Grab Your Gear, Maggots!  − 13 November, 1991

We had just completed our processing and performed the neccessary ten pushups. Trust me, ten perfect military pushups are tough to do. They won't start counting until you get tired. You could do 80 of them and they'll only start counting around 73, they just keep saying, "One...One...One..." The purpose of this is to break you and your cocky, "young dumb and full of cum" attitude.

Our actual Drill Sergeants picked us up by bus from the reception area at Ft. Bliss, but before that, the reception drills told us to put our powder detergent at the bottom of our duffel bags so that it was the last thing we took out. We all neatly packed our Tide at the bottom and good thing...

The first thing the real drills did was lined us up in formation and had us lift our duffel bags straight in the air and dump them on the ground. As soon as they said it, we knew what was happening. We all looked at each other with this, "do they know?" face. One guy even said, "But Drill Sergeant, we have washing detergent at the bottom." That guy pretty much was in the shithouse the rest of the week. In a somber mood, we lifted our bags up and dumped the contents. All of our belongings, of course, became covered with white detergent.

They proceeded to check the contents of our bag for "contraband" (cigarettes, weapons, drugs, alcohol, etc). But the purpose of it, in reality, was the hilarity of 50 young kids in sloppy BDUs dropping everything they own on the ground and getting it covered with white powder.

Everyone did laundry that night and cleaned the barracks which were, coincedently, spotless already and went to bed early. We woke up at 4 a.m. and went to the mudpit in the morning for P.T. (Physical Training)

I laugh my ass off now about that day, but at the time, we all realized that we were truly dipshits and the butt of their jokes. They broke us all that first week, and in subsequent weeks we became soldiers. I guess they figured if they can't hit us anymore that they'd play mind games with us. The Army's training system is very good at that.