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In the Hangin’ Together or Hanging Alone posts, I indicated the beginnings of your military life would be, shall we say (seemingly) “unstructured.”  Some would use the word “chaos” as a descriptor of the circumstances.  They are right and not right all at once.

They are right in that just many parts of your day will be spent running about, doing push ups, being yelled at (for doing something you had been told to do and now being told it’s the wrong thing to do).

They are wrong, because the process is designed to flood your sensory inputs to their max limits and then toss more things at you, after you think you have reached saturation.

I once blogged about “crisis management,” as my captain clarified why it was a good thing…take a moment at this point to read that old post and begin to fill in the blanks on why there will be a seemingly over abudnance of wildness.

The confussion and conflicting commands are to help to stress you artificially, as you will be in a combat situation, and see how well you do in sorting out the real/important details, from the background noise.  More than likely, you’ve never experienced this, so instead of reacting with fear about what’s going to happen next, think of it as an opportunity to experieince something “new.”

Bottom line:  It’s all managed and all what works.

Get out there and excel! 

Jason Grose’s USMC Recruit Training

Located tonight while looking for pictures of DIs yelling at advising new recruits for the header of the blog: Boot Camp Stories and Advice.

The posts cover all services, and range in time from 1999 to 2003, mostly written by new recruits, but an entry under the Army section for Apr 2000 from a former Army BCT echos some of my posts.

Part I is here.

So here you are with all these new people, trying not to be overly “bossy,” yet you may be the one with the answer, or not (but you think you do). Controlled anarchy will ensue. I discussed some reasons for haning together in the first part. Now what happens if you decide to be the maverick?

I once saw this in a more practical application, and the scenario gets my point across. Our staff ahd been assigned to provide services for the submarine community as they trained prospective commanding officers (PCOs). We were assigned three ships, a CG-47, a DD-963 and an FFG-7, along with a contingent of ship and shore based helos. Our operations ostensibly required us to be sitting ducks for the soon to be COs, as they shot at us with two (per person) exercise MK-48 torpedos. My commodore, on the other hand, viewed this time at sea with dedicated submarine targets as a good training opportunity. As a result, we made our plans. Here’s where it got touchy. The CO (an O-6) of the CG-47 was, by lineal number, senior to my boss (also an O-6). My boss, by virture of the tasking was in operational control and this just chapped the CO of the AEGIS cruiser (that’s another entire series of posts for another time and place), that he had to take orders from someone junior to himself. Net result, after smoking the sub guys like cheap cigars for about 10 of the planned “mini-wars,” the CG-47 CO took off downrange “to get a sub.” He left himself and his crew hanging out by themselves, as the PCO lined up and put an extorp right into his bow.

Somewhat humbled, our task unit finished our series of 14 events, the score being 12-1-1 in our favor. We would have had a 13-1 record, had it not been for foolish pride. Had it been a real shooting war, the $1B state of the art AEGIS Cruiser would have been quickly swallowed by an unforgiving ocean, with many of the 450 man crew killed, injured or drowned.

Different from your indoctrination training, where you have no ranking right away, we had listed of who could tell who what to do. The point remains: Be careful when you decide you know better, for it may be you all alone to suffer the consequences, be they pushups until you sweat all the moisture out of your body, or several extra night watchs in the barracks. Later the fallout may be far more striking.

The maverick can not only get him or herself killed in combat, but they have the opportunity to bring a few of you to the same fate. Your DIs are looking to see if you all get this by the immersion into situations they will place you in. Between their wisdom delivered at 115 dB, and the freindly persuasion they invite you to help your fellow inductees with, they are making a point: Stick together.

At some point in the within the first few moments of arriving at any place of military indoctination, you will be joined with a large number of complete starngers and you will be forced to begin bonding, in a common defense against the people who are yelling at you, using all sorts of unintelligible terms (which you will soon speak as if they were your native born langauge).

Literally, you don’t have a clue who these are, what they are made of, why they are there with you, or how they made the decision to sign and raise their right hands. You intelliectually know this, but….you’ll know it at a visceral level once you get to experience it.

Here’s your pre-planned response: Join the team and get your part done, then help those who are struggling. The second part may be hard, for the DIs (or what every name they are titled as) will be trying to cull out the “weak” from the pack, mostly to take the opportunity to help them excel at levels they haven’t before (that’s euphamistically said) and may be brusque in telling you your help is has not been requested, nor needed. Think carefully as to how you respond, for in the end game, everyone needs to be able to carry their portion of the load, and have extra capacity to help when it’s really needed.

Continued tasking: Keep your ears on full receive, and focus on the actual directions, trying your best to discount the chaos injected by the loudness and rapidity of the orders. Once you get it, do it.

Try not to, at least right away, make yourself distinguishable from the group, in a positive or negative way. Save that for later.

