Ten-hut!
Straighten up there soldier, because today we're taking you to boot camp so you can learn
what it's like to leave the civilian world behind and become a soldier in the US military.
Well, actually, we went ahead and had our favorite lab rat, and third-from-the-bottom-in-importance
writer, go ahead and relive his boot camp days as we had him live out his life for thirty
days like he was back in boot camp.
What does boot camp do to a person?
How does it change your behavior?
Let's find out, as you tag along with our boot camp for thirty days challenge!
Day 1: When I first got this challenge assigned to me, I had such intense flashbacks that
I shuddered.
I've been out of the military now for a decade after a six year stint, and I can still remember
my day one in boot camp like it was yesterday.
It wasn't really that shocking a transition going from civilian life to boot camp, my
whole family practically is military and my dad used to be an airborne instructor.
I'd train with his classes as a teenager and he almost even got permission to have me jump
with them during my senior year, but I'd have to wait until I actually joined the military
to get my wings.
Turns out if anything had gone wrong it would've been a bureaucratic nightmare, me being a
teenager civilian and all that.
But I still did PT with them in the morning, even trained on the jump platforms, and yep,
got yelled at just like I was any other recruit.
Fun times, but my point is that it wasn't that big a shock to transition into boot camp.
Boot camp however is definitely... unpleasant.
Though I hear stories about how cake kids today have it, if you went through boot camp
recently can you please let us know in the comments if it was difficult having to eat
your filet mignon without steak sauce while your drill instructors cut it up into neat
little slices and fed it to you?
I realize that I sound like the old timers, how much harder things were in my day- but
seriously, from what I've heard of boot lately it was definitely harder in my day.
I guess we were actively at war back then though, and I know that for some of the kids
who had no experience with the military it was jarring to have them see soldiers missing
arms and legs for the first time.
The point of boot is to break you down, to turn you from a civilian to a soldier, a sailor,
an airman, or a marine, and that's a pretty drastic transition to make.
All the yelling, the screaming, the insults- although I hear they don't do that anymore-
and the PT, or physical training, is all meant to break down your defenses so you can be
rebuilt.
You're meant to learn discipline, teamwork, leadership, and get mentally and physically
tough- because let me tell you, there's nothing harder in life than the battlefield.
Like the old adage goes, the more you sweat in training the less you bleed in combat.
So yeah, even though it makes no sense, the sleep deprivation, the screaming in your face,
the constant PT until you're well past physical exhaustion- it's all for a reason, and I can't
tell you the number of times once I was in the active military that I was in situations
where I was operating well past my mental and physical limits, and awfully glad for
the training that had prepared me for these situations.
By the way, I hear that in boot camp now you get 8 straight hours of sleep a night.
Wow, do they fluff your pillows for you too before the DI's tuck you in to bed with a
warm cocoa?
So unfortunately I won't get sent to a real boot camp for 30 days, instead I have to life
my life as if I was at boot.
That means trying to recreate the experience as close as possible in my civilian life,
which means a lot of sacrifices are going to have to be made.
It's intriguing really, because I know boot affects you psychologically, but this time
I'll get to actually make those observations and write them down.
I've taken some measures to make this experience as close as possible to the real thing, though
obviously still pretty far from it.
First, I've cleared my schedule of any social events.
In boot you don't get any liberty- or at least I didn't, though today you guys probably got
weekend water park trips and passes to the fair when you were feeling blue.
During my two months at boot I think I got a grand total of 48 hours of liberty the entire
time, so if I didn't get to dip out to the movies back then, I'm not going to now.
Secondly, I'm going to leave the apartment I share with the girlfriend and move into
my friend's place for the duration.
She's a travel blogger and gone frequently to work for magazines, so I'll stay alone
at her place.
I only got to contact family once a week- if I was lucky- so I can't be in contact with
the girlfriend this whole time except for 1 hour every week.
That includes no texting.
Third, I'll be recreating all the PT I used to do, and even doing extra PT as if my unit
was being punished, which happens all the time.
Fourth, no amenities for the duration except books.
No TV, no internet, no video games.
Just reading books for entertainment and that's it.
I'll check in at the end of each week as usual.
