What is your wildest story from basic training?

During basic training some soldiers would cut their own hair on weekends. One time while one of them.was providing a haircut to another soldier. While he was cutting a soldiers head. Meanwhile. As this this was going on a Drill Sergeant quietly replaced the soldier who was cutting his head and proceeded to give the soldiers haircut something different from what was expected. You should have seen the face of the soldier when he saw how his head was now shaved. We all had a good laugh because we could see the Drill Sergeant sneaking in to cut the doldiers hair. The soldier who had the bad haircut was do embraced that he did not report the zDrill Sergeant who stepped in.

As a Medical Officer, I started active duty as a Major and I had a brief "This is your Army and welcome to it" sixteen day course. The night before my first day in uniform, I had carefully used a ruler to be certain that all my insignia was perfectly place. "Pressed and dressed" I was walking to my first class when a Sargeant with a sleeve full of hash marks approached and gave me my first salute. I snapped a brisk salute back. As he passed, he said " Good morning, sir. Excuse me, sir. Your hat's on backward, sir" and dropped his salute. I had the good taste not to turn around since I am sure he was rolling on the ground with laughter. If not, I provided amusement at the NCO club that evening.

During a group meeting with our MTI, we were all sitting down listening to our MTI when someone farted audibly. Without skipping a beat, our MTI said, "I better not smell that shit! Everyone, deep breaths, GO!". We all began taking in deep breaths and soon some of us were gagging from the smell and taste of this rancid fart. It was one of the few times our MTI actually smiled and laughed. Soon the entire room was filled with laughter.

Wildest story for me is when your doing BRM training and your in formation and you hear (dummy) rocket go off. Now thats nothing right but when you hear go up in the air and start to come down and you feel that its gonna hit you and come to find out its right next to you the whole time. It never went in the air and when it goes bang your the only one breaking formation hitting the floor and telling others to get down. LOL. I think that was the only time the drill sgts never smoked and had a great laugh and didn't know what to say.

During 4th Phase in Boot Camp at MCRD San Diego California. At the end of a fire watch one night one recruit after waking his relief up couldn't find the other recruit that was on fire watch with him. Needless to say that recruit had gone UA and was caught a few hours later on the Pacific Coast Hwy. He was brought before the Company in a dog kennel and displayed for all to see. But, that was not the highlight. The highlight was the look in our DI's face a few hours earlier. After much distress we had to wake the DI that stayed in the squadbay that night to inform him of our recently departed recruit. After a few minutes of what sounded like the fury of hell behind the office door where he was awaken from his peaceful sleep, he opened that door to find us all at attention. Moments after he was informed he stood there and stared at us and it was then that 60 (59 missing one I forgot) recruits saw that our tidy perfectly disciplined well toned statue of a fighting machine had forgotten to tuck his right leg bdus under his bootband. Believe me it took more courage than I have ever seen for a recruit to inform his DI of what would have been his misfortune if he would have stepped out that squadbay amongst his peers.
The next day among Delta Company Platoon 1119 had big smiles on their faces as everyone watched the unlucky deserter tucked away in the dog kennel behind the truck parked in front of that formation.

BOOT CAMP MESS HALL DUTY

There are defining moments in everyone’s life that change who you are and how you see things. There were several while I was in the Marine Corps, but the one that stands out came to me via a prisoner in the Parris Island brig.

Early on, our drill instructors had run down the schedule of training and had told us that the week after we finished at the rifle range (if we made it that far), we would put in a week working at one of the mess halls. I had anticipated with dread my platoon’s week of mess duty. Since I couldn’t stand the dank, stale, nauseating smell of the kitchens from which we took our daily meals, I began to concoct some way out of this vile duty. To be confined to the kitchens for sixteen hours a day, was more unnerving to me than our three drill instructors combined.

Marksmanship training ended, and the dreaded mess duty approached. As a pre-screening, our senior drill instructor, SSGT Chase, had each of us, in turn, report to him any compelling reason why we could not perform mess duty. Having a few adolescent warts on my hands, I promptly started picking at them and continued to do so until they bled. When he asked me about any reservations as to why I could not pull mess duty, I showed him my hands and stated, “Sir, the Private has bleeding warts, Sir!” I think the Staff Sergeant saw through my ruse and assigned me to the mess hall at the brig. There, he said, I could bleed into the prisoners’ food for all he cared. My plan had back-fired, but it would prove to be profoundly life-changing.

