My DS just called it Koalifying...

God Damn, I'm cryin over here.  

You should have rared back and RIPPED one like you were proud of it and then cried out,"I'm hit sarge, I'm HIT!"

Were you a CC at GL or Orlando?

Great Lakes from '84 - '87.

"That's pretty good for a water head."

In a very heavy peckerwood accent.

This was actually one of the training NCO's.

We had the Indy 500.  Had to pick up your footlocker and do laps around the barracks room.  Under the bottom 1st set of bunks, over the top of the 2d, between the 2 racks on the 3rd, with the DS doing the announcement like it was a horserace.  "Trainee fuzznuts is pulling away, but trainee shit for brains is pulling up on the outside" that sort of thing.  How long?  Until the DS got tired of watching us.

1st day, right off the bus, some kid trips over the situp board in the hallway and knocks over the trophy case. We have been in the Army about 45 seconds but we know this is BAD!  Trainee Gomer (that was his nickname) got smoked until he puked.  Every day, Sr DS would pull into the parking lot in his little Datsun while we were in PT formation, put one foot out of the car and as he was exiting  "GIT ON DOWN AND GIVE ME 20 GOMER".  Same thing at the end of the day.  Poor kid got recycled to the motivation platoon about halfway through, and the last time we saw him he was on his way out for failure to adapt.

My TI's were both SP's, both served in the first Gulf War and one was a blue rope.

They loved crawling into the dorm through the 2nd floor window late at night trying to catch a dorm guard sleeping or finding a wall locker unlocked. One night, the guy next to me left his unlocked. I heard the TI's footsteps followed by a "Holy S!". He then proceeded to "assist" the airman in checking that nothing was missing by throwing his stuff throughout the bay.

Whenever we had locker/rack/uniform inspections, they'd turn on some dopey music and play their favorite game, Who could find more deficiencies.  It was funny as hell watching them bounce from one cot to the next...until they got to you. If you failed an inspection, they'd give you a McD application and a crayon since "Your so worthless, this application is your best hope in life".

Good times...

During "class room time" at basic we had ten minute breaks on the hour. These "breaks" were usually spent doing push ups. Our DS assured us we would lower the elevation of Fort Polk three feet during our stay there by pushing against the ground. On the rare occasion no one fucked up during the previous 50 minutes we would be allowed to smoke 'em if you got 'em. Once this dude asked "okay to smoke drill sergeant?" Drill Sergeant said "Sure, take out every cigarette you have on you, stick them all in your mouth and light them, smoke them down to the filter while at parade rest". Once he finished, we all got the "smoke 'em if you got 'em".  

Not really funny or anything but the 1st Sgt of my Basic Training Company (1966) was one of the few survivors of the Bataan Death  March that stayed in the military.

He mostly kept to himself but he took personal charge of the correction platoon of the guys that were having trouble physically hacking the training.  This was a platoon that couldn't do the pull ups or run fast enough etc and had to work extra hours getting in shape.

He would carry a Japanese rifle with a bayonet to the training sessions and poke at any recruits that wasn't giving their all.

The Top had absolutely no mercy on them and would not allow them to give any excuses or give up.  He ran them ragged and got them all so they could pass the PT test.  He was relentless.  

Of course our Drill Sergeants were not much more lenient.  All of them were Korean War veterans and remembered what it was like to retreat under fire from a half million screaming Chinese so they didn't like to take excuses either.

Of course they all told us that we were pussies that were going to die in Vietnam so we had better get our affairs in order before being shipped out.

"The shadow of your ass weighs 90 pounds."

I had to memorize that.

This.

12/23/1990 during mail call. Everyone is a good mood, getting Christmas cards and care packages. DIs are pretty relaxed for a little while, then out of nowhere they snap on us. They thrashed us for a good 3 hours.

1 kid died in my platoon.  Unrelated we also had to fill out witness statements for NCIS for a kid that somehow got the shit kicked outa him.  Interestingly enough 60 something recruits never saw a thing

After breakfast we would all finish cleaning the barracks.  Then we would crawl under our bunks like we were tightening the sheets or some stupid thing.  

Drill Sgt Ellingworth was a master at silently pulling the bunk away from the sleepers and covering their face in shaving cream.  Then you had to stand in formation with the shaving cream on your face.  That shit burns after a while.

I got the shit beat out of me on a minute to minute basis, Cole Range problems

At RTC Orlando a recruit that screwed up was ordered to do 'jumping jacks, forever, begin'. As he was well conditioned he began immediately. After a few minutes you could see from the look on his face that it was registering that it was not 100 or 1,000 but "forever".