By the end of the first day, you’ll get a few moments to talk to each other,and begin sizing each other up. Some of the first “leaders” will not be the ones who are good leaders, but ones who think they can. Most likely, several people will all try to sell themselves as leaders. You have to begin forming as a unit now, and this process amongst yourselves is analagous to the moments after a major and unexpected attack. Units are dispersed, everyone shows up with what they’ve got and it’s time to create a battle plan to go on the offensive. In this case, you’re all rankless, so no one can flash their insignia around. It’s a great experience for later on.

When the next day begins, most likely only a few short hours later, you will be tired and still being yelled at. More chaos, more orders, more questions, more mistakes out of ignorance. Now it’s time to steel yourself and just keep going. One foot in front of the other, forgetting the mistakes, doing your pushups and not showing your emotions.

Soon the moment will come when the mistake of one of you causes the punishment for all. Get over it, it will happen and there is a point. part of the point is for you, as a recruit class, to put the peer pressure on. That may be help or harassment, or a combination. The other part is to make the point that you’ll all in this together and the action of one can cause serious consequences for all the rest of you in a combat situation. Therein lies the lesson: Get with the “group think” program. Know the rules, follow the rules, make sure the others you are in charge of know the rules, too. It saves lives and wins the day when you operate together.

“Group Think” will be a topic soon. It’s not a bad thing, as long as you understand it.

Go forward and excel.  See Part II here.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

This is a slightly different post, but I thought of a conversation I had with a friend about 5 years ago. He said, and he couldn’t reveal much due to his position as a financial manager, this of a man who was nearing his 20 year mark:

“He could retire today and not work another day in his life, unless he wanted something fun to do.”

I knew the man he was speaking about. He was a USNA graduate, and had begun with small investments upon commissioning. The service is pretty good about providing regualr pay raises for both longevity and also the promotions. What this man did not do was hollar “COOL!” and then jack up his outpouring of dollars to coincide with his upped income. What he did do was put some of the increase into his investments. They never missed it, so it was easy to just put it away for the future.
He, his wife and two children lived in a nice neighborhood, not one of the very expensive ones. They had nice, but not brand new cars. Back in 1998, when this discussion was held, his 20 years of discipline had by then amassed about $2M in the personal retirement fund. Granted, the market took a downturn back then, but it has recovered, and he was only 42 years old, with plenty of marketable skills from his 20 years of increasing responsibility.

There are many people out there to help you create a plan for your futur. As soon as you get a chance, find one and begin stashing something for you future. Even if you don’t make the service a career, the discipline of the investing will be a great habit to get into. If you do plan on staying through retirement, and things go south, then you’ll have a solution to a potential problem already in place.

Short antecdotes to make my point:

1) Before DOPMA was passed in 1982, if you made O-4, you were guaranteed 20 years and therefore retirement. With DOPMA, statutory limits of 16 years of active service were imposed on O-4s. You then had to make O-5 to get your 20. For most people, that wasn’t an issue, but for some it was. That certainly became a wrinkle for some families to deal with.

2) With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the downsizing began. President Bush (41) began the drawdown and President Clinton accelerated it dramatically. With a force buildup heading for a 600 ship Navy, many of us had the pleasure of being told to retire at 20 years. It happened to both senior officers and enlisted people. That, too, were wrinkles for many, and far more dramatic in the number of families it affected than the DOPMA changes.

I suspect there will be many suggestions coming from the “bean counters” to alter the military retirement system, in order to squeeze a few bucks more out of that budget line, to spend elsewhere. A good plan to invest on your own behalf is a shield against the vagaries of lawmakers and the general populace.

And the best part is: If nothing strange or “out of the box” happens on your way to the future, at some point, the moves from the mandatory safety net personal budget line, to the personal entertainment line.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

I was wandering about the net and foound a link to a site with a whole lot of info on entering the Marines….

And as a bonus, I found this article:
“Surviving Marine Corps Basic Training” by Rod Powers.

Sgt Hook has been around the block a lot of times and also around the blogs. He’s one of the the early Milbloggers…

He recently posted a story on leadership, which begins as he entered AIT:

Twenty-four hours after walking across the parade field of Fort Dix, I found myself in a Greyhound bus, recovering from a hangover while on my way to Fort Eustis, Virginia where I was to begin my Advanced Individual Training. The Army sends all its Soldiers to AIT for training in their specific skill, or military occupation specialty. In my case I was to attend the Army’s CH47 heavy lift helicopter mechanic’s course, which is approximately four months in length.

Unlike basic training where we had three drill sergeants assigned to our platoon, only one was assigned to us at AIT and much of the duties and responsibilities previously performed by a drill sergeant, were now delegated to us, the students. There were four student squad leader positions who answered to the student platoon sergeant who was accountable to only the drill sergeant. Following a wall locker and room inspection on just my second day in the platoon, the drill sergeant fired his student platoon sergeant and named me in his stead. I was surprised and nervous as hell.

