1.) Ooo, Burn!
“I am going to take a s— in a box and send it to your parents for sending me theirs!”
2.) Future Soldier
“One of our warrant officers took my glasses, drew a crosshair on one of the lenses and introduced me as a ‘future soldier’ to a colonel who was inspecting our training.”
3.) Garden Work
“My battle buddy and I were ordered to dig holes, so when we’re about to our waist he proceeded to turn on a hose. He started to fill the holes with water and told us to stay in the hole. Another drill sergeant walks by and asks him what he’s doing. He says, ‘I’m watering my petunias.’”
4.) The Bedroom Mystery
“We came back from a run one night, it just was starting to snow. We came back to see all our bunks and lockers had been thrown out. I being not the smartest Pvt. said ‘I could have sworn I made my bed’—drill sergeant was behind me. I painted a fence at midnight in the snow for three hours. I almost cried the whole time while painting that damn fence.”
5.) What a Gas Leak
“If I wanted to hear s—, I would have farted!”
6.) You… Uh… I Don’t Know
“We do a lot of aid training, such as CPR, wound healing, exposed intestines, chest hole fix, etc. The fun stuff. In training, one of the steps is to tell someone to call 911. Specifically point at them and direct them. In combat, this switches to pointing at someone to go get the medic.
We were all lined up at our bunks at the end of the day and the drill instructor was talking. The same as you can see in movies like Full Metal Jacket.
As his final words, he is dictating whom is going to do fire watch for the night. Fire watch is basically someone standing at the main door who guards sleeping recruits and also watched out for any fires or anything else that could kill us in our sleep. There are always two people on watch in our platoon of about 60.
He points at one recruit and says ‘You, go stand fire watch in the front.’
He points at another recruit and says, ‘You, get dressed for fire watch too.’
He points at a third recruit. He hesitates because he realizes that he’s already picked two. He suddenly says, ‘You…’ … ‘Go call 911.’
Funniest thing that happened in all of boot camp. He let us all laugh for about 3 seconds and then told ‘alright now… enough’”