To start off, boot camp is never easy. Being that you are not suppose to laugh or smile for the next 8 weeks, it can be quite hard to hold it in. By the time you get out you are laughing at the slightest things, everything that is said or done becomes funny to you. If you look at it from the company Commander's or Drill instructor's perspective then it's even more funny, because the things that recruits say and do can be hilarious. And a CC's job is to make them look and feel even more ridiculous.
I remember this one time when my company was running around the Quarterdeck(central gathering place for information) and one kid picked a weggie. Well the Company commander saw him and made the kid direct traffic around the Quaterdeck by saying "shipmate, don't pick your weggie, shipmate" Repeatedly. It's a lot more funny when that kid has to say it seriously and no one can laugh.
I think the most funny thing was when someone would ask an already stupid question and the CC's would just tear them up for asking stupid questions. Yelling at them and making them feel even stupider. It is kind of sad to say that is funny, it really is, because the CC's just go all out and make a show of it.
One hard thing to do at boot camp was to stand still for hours at a time. If you had bugs landing on you, you could not swat at them or move at all. This one time, we were standing in line waiting to go into our Hall of residence for the night, when a girl up front swatted at a bug on her face and the CC caught her. It wasn't her fault, we were all doing it she just happened to be the one to get caught. Mind you, I went to boot camp in New Jersey during the summer. Bugs everywhere! Well, she ended up getting all 70 of us in trouble.
So it's night time and my CC decides to make us go into the grass field, lay on the ground and roll around. He said "Let them feast on you, it's just the food chain they need to eat too. Do not swat at them, just let them feast!" So next morning we all had about 30 bug bites all over our bodies. That was fun. NOT!
Oh yea, the one thing my company was known for is when we had 18 girls marching around all holding onto a piece of rope with our heads down. My company had gotten into trouble and we had to march around with our heads down and tape covering the "US Coast Guard" name tag on our uniforms.
The next day, some girls were caught fighting in the bathroom after the 10pm curfew. And this was the 2nd to last week of boot camp so we should have known better than to get into trouble. Well our punishment was to march behind the boys all linked together by short ropes in between our hands. It was very hard to walk around for 3 days linked together, especially going through the lunch line.
The guys didn't really like the girls in the company. We were mostly the reason for getting in trouble. I don't blame them, we were a mess. Oh well.
Towards the end the CC's start to lighten up and joked around with us more. The last week of boot camp, the girls were up past 10, which is bed time, and right when one of the girls told another girl(jokingly) to "kiss her ass", our CC comes walking through and everyone goes silent. He just shakes his head, keeps walking and says, "Really? Is that how you girls talk to one another... Night ladies." and walked out. That was pretty funny. We all just burst out laughing.
Some good memories come out of boot camp but I would not say it was fun. Rolling around in the beach sand at 4 in the morning was not fun but the challenge we had to accomplish was. I will say that boot camp is a good experience but only if you can handle it, otherwise don't do it.
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