Tough PT session in morning.
Sit ups/push ups. Not much
to eat today. No guard duty
tonight. Expect 6-1/2 hours sleep.
Really smelled grungy today. Hot
+ 3rd day for uniform = unpleasant.
Lost and retrieved our colors today.
Platoon fucked up. [Delta] generous, after
"smoking" us. No mail from [fiance].
Very depressing. [Sergeants Hotel] and [Delta]
will be leaving soon making way for
more reservists. I like them.
[Delta] especially. He's lost family
and friends in 'Nam. He wants us
to live if we have to fight. Both
are good soldiers and both seem
like good men out of Army.
[Hotel] seems good but [Delta]
especially is a man troops
would follow to the Kremlin.
Another day down. Voice gone.
Feet hurt, ankles hurt,
shoulders hurt. Am I getting
weaker? Sometimes seems
like it. Note--[Sergeant Sierra] actually
smiled yesterday in class though
he tried to hide it.
More first aid. Tested. Tests
here will be no problem.
Marching is hurting my feet.
We continued to endure the stress but the psychological stress was becoming normal and even the physical stress was becoming routine if still unpleasant. We were slowly becoming soldiers who admired rather than feared our drill sergeants.
How bad I had to smell to actually notice it is frightening.
I'm sometimes amazed that back then, Vietnam was only 13 years behind us. Now, younger troops weren't even born before the Persian Gulf War let alone remember Vietnam. Our country sent our young men (and some women) to war, then abandoned them to lose and turned its back on them when they came home. Yet still some--like the Army Reservists who trained us--served their country after that. No false patriotism, there.
This was an aspect of my basic training that is different than most. We had reservists who rotated through doing their summer annual training, practicing their trade on us. Regular Army drill sergeants supervised by stayed in the background. And since this was training for our drill instructors as much as it was for us, a new bunch would need to practice their day 1 routine on us when they arrived. We'd have to start all over again, really.
And everything still hurt. I haven't mentioned this so far, but I was a road guard. This meant that as we marched about along the streets of the base and approached an intersection, I had to sprint forward to reach the intersection first, halt traffic by standing at parade rest with my right arm extended, and when the company column passed, go to attention and salute the vehicle and then run to return to my place in the formation. This was a job given to a guy who limped around everywhere.
Oh, and losing our colors happened when the trainee in charge of that bit of cloth on a stick let them hit the ground. We collectively paid for that dishonor. But won them back. I don't remember how. I do recall that when I had a chance to volunteer for the honor of taking care of the colors, I continued my policy of never volunteering for anything in order to keep my head down.
But we were relieved to have them back. Soldiers don't die for bits of cloth. Soldiers die for the honor those bits of cloth represent.
A final note on the first aid tests. As I wrote, the Army really cared about two things--shooting and being in shape. You could not skate on those tests. You passed or failed. But the first aid test was something that you needed to know but could get as you went along, really. I forgot the correct sequence of CPR while taking the test. But with only one sergeant walking around deciding if you were "go" or "no go" I realized that as long as I didn't stand there over the dummy like I had no idea what to do and instead carried out any random steps of CPR regardless of the order I did them, by the time the testing period ended the sergeant would only have seen me correctly doing something whenever he looked at me in particular. Some did not figure that out. But not panicking and doing something rather than doing nothing and waiting for further instructions is something the Army wanted instilled, too. Or should want that, anyway.
