Games

This entire experience is one giant mind game.  Drill Instructors have a seemingly endless array of games.  Everything is designed to get us to move faster, listen better, and work as a collective.  The games only start when someone screws up.  Who exactly can one screw a simple instruction like turn to your right??  This friggin platoon somehow figures out a way.  It's almost unbelievable that we can't do anything right. When we first got here I really thought that the DIs were just psychos.  They scream all the time and they always want more.  They snap at you even when you do it right.  I got up in the middle of the night to make a head call.  The squad bay is really dark and on my way to the head I didn't see Sgt Cain until I was about to pass him.  I said "Bye your leave, good evening Sir" and attempted to keep walking.  I should have known better.  "Oh hell no" was his reply, "Get back and try again."  Just so you know get back means go all the way back to my rack and then walk up and do it properly.  I didn't roll my eyes when he said it, but he cussed me out anyway "Good to Connors, you nasty thing lose your bearing too!  You owe me on the quarterdeck in the morning!  Get out of my sight!"  I was almost relieved to be able to go the head and just hoped that Cain would forget about the quarter decking in the morning.

When we move to slowly we hear "Oh?!?  Good to go?!? You want to move slow?!?" and then the bizarre task comes.  What constitutes a bizarre task?  Here is a list of notables:

• get on line with two sheets and a blanket
• fix your racks now (after you just stripped it)
• get to the rear of the squad bay
• get to the front of the squad bay
• get to the port side
• get to the starboard side
• get on line with a footlocker
• dump out your footlocker
• put everything back in your footlocker
• dump out your footlockers in the center now
• put everything back in your footlocker (good luck getting your stuff back)
• get into your PT gear
• put your uniforms on
• form a school circle
• get out to the street
• get back to the squad bay
• get into the pit

There are a lot more of these.  If you don't think that this sounds bad, you're right.  You're right because listing them doesn't include a DI screaming at you.  The games begin when the DI tells you to do this and then decides we aren't moving fast enough.  Get on line becomes get on line with two sheets and a blanket, which then becomes make your racks now...  "10, 9, 8, 3, 2, 1 You're done."  Everything always started with "Good to go, you want to move slow?" Then the instruction. Then the countdown.  No matter how fast we did it, we didn't do it fast enough.

The DIs have another set of games.  These are punishments.  We aren't allowed to say I.  We have to refer to ourselves in the third person as "This Recruit."  One recruit called himself I and got the following punishment; He had to stand at the POA and point at his eyeball and shout "Eye!" and then at his chest and shout "Recruit!" repeatedly for an hour.  Another time a recruit fell asleep during a class, so the DI chewed him out asking how he'd feel if he fell asleep on guard duty and got the platoon killed?  Then to emphasize the point he gave eight hours of fire watch and made him stand at the POA holding a pen in his finger tips with his arm straight out.  If he lowered his arm or dropped the pen he had to report to the DI Hut and announce that he had killed the entire platoon.  This kind of thing can happen at any time for any reason and I think I'm becoming paranoid.