About Basic Training & AIT

Basic & AIT
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cdwdirect
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About Basic Training & AIT

Post by cdwdirect »

THE BENNING BEGINNING

Congratulations! You're headed into the Infantry, the best job in the best Army in the world. Get ready for some good times and be prepared to pay the price: Discipline. You've got a long trail to hike to "make it." Here is some information to get you started.

I'll leave out the obvious stuff like, "Do what you are told as quickly as you can, and volunteer for everything." You can play the fool and still graduate OSUT, but why would you want to be like that? You're growing towards leadership and a more meaningful life, use this time well.

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OVERVIEW

To start with, boot camp is not what you expect. Though they may be hard on you at times, and make you feel like a failure, the primary objective of the Drill Sergeants is to get you trained and graduated. When you do better, score higher, and ultimately graduate with a higher percentage of your platoon - they and their chain of command look better. In addition to infantry training, your Drill Sergeants will teach you to navigate the particulars of Army life. From properly filling out equipment manifests to field expedient tricks with 550 cord, absorb as much information as you can and don't worry about looking stupid to ask a useful question. Don't apologize to Drill Sergeants, they know you're sorry for screwing up because they make you sorry. Don't thank Drill Sergeants, they are doing their job when they equip you with the information you need to take care of business.

If you don't lead an active life or haven't spent much time playing organized sports, the PT you'll do in boot camp will initially feel difficult, but that -quickly- fades as your body wakes up and your muscles begin to grow again. Within a week and a half you'll be coming in from morning PT feeling more energized than you did when you went out. PT replaces coffee as your pick-me-up. I'd smoked cigars and cigarettes off an on for nearly 9 years (I'm 23 now) before I went in, and struggled to even complete a 2 mile run without stopping to walk. Now I knock out 5 mile runs at less than 8-minutes a mile and feel high off it for hours. Don't be intimidated by PT or getting in shape... just do it. Don't be hung up on resting every second of your down time. When you get a few minutes at night, knock out 25-40 well-formed pushups and /then/ hop in the bunk to rack out. If you suck (like me) and score painfully low on your first PT test DO NOT QUIT on yourself... just get mad and work harder when you can. You get Sundays off and that is a good time to experiment. One Sunday I did 500 pushups. I was going for 1000, but we had to strip the floor (even under wall lockers) and clean the bay so I didn't have enough time. Platoon objectives before personal objectives, always.

Smokings become funny eventually. You realize that you joined the Army to get in shape, to do PT, and what better way to drive on past your old limits than by being smoked? While it can be really frustrating feeling like you've let your leaders down and can't satisfy them, fear not - most smoke sessions are pre-planned that morning with the company commander and the first sergeant dialing your Drill Sergeant's level of aggression up or down on schedule. Red phase will end and you'll still be smoked as a platoon... who cares? The worst that can happen is that you hit muscle failure and get called a pussy, but then a few seconds later you can probably knock out one more pushup, or get those feet back off the ground and keep hitting flutterkicks. If you just finished the sit-up routine and everyone is reclined resting, keep your legs up and do supine bicycles. Don't waste your time, you'll begin to feel RIP bearing down on you.

Physical challenges are fun to complete, and the development you sustain is their reward. The hardest part of OSUT for most of us was the classroom sessions and trying to stay awake. You'll only be in classrooms for a couple weeks - just get past them. Drink water to stay awake. My squad came up with a hand sign (crossed fingers) to indicate that we were on the verge of passing out asleep, so we could flash the guy sitting next to us so he would occasionally reach over and painfully punch or pinch us on the arm. It releases a surge of adrenaline and is quite effective.

Something that catches you off guard at first is the complete disdain for your decision to serve displayed by those in charge of you. They don't seem to care a whit who you are or what you're about. You felt patriotic stirrings and followed through with them by signing a contract and placing your life in other people's hands. That's a big deal, perhaps for some the decision of a lifetime. When you get into the Army though, you are in the company of men who have done that and OH-so-much-more, many with combat experience or fallen friends. Do not expect the respect and gratitude from them that you were accorded by the civilians you left behind. Trust me, there is PLENTY of love coming your way once you graduate. Don't lose the vision, don't forget why you joined... your personal ethos, prize, mission, and hope. Don't let the people around you, above or below you in rank, inject you with sorry values - let yours be solid and right and standing at the end of it all.