To be honest, this is not a challenge I'm looking forward to.
At real boot camp you got the camaraderie of 30-40 other guys, but here I'll be pretty
much all alone for the duration.
This one's gonna be tough.
Day 7: First week down, and man, I remember now all the annoying things I hated about
boot camp, though I'm glad that there's aspects I'm not having to re-live.
So, my days start a 0445 hours, exactly like in boot.
I don't have a very pissed off drill sergeant dragging me out of bed by my foot though so
instead I found some audio recordings of drill instructors screaming and yelling and each
night I set an alarm that automatically triggers the stereo system to play a mix track I made
at very loud volume.
It's disturbingly close to the real thing, and I about had a heart attack the first morning.
After waking up, I give myself ten minutes to make my bed- yep, hospital corners and
everything.
I never got the art of hospital corners down, and used to get yelled at and punished for
it constantly.
Along with making my bed, I have to be outside and ready for PT by the end of ten minutes.
If I'm late, I punish myself with extra PT.
I then do a morning routine alternating between push-ups, jumping jacks, sit ups, burpees
and mountain climbers, which are all the exercises I could remember, and then go for a two mile
run while listening to cadences on my ear buds.
For those of you who don't know, cadences are those songs that military formations sing
as they run, which makes running harder because you're singing while out of breath, but in
a weird way makes it so much easier because you sort of become part of a machine.
You hypnotize yourself into just running, and the exhaustion always seems far away.
After PT I give myself 20 minutes for the famous three S'es, Shit, Shower, and Shave.
Those 20 minutes also include completely cleaning the bathroom so that it's spotless.
I then inspect the bathroom, and if I find anything out of place or dirty I punish myself
with, yep, more PT.
Honestly, at this point I am starting to feel like a masochist.
By the way, if you're on your way to boot and you get assigned to clean the toilets
or sinks, after you scrub them, rub the porcelain down with your bare hands.
Yes, even the toilet.
It's gross, but the oils in your skin will make the porcelain shine and make any stray
pubic hairs stick to your hand.
Just make sure you wash your hands thoroughly afterwards- without messing up a sink all
over again of course.
Although I don't know, maybe in boot camp today they hire maids to clean your toilets
and make your bed for you.
My absolute least favorite part comes next- breakfast.
Back in boot we had to eat according to a system.
You would form a line along with everyone else, maintaining the position of attention
the entire time you were in line.
Drill instructors would wander through the line, and very swiftly punish anyone who's
position of attention wasn't perfect.
We shared lunch time with our entire company though, so there would be hundreds of us,
perfectly silent and waiting our turn as the line slowly shuffled forward.
Sometimes you'd wait a half hour to finally get your food and sit.
When you did get your food though, you had to fill in rows of tables with people starting
from the front of the chow hall to the back, and nobody at your table could sit and eat
until the entire table was full- then you would all sit as one and begin eating.
You had to eat fast too, because you only had as long to eat until the table in the
row across from you began to fill up.
The moment that table was full and those guys sat down, your ass had better be getting up
to trash your tray.
All in all you had about 3-4 minutes to eat as much as you could.
I distinctly remember sneaking food out of the chow hall, and I never got caught once.
So I give myself four minutes to eat, and I've tried to recreate a food menu for breakfast,
lunch, and dinner as close as possible to what I remember eating.
For breakfast that means a lot of eggs and oatmeal.
As soon as the alarm rings, I trash whatever I didn't eat, and this first week I found
out that I am definitely rusty and have gone hungry quite a bit.
It's amazing how fast you learn to eat when you need to.
For the rest of my day I have a strict time set for lunch and dinner, as well as lights
out.
I also had a friend who programs whip up an app for me as a favor which randomly sets
off an alarm throughout the day.
The frequency and timing of the alarm are totally random, but I use it to simulate the
countless times throughout your day at basic that you're getting yelled at and disciplined
with PT.
So every time the alarm goes off, I drop and alternate between push ups, sit ups and burpees.
Burpees suck by the way.
I don't watch TV, cruise the internet, or anything like that.
Instead I let myself read for entertainment, and of course I work on my writing.