I hadn’t been issued any Patton Pills or read any “How To” books that would transform me from a private first class to a platoon sergeant, a leader. I did the next best thing and called one of the greatest leaders I knew, my dad my hero the Commander.

“Don’t worry son, you’ll do fine. Have faith in your old drill sergeant and trust your instincts,” he said.

“But dad…” I pushed.

Read the rest…

And…when you’re done with that story, then read about compassion and drill sargents.

The big myth of military life: “You have to dress, act and think the same. You do what you’re told and are never able to think for yourself.”

I have a one word response: Bullocks!

The reailty of military life: There are many basic concepts of operation, that have been figured out by many who have gone before us. The basics of warfighting boil down to killing the other guys and breaking their things so they can’t kill you and the people you protect, or can they break your things…simple? Yes, it is. Therefore, all the seemingly mindless training you experieince in the initial stages of your entry into the service are about teaching you the wisdom of the ages for fighting wars and taking it from the realm of conscious decision making, to smoothly executed subconscious responses. Those things they want you ro absorb into you are not just for the fun of toruring you, but to save your life and the lives of those around you, when the bullets are flying at thousands of feet per second. The brain is an incredible creation, but conscious decision making is a relatively slow process, while reactions straight from the subconscious speed through the system rapidly.

I blogged before on the value of learning from someone else’s mistakes here.
The foundation of these reactions, or group think, or a Borg like hive mind, if you prefer, are to make you survive. Many are counterintuitve to how you would solve a problem, but then you haven’t been in that condition named combat, but those training you have had the experieince to help you bring these reactions into your system.

For your friends and future employers, “concerned” that you have become a non-thinking individual, with your springs all wound tight, ready to expolde emotionally and do bad things at any unplanned moment, I’ll say this: Your training is to elict responses under certain conditions, and not just as you walk from your cubicle to the restroom and someone calls out to you. They are designed for the ultimate conflict, and I’d hope, unless you go to work for Blackwater Security, you’ll not have much of a probability of being presented with the circumstances that will cause you to react. In the case of the Blackwater folks, they will welcome you into their company, if, and only if, those reactions are truly refined to being very subconscious capabilities.

Now, what your friends, family, employers and co-workers should know is you have the ability to subconsciously react to serious “out of the box” conditions, which they would call emergencies. You will most likely keep your calm, cool head on, and quickly react to make the most people safe when one of those moments come. Be it a fire, a flood, a tornado, a car accident, a kid who has fallen off the roof and is laying in the flower bed with a compound fracture to his femur, or a disgruntled employee, who shows up at the office with a weapon and evil intent, it is you who will come forward with your “monolithic, hive mind” mentaility and take charge, issue orders and jump in and do your part. They will be all at once, be grateful and amazed, at what you did, and you will most likely not even realize, until the emergency is past, what you did. At that point, you will be amazed.

Let me ask this question: Who wouldn’t want you around, for just such times as those?

Next. Once they have successfully taken your entire group to the basic or warfighting skills, having firmly entrenched them in your young minds, then they will begin to seek and develop the inherent individual skill sets you have. From a purley logical standpoint, if the reality is all of the military members have to think and act the same, why is it the recruiter gives you a battery of tests, then sits down with you to tell you which skills you are best at, and then (hopefully) gives you the choices of the open fields you will be trained for, once your indoctrination is complete? You got it. We need people of all types of skills to make the military function. Upon completion of basic training, some people will become snipers, some welders, some logistics experts and some lucky few will get to head towards playing with live ordnance, specifically the kind the bad guys like to leave around with the plan to hurt passers by, or major industrial facilities, but I digress.

As you spend time in the ranks, you will see how what you can add to the unit is sought after and developed. Word of cuation: Just because you are good at something, it doesn’t mean you will get to do it. They may be too many people already in the specialty, so relax and look for the next best thing. On the other hand, it may be more important that you stay where you are, so that unit is intact.

Relax and look for your niche. Ask about it once you have learned the initial ropes of the system.

Taco of the blog SandGram, a USMC Helo KC-130 pilot (correction due to my misunderstanding of his type A/C), when he’s not flying for American, has begun posting about his entry into the Corps via Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Here’s a bit of wisdom for those of you joining the service, which Taco stole from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai:” Remember… where ever you go, there you are.

Here are his posts so far:

Marines

DyyyynnnnoooooMIGHT!!!!!!

and

Save Your Mommy, Kill a Commie.

In the third post, pay particular attention to the part of the story about a guy who couldn’t get his hair cut the first day. There is a huge lesson there.

This, of course, put Anders on the skyline (walking on the skyline allows the enemy to see you and pick you off easily) who, to add insult to injury, couldn’t march to save his life. I have to admit, it’s hard enough to do all the drill, but at least I was behind a prior enlisted guy and could see what his movements were, whereas Anders was all on his own.

Try not to stick out, at least at first would be the takeaway here.