There are parts that are legitimately hard, and some parts that are a slow grind. In the end, you will look back at basic training with a smile and see the good things much more than the bad, and say, "Hah, that was easy! I'm glad I'm done."

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SHIPPING OUT

Your recruiter will give you a packing list to follow to keep you out of trouble - don't deviate from it too dramatically. Everything not issued to you is going to get locked up anyway. Wear comfortable clothes and pack your gear up in a personal backpack, not that retarded uni-strap deal you were given at MEPS. You'll want it to be a big bag because at the end of boot camp you're going to have a lot of stuff to move. Make sure you bring a pair of "shower shoes," basic disposable foam sandals from Wal-Mart are perfect, because the shower floors can get a little gunky with everyone in there together. Don't bring nice running shoes - take an old pair or buy something cheap. We had to throw ours away and buy Asics at the little PX behind 30th's DFAC. You're not allowed to run at 30th AG anyway because for that week you're expected to be acclimatizing to the area.

You'll fly in to Atlanta airport. Go to the big clock tower in the central area with all the restaurants and you'll see a ton of guys loitering about with ARMY bags. That's your crew! Hang around (eat a nice meal, enjoy it) and eventually someone (likely civilian) will start calling off the MEPS stations that were sending people that day. Yours will be called, let them know you're there, and then follow their instructions to line up for the next bus to Sand Hill. Be the quiet guy and listen to everyone jacking jaw - it's soothing to contemplate how uneasy the other guys are. The macho posturing. From this point forward the RumorMill(tm) is active and roughly 100% of the things that people say about your coming life and training is BULLSHIT. The information you've received here at ArmyRanger.com is MORE than enough to get you through. Listen and smile, most of these guys are idiots.

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RECEPTION BATTALION

On arriving you'll be yelled off the bus and into a formation near Johnson Hall (I think that's the name) and then you'll come in single-file and be seated on those hard wooden benches to start turning in your ship packets. You don't need to turn in all the other paperwork you have, high school diplomas and that sort of stuff. Then it's time to throw away your contraband, which they say includes aerosol products... DON'T throw out your shaving cream! It is NOT considered an aerosol, but stuff like AXE body spray is. You'll be moved into the meeting room and be issued your IET smart book and get briefed on some stuff, then go downstairs to get your first bit of clothing and a laundry bag. Eventually you'll be allowed to sleep. My line was told to sleep in all the next morning and nobody came for us until noon. Most people aren't so lucky, and wind up with only a handful of hours of sleep that first day.

You'll see privates in uniform working and moving you from station to station - these guys are braggadocios shitbags pulling detail, as you'll later learn - they washed out of training and are pussing out their days at 30th. Only a couple of them we met were remotely worth respect, they fractured some bones during training and didn't want to go home on convalescent leave. The rest are retards who'll hand you two spoons when you're carrying a steak-meal on your tray through the DFAC. Watch out for them because at night they came through people's barracks and procured unsecured equipment, i.e. wallets. It is best to start early with the "fireguard" routine. Pick two guys to do the front door and two for the back stairwell (if you have one) and then work down the line of bunks through the night on hour shifts. Use that time to read your IET book and start really memorizing your general orders and the Soldier's Creed.

Your line will ship out as a group to the same company, downrange, but likely you will not be in one platoon together. They kinda shuffle several lines together into one company. For some reason everyone was worried about this, but you have to realize you've got some eight months of straight training coming up where you will continuously be meeting new people and selecting friends from among them. Memorize your line number and roster number as soon as they assign it to you. When you form up in the eerie morning silence out on the parking lot, you'll have to sound off with your roster number and then as a line, your line number. Yell it loud. Before I shipped out, when I was driving around town, I would yell in my car. Just yell shit out, to get used to yelling. It sounds gay, but it made the first few weeks a bit easier.