The next morning while most of my platoon was marched to the big mess hall, me and a few others were detailed to the brig. After our mess lecture, my first assignment was to stand behind the serving bins at lunch and dish out one scoop of mashed potatoes to each prisoner. It came with this warning: If I give out any more than just one scoop to any prisoner, it would violate a direct order and I would become a prisoner myself. I was also directed not to speak to any of the inmates. Or else.

Marines can be a pretty bad lot if you piss them off. And Marines in prison were doubly bad characters. The brig was a very scary place, especially to this teenager away from his pleasant and insulated home life for the first time. I had been without my folks and familiar surroundings for seven nerve-wracking and bewildering weeks and this current reality was truly antagonistic and disorienting. Anyway, here comes the revelation . . .

As I was giving out one scoop of mashed potatoes – and only one scoop – a prisoner looks at what I had just plopped on his tray and he says, “Gimme some more.”

I said in a hushed tone, “I can’t.”

He replies again, rather loudly, “I said, gimme some more!”

Still quietly, I replied that I had orders to give only one scoop or I would be arrested.

He glares at me with a look of utter disdain and says, “You non-combat fuck!” And he walks away.

It struck me that, gee whiz, that’s what I am. I’m a non-combat fuck. I don’t want to be a non-combat fuck, but here I am – a non-combat fuck. How could I call myself a true Marine if I never fired a shot in anger – if I was never tested on the battlefield? I might as well be in the Army. It was at that point that I vowed, no matter what, I was going to get into combat. Bill Stilwagen was not going to go through life with that miserable title. No one would be able to say, “Look, there goes Stilwagen, that non-combat fuck!”

And that was revelation number one. More would follow, but this first one set me on a path that would forever change my life.

The brig had its own mess sergeant. After the mashed potato incident at lunch, I started picking the warts again and got them bleeding pretty good. I went to the mess sergeant and said, “Sir, the Private has bleeding warts, Sir!”

He says, “Holy shit! You can’t work with food. We’ll have to move you.” He had me swabbing the deck for the remainder of the day. After the evening chow clean-up, I was sent back to the barracks with the rest of the brig detail.

The next morning, I was directed to the base armory where I finished out mess duty week. No more food work for me. At the armory, I cleaned M-14 rifles and Colt M1911 .45 caliber automatic handguns, stacked ammo, and performed other gun-related chores. I also spent a lot of time talking with the armorers. These guys were not drill instructors. They were regular Marines who had been stationed here to maintain the base arsenal, so there was no “No Sir” or “Yes Sir” stuff.

By the end of mess week, my warts had stopped bleeding and they never bled again.

Making it to the “A” runners group!

We were flown to San Diego from Louisiana for basic training and we arrived late in the day and brought to a holding area where we all sat down and waited for hours. Every now and then someone would come out and yell "HEAD CHECK" and I would touch my head and it seemed OK. It took several more hours before I finally figured out what a HEAD CHECK meant and by then I had to piss so bad I could taste it.

My story is not as a recruit, but as a Marine Drill Instructor. I had the duty one night and had the firewatch wake me in time to get the recruits in my platoon up for reveille. At the prescribed time to wake the recruits, I had the firewatch flip on the lightswitch and as usual did my DI wakeup yelling "Get up, Get up, Get up!" At this, the recruits would jump out of their racks and stand in front with their hands held out in front of them for my walk the length of the squadbay to inspect their hands and feet for injuries. One recruit yelled loudly after jumping out of the top rack and stood in front slightly bent over with one end of a string tied to his privates and the other end to his top rack. I walked behind the racks on his side of the squadbay, and approached him from behind to tell him to untie himself and to inquire why he had tied the string around himself. He explained that he had enuresis or bed wetting, and did not want to be put out of the Marines. So he tied himself up to prevent himself from wetting his bed, or rack as we called them. I understood, except why he tied one of the ends to the bed. Fortunately, he was not injured, but sadly, he was released from active duty. My first instinct, when I first saw the recruit and the string was to laugh. But, I controlled it and walked behind to avoid further embarrassment to the recruit.

On the last night of basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in 1967, our company commander warned us not to "grab ass". Unfortunately, our recruit CC and Master-at_Arms started wrestling and knocked a 6 foot tall locker into a window that crashed right in front of the quarter deck three floors down. A couple of Shore Patrol showed up and that's the last we saw of our two fearless leaders.