August 14, 1997 - High Praise Indeed

970816 - Wed, Thu, & Fri was more A-Line. I could go into detail about it but I hated it so much that I've blocked most of it out of my mind. One thing I remember is that the DIs treated us like DUNG all week. Partly because they wanted to and partly because there's a DI from San Diego who's here for the rest of our stay here on "Paradise Island." 

One of the components of A-Line was the Night Movement Course. It's a simulated night combat course, minus the bullets. This course consists of two elements.

First, you walk through a section of forest. Prior to each step, you make an S with your forward hand (i.e.: the hand not holding the pistol grip) from the ground to the height of your head. The purpose of this is to check for tripwires. Once you've checked the space immediately in front of you, you take one step forward and repeat the S maneuver, checking once again for tripwires. As you might expect, this takes quite a while. The relative silence of the process was broken up by the sound of recruits setting off a flare as they got impatient and took a step without sufficiently checking the space in front of them. Each time they did that, they had to yell out their name, platoon number, and Senior Drill Instructor's name, thus publicly humiliating themselves, their SDI, and the platoon, and ensuring that they would pay dearly back at the squad bay.

The next part was a simple obstacle course. The obstacles included low walls (over which you would scramble), barbed wire about 18” off of the ground (under which you'd slide), and large concrete pipes (through which you'd crawl). Throughout this section, a DI would periodically shoot a flare into the air. When this would happen, the recruits were to drop into the prone position and pretend to be shooting at the enemy. Once the flare was out, we were to continue through the course.

Once I had successfully navigated through the woods without setting off a flare, I walked quickly to the first obstacle: a wall about 4 feet high. We had been instructed to reach our non-trigger hand over the wall and check for booby traps before going over the wall. As I did so, I could hear someone speaking, but was so focused on the task at hand that I didn't pay any attention to the voice. Once I had checked the wall, I turned around to go over and was stunned to see the Senior Drill Instructor from another platoon standing immediately in front of me. I could tell right away that he was furious at me, for some reason. Then he began to scream at me.

“What the hell is wrong with you, recruit?!? Didn't you hear me telling you to go over?!?”

Now, as you might recall, recruits are required to speak in third person. Therefore, in order to tell him that I didn't know he was talking to me, I'd have had to say, “Sir, this recruit didn't know the Senior Drill Instructor was talking to this recruit, sir!” At this moment, considering his rage, I decided that was too much to try to say. Therefore, I replied with the default recruit response:

“This recruit don't know, sir.”

Wrong answer. He started to visibly shake with rage, pointed at me, and stammered, “Go OVER!!!”

I was happy to oblige, eager to get as far away from him as possible, as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, just as I got to the other side of the wall, a flare shot into sky. I dropped immediately to the prone position and hoped the SDI would stay on the other side of the wall.

No such luck.

He walked over to the side where I was lying  down, pretending  to shoot at the enemy. My DI, Sgt. H__ was on this side, and the SDI came over to where we both were (him standing, me lying).

SDI: Is this one of yours?
H__: Yep.
SDI: Guess what he just did.
H__: What?

As he said “What,” Sgt. H__ put one of his boots in between my shoulder blades and pushed me deeper into the sand. He kept his boot there while the SDI gave an incredibly inaccurate explanation of the events from the other side of the wall. When he had finished his retelling, he said, “I bet this guy's a real shit bird, isn't he?” (In case you couldn't have guessed, a shit bird is a bad recruit.)

H__: Nope.
SDI: Is he a hard charger? (This means a really great recruit.)
H__: Nope. Just a regular recruit.
SDI: That's what I figured. Just a regular recruit. I'll give you, “this recruit don't know.”

And he proceeded to kick dirt in my face, while Sgt. H__ kept his boot on my back.

But I didn't care. I had just received the greatest compliment I'd ever get in boot camp. It's understandable if you missed it, but I'll explain. Of course my Drill Instructor wouldn't say I was a hard charger with me laying right there. That would be too much high praise. But, he also didn't say I was a shit bird.

I was a regular recruit. Maybe not terrific, but also not terrible. That was good enough for me. This compliment was enough to carry me through the rest of boot camp. In fact, in the years since boot camp, I've come more and more to aspire to being just “regular.” Being great is overrated and not sustainable. I'm good with regular, thank you.