I was in a Flag company and we got to go off base and do performances pretty often. This always involved stopping at a bar on the way back. Seems as though the Company Commander had quite a drinking problem.

The Company Commander was later arrested for a scheme where he pretty much compelled each recruit to contribute to a 'fund for underprivileged kids' which went into his pocket and then to the bar. With two weeks remaining in Boot another CC was assigned to us. We did not however have the initiative to take the completion of our training upon ourselves a la 'Stripes'.

My first TI was a SSGT who was a dead ringer for Louis Gosset Jr with a Cobra tattoo on his arm.
During inspection, he says to my bunk mate:
TI: What's black and yellow and makes you laugh?
Bunk mate: don't know, sir.
TI: Bus full of n....ers falling off a cliff.
No reaction from my bunkmate....
TI: You don't think that's funny? Your recycled a week!  Go pack your shit!

Mom decided to be slick and mail me a stick of juicy fruit. During mail, same TI feels it in the envelope.

TI: What the fuck is this shit? Gets scissors, make me cut it into even pieces for the whole flight. Sees my microscopic piece and eats it.
TI: that's mine!

Next letter to mom, don't send anything else! Thanks....

Our one DI found a guys wall locker unlocked, he told the recruits friends to find private x and tell him he better get back to his room and secure his wall locker. They brought him back to his room, and were instructed to ask private x what he thought about that particular sergeant. All goes as planned, and the private starts talking about how the drill sergeant is such an a$$. About that time the DI jumps out of the wall locker...I thought the guy was gonna have a heart attack.

Same DI would have us spell his name phonetically, so we would start Charlie, oscar, november, charlie, echo, papa, charlie, india, oscar, november...he would always start messing with us at "papa"...I don't think anyone ever spelled his name.

We had one private who was always messing up, one night the guys in his room decided to adjust his attitude....they tried to push him out a window on the second floor. Of course the DI's found out about it and we all suffered greatly.

"The Duffle Bag Drag". Punishment if your duffle bag wasn't full enough. You carried a duffle bag for a week everywhere you went, and during PT.

Gas attacks where we flopped around on the hot pavement like dead fish. Air raids where we would run around looking for cover. People getting cussed-out when they passed out from PT. Bets on which platoon could low crawl a certain distance the fastest (I still have scars). People would blink too long during some terribly boring film, one DI would be on the prowl looking for victims, he would find some hapless private and say "come here luv". They would come back about an hour later with a terrified look on their face. Squeezing together in line..."make your buddy smile", cattle cars, etc. Hard to believe that was thirty years ago....

I was 32 when I went to basic.

Drill Sgt. Whetstone.  Freakin' hilarious guy.  Crazy ass PT stud who never broke a sweat.  When showing us how to fold all our stuff the Army way, kept telling us that when you rolled your socks up the right way, they "looked like a pussy....MmmmmMMMMMM".  When he called cadence, you felt like you could march forever.  His favorite was "Tiny Bubbles".  

Drill Sgt. Galloway.  Another hilarious guy.  Big dude too.  One of the funnier moments was when we were in the barracks having a more low key moment and he was asking all of us where we came from, what we did in the "civvy world" (there were more than a few of us who were late 20s-early 30s).  He mentioned that PT could be a bitch, but was a necessity especially if you were a "food blister".  First time I heard that term...still makes me laugh.

Another Drill Sgt. (with my luck he's an ARFCOM'er).  Total imbecile.  Tried too hard to be "cool" like the two above.  A "Chad" if I've ever met one.  No one repsected him.  It was even more hilarious when he would insist on calling cadence (he'd turn to Whetstone and say "I've got this battle..." and Whetstone would smile and walk away knowing what was about to happen), he could not keep a steady beat for the life of him, so in the distance from the DFAC to the barracks, we all were a giant out of step, pissed off, soup sandwich.   When we get back there's Whetstone just smiling nodding his head.

Last one was freakin' weird.  Garcia.  Huge food blister dude.  Every 5 minutes it was "half right face....".  Funny thing was no one could figure out his ability (or lack thereof) of pronouncing names.  He had no problem pronouncing my name (German) or any other crazy Polish name....yet the one he couldn't pronounce was "Orchard".  Orchard was a really nice kid from Mi'ssippi.  Thick southern accent and reminded of Cletus Spuckler from the Simpsons. So at roll he's going through the names, all the Polish, German, Korean names....no problem.  He gets to Orchard.

"Orkerd!"

**silence**

"ORKERD!!!

**silence**

"ORKERD!!!!"

Then Orchard drawls "Do you mean Orchard Drill Sgt?"

"HALF RIGHT FACE!!!......"