All in all, the experience is definitely not like the real thing, but I feel like I've
recreated most of the highlights.
The girlfriend is taking this much harder than I am though, especially because she was
only allowed to talk to me for one hour today at the end of the week.
She asked to visit, but that's not possible so we could only talk on the phone.
I think she really, really misses me.
Oh, and she was not happy about me shaving my head- because yep, I did that too.
Keeping a buzz cut is pretty integral to the experience, and I haven't had a shaved head
since I left basic.
Mostly because I'm seriously ugly when I'm bald, so very grateful I have great hair genes.
Day 14: It turns out that without all the yelling, marching around, time on the firing
range, and classroom instruction, boot camp is pretty damn boring.
Not being allowed to watch tv, play video games, cruise the internet, or even just go
for a drink with friends is extremely boring.
I remember now that this was the part I hated most about boot- I didn't care about the yelling
and screaming and constant PT, but the isolation and being cut off from the outside world was
killer.
If it's hard on me though, it turns out it's way harder on the girlfriend than I ever thought.
She has to leave frequently for different movies or shows she works on, sometimes even
for a month or two at a time.
But we always have skype, facetime, texting, phone calls, I even send her hand-written
letters.
Also if she's gone for more than two weeks, I typically fly out to her or she'll fly to
me.
Now though, there's practically zero contact between us except for our one hour a week
on Sunday.
I can tell she's really lonely and she even sounds depressed.
This week I kicked up the morning and afternoon PT to 3 mile runs, because 2 miles is for
the first week just to condition you.
I really, super hate running, always did, and the military loves to make you run.
But I found that listening to cadences actually makes it easier, I've been slipping back into
that weird hypnotic state I used to operate in.
I kind of wish I had a group to run with, so we could actually sing cadences together.
It would make it easier.
This alarm app on my phone is driving me insane, although I guess that's the point.
Sometimes it goes off five minutes after it just went off, so I have to drop down and
do another thirty push ups or burpees, I randomly rotate.
But I guess that's sort of what happened when I was in boot, somebody was always messing
up, and the military loves to use group punishment to fix mistakes.
I've also been waking up each night to do one hour firewatch, which I randomly rotate
through.
So for one hour I walk through my friend's empty condo with a flashlight in my hand,
and if anyone could see me they probably think I'm the world's biggest weirdo.
I am recreating a boot camp experience for the sake of an online entertainment show though,
so I guess I am pretty weird.
There's not much to report, except boredom.
Luckily I'm an avid reader, but I miss the outside world.
Day 21: Last week I wrote the girlfriend a letter because I missed her, even though geographically
speaking we are only about 8 miles apart.
The mailman that delivered that letter must've assumed I was the laziest person in the world.
She sent me one back, and I immediately remembered how morale boosting it was to get mail in
basic, and during my months of training after.
If you know anyone in basic training or that's going soon, do them a favor and send them
a letter.
That goes double if you know anyone who's deployed overseas.
Oh, and send the person overseas baby wipes- seriously, baby wipes are a godsend when you're
living in a hole in the desert.
Just don't send anyone in basic baby wipes or anything else, one guy in my unit got sent
a tin of cookies by his mother and the drill instructors harassed him for days over it.
And they ate his cookies, right in front of him.
Man, now that I think about it, being a drill would've been fun.
This week the running went up to 4 miles, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon.
Honestly at this point I might be confusing my basic training with my training for the
various schools I went to after basic- but I know for a fact that we did a lot of running
either way.
I've always stayed in good shape, but because I hate running doing the two miles the first
week was killing me.
Now I'm kind of surprising myself with the way I'm able to cope with 4 mile runs.
I mean, I'm still smoked at the end of it, but I'm not dying the way I thought I would
be.
This, combined with the very fast eating- remember, I get 4 minutes for each meal- has
made me shed a lot of extra pounds.
My abs are absolutely popping now, which makes sense since I basically run like an idiot
all day long.
I've even learned to eat faster, and typically I can finish my entire meal by the time the
alarm goes off.
It's not pretty, but I manage it.
Food in basic is important, which is why they feed you very high calorie stuff to help your
body cope with all the PT.
You're always left hungry though, and that's why if you ever pull kitchen duty, oh man,
that's a godsend.
