would send them immediately, without intervention, to the battalion commander to begin being processed out of the Navy.
Our drill instructors were Marine Corps gunnery sergeants and had all served two tours as drill instructors at Marine Corps basic training schools — not to mention the time they survived that ordeal as recruits themselves. Our Navy chiefs were all master chiefs and had served longer than most candidates had been alive.
On a Sunday morning at the end of OCS, Master Chief and Gunny would greet each member of their graduating class outside the base’s chapel and, one-by-one, salute each student with a “Good morning, sir,” or “Good morning, ma’am.” By tradition, each newly commissioned officer would return the salute and hand each instructor a silver dollar.
Between day one and graduation, Master Chief and Gunny did their best to pare down the class so that those they saluted at the end had earned the respect that this centuries-old military custom warrants.
If you’ve watched a movie like “An Officer and a Gentleman” or “Full Metal Jacket” then you have the right idea (for added realism, the legendary drill instructor from the latter was played by R. Lee Ermey, who was a retired Marine Corps drill instructor).
Our alarm clock was a metal trash can and a baseball bat. Our racks were inspected daily. Our clothes were folded into 6-inch squares. Our brass belt buckles and leather shoes were polished. Every word was shouted. Our workouts were frequent and often came as surprises. The school’s corpsman told us that our instructors could not hurt us, but that they could make us hurt.
And they did.
They would send us running to a sand pit, have us do a half-hour workout, send us back to formation, criticize us for having sand on our uniforms, and send us back to the pit for more “mashing.” After a few rounds of this, they would give us five minutes to get changed. If we were not all back on the street and in formation, it was back to the pit.
My class started with 58 candidates. By the end of day two we were down to 50. By the end of the first week, 45. By the fifth week, Gunny informed us we were down to 35, or what he called, “fighting weight.”
To call it hazing would be to miss the point. The point is that if one is not up to surviving 13 weeks of admittedly intense training in the relative safety of a Navy base in Florida, then they may not be the right person to expect to handle patching a breached hull while a ship is foundering, or putting out a fire, or rescuing a shipmate while enemy fire is raining down on them. Better to find out who can compartmentalize stress while in school than while in battle.
I don’t claim to know which form of basic training is the hardest or which is the easiest (well, as a Navy guy, I’m compelled to say that the easiest starts with an “A” and ends with an “ir Force”), but I do know that all service branches have some form of ritualized admission that is designed to have recruits test themselves as much as it is to “indoctrinate” them into military life.
Like most people I know who have served, I don’t think of Veterans Day as being about me. It is about the people with whom I served, who served before me, and who served after me. But today, I hope those of you that survived basic will take a moment to reflect on how much your willingness to be tested and the fortitude you found during that training prepared you for your time in the service, and how all of that shaped who you are today.
Bravo Zulu and Happy Veterans Day.