The Drill Sergeants at 30th are men who finished a term as a regular Drill Sergeant on Sand Hill. While stern in bearing, they are pretty chill and under normal circumstances wont mess with you. You may be at 30th for as long as two weeks, even in some rare cases three weeks. Yeah, it sucks, it's boring, but it's also finite. Some Sergeant will say, "You'll wish you could come back here." Baloney! I hated 30th more than anything. You get to eat what you want in the DFAC. Yay.

The night you are issued your ACUs, go over them with a pair of nail clippers and remove all loose threads. Hit the cuffs and the seam ends and the pocket flaps in particular. Make sure your pockets are shut at all times. Don't put your hands in your pockets when you're in uniform. If your boots aren't comfortable, say something right then and there. You don't want your toes to be right up on the end of your boots, you want some space there.

The worst part of 30th is the penicillin shot in the ass cheek. It fucking hurts.

Finally the golden morning arrives. Everyone will form up in the breezeway and dump and repack their gear to make sure they have it all. Your for-real Drill Sergeants will materialize, unfamiliar and elated in the most menacing way, and their threatening presence will be immediately palpable. The Drill Sergeants who had been keeping care of you will probably make you extremely uncomfortable with their anecdotes and personal attentions. Just chill, it's going to be a long day and nothing you can do will change it for the better. When I went through, we moved over to the big grassy staging area and recited the Soldier's Creed as a group and then loaded onto busses with our duffle bags on our backs and laundry bags in our hands. We packed in the bus like sardines, glad to be getting the hell away from 30th and into some "real training." Huh.

To be overly descriptive, here is how it went for me...

The bus drove what seemed like a long circuitous route around Sand Hill, eventually terminating in front of some plain brown barracks. Just as the brakes were hissing and I was beginning to shift my bag off my knees, all hell broke loose and my consciousness slipped inside itself. I was aware of swirling chaos, noise, and a foaming sea of panic surging through the privates around me. I saw myself sitting there on this bus, in this moment in time, and there in the inner sanctum of my private mind, I started laughing - and smiling to myself I nodded. "Here we go." I stood up and broke into a stumblerun off the bus and right into the blistering Georgia heat, a bullhorn inches from my ears, a thousand times a thousand decibels of smoke raining down on me like purifying fire from the sky.

(This section intentionally blank. You'll figure it out.)

After a while, a few people passed out, and we were told to get up and given five minutes to find both our two bags from a pile of roughly 400. It was the biggest clusterfuck I've ever seen. It took three iterations of smoke and timehacks before everyone had their bags. Then we held them over our heads. Once the Drill Sergeants were properly amused they started calling off names. I thought I heard my name being called for first platoon, so I grabbed my shit and hightailed it in the direction everyone else was running. Up and inside the bay, it was ice cold in contrast to the outside, and the floor and walls were the purest white, the bed frames were gray, and the mattresses were light blue. The lights were on and bright. I felt like I was inside a spaceship. We dumped our bags and started toeing the line in the order we had arrived in. I remember being terrified that I had heard wrong and was in the wrong platoon, the wrong bay completely. "I am so fucked. Oh shit..."

:twisted:

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RANDOM NOTES

Ft. Benning, GA is lingeringly HOT and humid, so your sweat fails to evaporate and effects no cooling... or the weather is bitingly cold in the winter. It alternates quickly in the middling seasons and can be hard to get used to. I shipped out August 25th and it was so hot my soft civilian hands blistered doing pushups in the CTA, but by the end of cycle the ground was frosted over during morning PT. Winter/Spring is the rainy season.

There is a LOT of structure to your days on Sand Hill. For the first three weeks, a Drill Sergeant is sleeping in a room in your barracks and you are under the microscope. Eventually that goes down to one Drill Sergeant pulling CQ for the whole company, visiting each platoon several times a night for a report from the fireguards.

There will be a day early on where PT involves a one-mile run. Run your ass off. You will be assigned in a running group, but even if you are put in B Group you can do A. Try to run with A Group at the beginning of cycle, it's the best practice you'll get at sticking it out, and you can always fall back to B Group if you tire too much to keep up. The Ability Group Runs (AGRs) get longer and longer as the weeks pass, and you want to begin running fast with the short runs so there is hope of hanging in. You really don't get to run often enough in OSUT.