Yes, you have to clean thousands of dirty dishes and pots and pans, then scrub down
an industrial-sized kitchen- but your reward is you get to eat whatever you want as slow
as you want.
Kitchen duty, or KP as we called it, was a godsend, and I would stuff my face every time
I could.
My morning breakfast routine reminded me of an incident from basic though which still
haunts me to this day.
One of the guys at my table was sick, really badly congested and probably had the flu or
a really bad cold.
As we're shoveling food into our mouths, suddenly he stops and his body jerks, and before he
can do anything, he sneezes, completely involuntarily.
More snot than I've ever seen in my life flew out of his nose and into his oatmeal.
Poor kid was so terrified of the drill instructors, and so damn hungry that he ate it.
He ate oatmeal loaded with mucus.
It was the single most disgusting thing I've ever seen, and I randomly remember it to this
day.
In non-vomity food news, this week I've changed my midday meal to MREs, which I snagged from
a surplus store nearby.
At this point in basic we started spending a lot of time in the field, and that meant
no hot meals, just MREs.
Honestly, I've never hated MREs the way some people do.
In fact, I always kind of liked them.
The jalapeno cheese is off the chain, and I remember that it and the cocoa powder was
basically currency.
You could literally buy things from people using them.
One week and two days left, and I honestly can't wait to get back to my normal life.
See you guys at the end!
Day 30: Today I finally came home, and the moment I walked through the door the girlfriend
literally threw herself on me, very quickly followed by the dog.
Then she saw my shaved head and made a gagging sound, which I totally agreed with.
My re-visit to boot camp days is finally over, and I'm very happy about that.
I honestly feel it would have been easier to actually go back to boot camp instead of
to do this weird experiment alone in isolation.
The camaraderie of the other recruits really makes the experience and isolation much more
manageable.
What I experienced was basically very disciplined hermitdom.
Doing this though did hit a lot of the core points of the boot camp experience.
You really do start to feel completely isolated from the world, in fact you feel like you
aren't even a part of it anymore.
That's how complete our quarantine from the real world was.
When you deploy you still get news, tv, internet, phone calls, emails, all kinds of ways to
stay in touch- unless you happen to go really far down range of course.
But at boot, we got none of that, and I definitely nailed that isolation and loneliness.
Stepping back into the real world is kind of going to be weird.
Let alone eating food at a leisurely pace, or even eating what I want.
I was very strict about my meals and stuck to a plan that resembled what I remember from
boot, but now I get to eat what I want again.
Tomorrow, I'm hitting In and Out the moment they open, and it's going to take a SWAT team
to get me out.
I've reflexively found myself saying “sir and ma'am” a lot now again.
I occasionally got to interact with the outside world during my experience, like having to
go to appointments or grocery shopping, and I was calling people sir and ma'am constantly.
You can always tell when a kid is fresh from boot, because every other word out of their
mouth is sir or ma'am.
There's a lot of things I couldn't simulate, like an FTX, or field training exercise.
That's typically a big part of the final weeks at boot camp, when you go out into the field
and live in the weeds for a few days.
The constant stress of being yelled at and having aggressive drill instructors in your
face is another factor I couldn't simulate, which I feel is pretty much the cornerstone
experience of boot camp.
The constant PT though is something I definitely did, and I have to tell you, it really is
easier when you're part of a group.
There's something to be said for the way the military makes you do PT with your unit.
Being part of a machine, one cog out of many, makes even physically exhausting tasks manageable.
I made a deliberate choice to leave the military after six years to find a more peaceful life,
but I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it intensely at times.
Especially the part where you find yourself operating so far past your limits that you
look back and can't even see them anymore, and your team is right there beside you.
The first time you experience that moment it's something you just don't forget, and
you'll typically first get your own moment in boot.
Depending on what your job ends up being in the military, you might find yourself there
often, and it's terrifying, exhilarating, and the most alive you'll ever feel.
It's also addicting, and eventually you'll hit a point where you'll have to choose whether
you want a shot at living a normal life or not.
If your luck doesn't run out first.
Think you could handle boot camp?
Have you been through boot camp recently?
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