Holy shit, all of us were laughing our asses off during that smoke session.


I swear the hardest part of basic is not laughing at the drill sergeants

We had this kid who's daddy was a SGM, so he thought he was all hot shit. He was always mouthing off to everyone, and finally our DS had heard enough of it.

Our DS walked up behind him and put him in a chokehold, then drags him in between two of the lockers. The lockers that they wound up in front of happened to be mine and my battle buddy's. At the time, we were squaring away our lockers, so they were open.

As the DS is whispering in the kid's ear...stuff about how he needs to calm the fuck down and not be an asshole...he looks to the right, sees my battle buddy's open wall locker, and breaks off mid-speech.

DS- Who's wall locker is this?!"

My Battle Buddy- "Mine, DS!"

DS- who is that in these pictures?"

MBB- "The one on top is my mom, and the one on bottom is my sister, DS!"

DS- "How old is your sister?"

MBB- "She is 15, DS!"

DS- "Ok...how old is your Mom?"

MBB- "She is 38, DS!"

DS- "Is she married?"

MBB- Yes, DS, but she is getting a divorce!"

DS- "Does she speak English?"

MBB- "No, DS!"

DS- "when she comes for family day, you tell her for me, in Spanish, that she is fine as hell!"

MBB- "Yes, DS!"

My battle buddy was from Pureto Rico...both his mom and his sister were smoking hot!

We walked into our barracks on Sand Hill back in 83 for infantry basic. on the wall were these 13  pieces of paper the length and width of the the cinder blocks they were hiding. On the extreme left side was this weird looking rats nest of brown/black lines painted on the walls.

The DS then gives is this speech about how we are all dickless wonders but at the end of OSUT we would become full fledged infantry with swinging dicks ready to fuck or fight as the situation demanded it. He stated how he had a full fledged infantry dick. Pointing to the wall where the lines were he said "This is you this week- nothing but pussies as you don't have even the dick God gave a newborn).

Well every week after that we would stand at attention in the bay while the DS performed a little ceremony telling us how we were slowly growing an infantry dick. The person he considered the most outstanding that week got to remove that piece of paper exposing this growing shaft. At the end when we turned blue the last piece of paper was pulled off revealing this head spurting red, white and blue stars. The DS said how proud he was of us all and to take our new found dick out the gates and fuck the first girl we could "in an infantry manner"

I know this sounds WAY juvenile but at the time this was a real high point and people tried to vie to be the one selected to pull that paper off. We cheered and hoorahed when that last piece of paper came off.

Oh and we were threatened with naked PT till we dropped out in the sand pit if ANYONE removed a piece of paper prematurely.

His or your favorite..??

WTF?
ETA I'm hoping you're not talking about the dead dude.

I was in MM "A school" in GL Mar-Apr of 82. Was the coldest place I'd ever been until NorthPac ops.

I got hosed with a recruiting tour. I think I would have rather "pushed boots".

Did both, now I'm stuck doing an ROTC instructor tour.

Where was this that you had private rooms?

A good friend of mine joined the Army in the early 80's. Don't remember what the cause was, but in a letter he told me that they waxed the leafy bushes and trees on the base with cans of Johnson's paste wax for a weekend. And he said they were all forced to do pushups every time someone broke a leaf off, for however many leaves had been broken off to that point.

You could always tell when someone left their wall locker unlocked. We would come back from chow and my Drill Sergeant would be standing in the middle of the drill pad, hands behind his back, rocking back in forth on his feet, with this sadistic smile on his face. Lying on the ground in front of him would be the lock, or multiple locks. He had the same look when he managed to steal my Squad Leader's weapon in the middle of the night during FTX3.

I hear recruiting sucked; there were a couple guys in my CC School class who had been dropped from recruiting. During "A" school, did you stay in the "Snipe's Castle"?

No I was an nuc MM we were in one of the other barracks but I played pool and video games at Snipe's Castle.

Another SSG Pinkneyism.

He had us down in the front leaning rest and pushing hard while chewing our asses for I don't remember what.
After a while we hears " Re...Re... Re.... AW FUCK IT JUST STAY YOUR NASTY ASSES DOWN THERE!!!!!"

About fifteen minutes later DS Dowd comes along and hollers " Platoon recover and quit pissing off DS Pinkney."

Did any of y'all have the "streak of the week" and have a guy have to wear his drawers on his head?