You DO however get some good road marching experience. Your Drill Sergeants will hopefully square you away, but in case it is not taught... center as much weight high up in the ruck and close to your back as you can. Pack the heaviest items in the radio pouch. Adjust your LCE straps so that the belt is either really LOW or really HIGH. The reason is that your ruck frame kidney pad will impact the LCE clips directly if you put the belt where you would normally wear it. The pressure of a full ruck on those bits of metal, over six or more miles, will leave painful bruises as they cause a great deal of pain. If the pad doesn't touch the belt at all, marching is so much easier. The cross bars on the ruck frame sometimes have been distorted so that they poke into your back. Kick them in to make a concave space. You'll be told to roll your LCE back strap up and tape the roll back to itself, just be careful to not make a lump that will get rubbed into your back.

You've got sixty dudes living in one room, maturity isn't the name of the game. Cling to what shreds of it you can and use it when you get to make your few decisions. For example, even if you are a Christian, don't go to chapel more than one or two Sundays. There is work that needs to be done on the bay and everyone who stays behind and does it resents the people who take their weekly mini-vacation. Some guys bounce around to every service that they can get to, and it is really poor of them. As one of our Drill Sergeants put it, "God will forgive you for missing a church service. If God doesn't forgive the Infantry, we've got other problems."

The hardest part of going through OSUT is not the training, its dealing with people. Be unintimidated, but humble and quiet, an agreeable diplomat. A right attitude will carry you through the days when you'll be unmotivated, because they inevitably come.

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THE MOST IMPORTANT THING

Just let go.

Let go of your civilian life and meet the Army in a giant embrace. Your entire lifestyle, from the hair on your head to the shoes on your feet, is going to be affected. This new way of living and thinking is integral to your duty for the next 4+ years, you better learn to dig it or you'll never stop struggling, and eventually struggling wears a dude down. Everyone hits the hump and has to overcome it. Be ready to change, to be uncomfortable, and also to be small and not yet good at what you're asked to do each day. It will come to you eventually... but do yourself a favor, make it a smooth transition, and simply let go. You're not going to cease being the cool guy you are today, you're just going to grow and get even cooler.

Eventually you get to go home as a U.S. Army Infantryman, rock out, play video games, drink the grog, and get the sexy femmes. But for what may be the first time in your life, it will all be in celebration of real honest-to-God adult achievements. Remember that it only gets better and it only gets more fun. Your freedom will quickly return to you.

Earn it.

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I might add more later.

-cdwdirect
Last edited by cdwdirect on April 14th, 2006, 5:30 pm, edited 10 times in total.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by oneday_I_will »

Ranger cwdirect,
I just want to take this time and thank you for all that you have written for all of us future soldiers. Even though I am not the youngest on the block and a former zoomie, I try to learn all I can from those that have gone before. I as well, will be leaving sometime in the near future to return to active service. I wish I had read this, or something like this, about 10 years ago. Once again, and sincerely, thanks for the motivation and thank you for the heads up. Oneday out.
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Chris
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by Chris »

Ranger cdwdirect, that was a very good read. Thanks for the information
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by brent7890 »

Way to tell it, Ranger cdwdirect told it! Thanks for the story, it was much inspiring!
Last edited by brent7890 on April 3rd, 2010, 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by Kilted Heathen »

brent7890 wrote:Way to tell it, This guy told it! Thanks for the story, it was much inspiring!
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by brent7890 »

Comment edited accordingly.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by Nathannnn »

Ranger cdwdirect,
Thank you. This post is exactly what I was looking for. It was a very good read.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by Pigeon »

Ranger cdwdirect, Absolutely wonderful.
Extremely helpful to hear this information from someone who has actually experienced OSUT first hand.
And in such detail too.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by Dc22x »

Ranger Cdwdirect, Thank you for this information I ship in about 2 months so it was a good read to know what to prepare for when I get to Ft. Benning.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by mv2012 »

Ranger cdwdirect,

Thank you very much for this excellent write-up. This is exactly the kind of information I have been looking for.
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Re: About Basic Training & AIT

Post by iggy »

Ranger cdwdirect,
Thank you very much for this post. This is exactly the kind of information I was hoping to find.
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