One of our drill sergeants lined us all up about in the middle of basic and got real serious and normal like and told us during a long sympathetic conversation that while our blood was drawn upon arrival, someone in the platoon had tested positive for AIDS/HIV and that person would be pulled from the platoon and sent to Ft. Dix in a couple of days, that if and when this person's identity became known to the rest of us, we should all be sympathetic and understanding and not treat him differently. Then, over the next couple of days, the drill sergeants kept calling this one puerto rican kid into their office. When we asked him about it he swore they were asking him dumb ass questions like "what's your favorite, chocolate or white milk". Of course none of us believed him and he knew it. No one would go near the guy. After several days of do the Drill Sergeants told us they were fucking with us and that no one had aids. I always thought that was fucked up. This was in the early 90's FYI before the total pussification of basic.  

Well now that I think about it, The kid that died got his ass kicked the day before hand in the boxing/hitting skills portion of training.  Leading to bleeding on his brain.  He was a little guy, that fought another little guy that actually knew how to fight.  Next morning on line, kid just fell over dead.  The other part I wrote about with NCIS was dealing with another kid.  Which lead to my heavy getting put on suspension(or whatever they call it) he got drunk during that time and and came in the squadbay in the middle of the night and and we had "Midnight Drill" for about and hour.  Good times, good times.  (Honestly all my DI's were GTG, one even came to SOI a few months later when I was there and brought me lunch)

Now that I derailed this thread, Ill get back to what it was all about.

Best sayings I heard:
" It's like fucking a chicken, it's just unnatural"
"Let this be a lesson, look at this white boy to learn how to spit shine a pair of boots"  By a black DI
"So and so, is this like fucking Camels where you come from?"

Ok I'm an outsider here with zero Mil experience but are you telling us
a private was beaten to death?

Nope.  I believe he said 60 recruits never saw a thing.

I remember two incidents that happened at Ft. Benning in the early '90s that probably happened for each cycle that went through there.  

First one was when we left on the trucks to go to our barracks from the 30th AG Reception Battalion.  Drill Sgt. Falcon got on the truck and screamed at everyone to get off, after everyone was off he came out with a dirty pair of underwear.  Huge shit stain on them .  Started going up and down the line waving them in everyone's face saying whoever left them better own up to it or everyone was getting punished.  Nobody admitted to it so he decided to throw them, my face was in direct line with the nasty drawers.  I moved my head out of the way and he smoked me for 5 or 10 minutes for moving in formation.  I am sure he planted them on the truck and it was a great way to shake everyone up.  Forgot to ad that DS Falcon had some huge biceps with USMC tattooed across one of them, not a single person dared to tease him about it.  He told me why he left the Marines and joined the ARMY but I forgot it was so long ago.

Second was my Drill Sergeant, DS Brown, one of the meanest people I have ever met, still miss him today.  There was a wall plate in the bathroom that you could remove easily.  One day DS Brown asked me to go look at it with him, he gave me a flashlight and told me to look down the hole and tell him what I see.  Well, I clearly see a beer can down there but I decided to say I couldn't see anything.  He sees through my bullshit and tells me to bring it out and show the whole platoon what it is.  As I pull it out can't help but laugh, the damn can is so old it has a pull tab top.  I knew it was old, he knew it was old and most of the platoon knew it was old, but that didn't stop him from smoking us for a couple of hours for disrespecting his barracks.  I went out drinking with him a few times after Basic/AIT when I was in Airborne School, he told me liked to do that kind of stuff where we all knew it was bullshit but he would punish us anyways.  He would be arrested and thrown out of the ARMY today for most of the stuff he did to us, but damned if it didn't help us grow up fast.  I will always be thankful to him for that.

1. One particularly shitty morning everyone was lagging and struggling with morning routine (shave, make beds, get into whatever they told us to wear that day).  For some reason everyone managed to cut the hell out of their faces shaving, but we were all ready on time.  The corporal walks in and goes "holy fuck! There is more fuckin blood in this hallway than all of fuckin transylvania!"

2. We get woken up by a cheap CD player with a CD full of metal played so loud that the speakers are starting to warp.  The instructor's all fired up asking us 'what the fuck happened last night team? You'd better get fuckin ready in 5 fuckin minutes and find out what it was before then!"  Obviously it took us six minutes to get ready since everyone was asking each other what the hell happened, so we cycled through a couple of those unnecessary uniform switches, re-making beds, moving people's shit room to room.  Once it's all said and done we get re-assembled in the hallway and he says "you want to fuckin know what happened last night? Fuckin nothing! I expected more of you by now."

3. At the range one day there was a huntsman spider walkin around the concrete we all used for cleaning our weapons, someone takes out their bottle of CLP and starts making a spiral around it until they end up dropping oil onto its feet.  That spider's legs were moving like a disney character that's just run onto ice.

Reading is fundamental. He clearly stated after he mentioned a trainee dying that "unrelated" someone was beaten.