Integrity First;
Service Before Self;
And Excellence In All We Do.

You’re in luck: you don’t need to go spend time in the military, possibly getting shot at by angry people, to benefit from these core values. We can all choose to adopt them, whether we’re military or not.

INTEGRITY FIRST

In the Air Force, they make a big deal about honesty, but not just any old honesty. They want proactive honesty. Regular honesty just means, if someone asks you if you screwed up, you say yes. Proactive honesty means, if you screw up, you tell whoever you need to tell, and make sure it gets fixed. And that, proactive honesty, is integrity.

I was a Weather Forecaster while I was enlisted. If I messed up a forecast, even if I could justify it with some clever use of loopholes (believe it or not, there are specific guidelines for determining precisely when a forecast is officially “screwed up”), it was better for all parties concerned if I would amend it anyway. Absolute worst case scenario, a messed up forecast could make a pilot crash. But even if everything went rosy and no problems came about because of the missed forecast, I’d still feel worse about myself, knowing I hadn’t given it my all.

As a matter of fact, there was a long period when I was doing as little work as possible. I was using every loophole I could. I still remember one trick: any time winds are light, always forecast them to be 9KT. That way your forecast isn’t “out of category” (ie “messed up”) unless the winds hit 19KT. Forecast calm wind and your forecast goes out of category when the wind hits 10KT! (Why 9KT instead of 10KT? If you forecast 10KT and the wind actually was calm, you’d go out of category…) Well, using this trick, I had less forecasts officially out of category, but at the same time it had a cynicalizing impact on me. Over time, I began to become extremely miserable at work. “I could program a computer to do this!” (and I could have, and I even did program TCL scripts to do certain parts of my job).

I felt like my time was being wasted, that I’d made a big mistake going into that career field, but the more I resisted it, the more downhill things looked. I hit rock bottom after a week of training to take phonecalls from pilots mid-flight. They threw a ceremony to give us training certificates, and I forgot to salute the colonel handing them out. Big no-no’s in military circles, and it cranked the heat up on me all along the chain of command, when I was already in pretty shaky standing.

I made a decision shortly thereafter, to return my focus to the blessings and good things in my life instead of dwelling cynically on how “messed up” the squadron and career path in general were. (And, objectively speaking, military weather forecasting really is pretty screwed up, but that’s not the point.)

With that decision, I also started putting a little more heart into my work, and like magic things started falling into place. A few days later I got word that my application for early release had been accepted (Congress was forcing the Air Force to downsize, so I volunteered; I’d volunteered once before and been rejected). As soon as I stopped resisting, and turned integrity back on, suddenly I had learned the lesson that I was meant to learn in that situation, and the path to my next adventure was revealed.

The thing about integrity is it usually takes a lot of courage. It takes unconditional acceptance of one’s own self, because otherwise there’s too much fear of “losing face” when one admits a mistake. But like anything, it becomes easier with practice, especially when you experience first hand just how painless it actually is. Like a high diving board, the fear of admitting a mistake is mostly illusionary. Make one dive, and the rest are easier.

SERVICE BEFORE SELF

Service before self is something I’m working on right now in my own life. This blog is part of that, I want to provide value to people through writing. The thing about value and service is, I usually find, it’s reciprocal. In other words, when I give value to other people, it shines back at me like a mirror. A win-win situation. If I try to take value from people, my own value plummets like a rock.

Service before self doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a Mother Theresa type. In fact, sometimes it’s the exact opposite. The best way I can explain this is with an example. I was in the car with some friends, and we were discussing where we should go eat. And it was one of those “I dunno, where do you wanna go?” “I dunno, where do you wanna go?” battles. No one wanted to take the initiative and lead the group. So I blurted out where I wanted to go, not caring whether that was somewhere everyone else wanted to go. And of course, that’s the best, most serviceful thing I could’ve done in a situation like that.

Of the many services you can perform, one of them is good leadership. If you’re a good leader, then by asking others for service, you are actually providing them a service, like in the “I dunno, where do you wanna go?” example. This is especially important for guys in relationships. If a guy is all like “ummm where would you like to go tonight”, all the time, that’s a turn-off.

I find that just by consciously deciding, ok, I want to create value for people by writing on the internet, just that thought alone somehow opens floodgates of creativity for me. When I first started the Glowing Face Man Blog, I was surprised how tough it was to write. I had no motivation at all. That was before I had started looking into how I could create value. Now that I’ve decided I want to create value, writing these articles has become easy. I don’t even think of myself as being the most well-travelled or well-read guy, yet now I keep realizing just how much value there is in various experiences which I’d totally written off before (like, e.g., my Air Force experiences).

It’s taken a long time for me to really realize and appreciate it, but one perfect example of service before self, was my mother. Leaving college to take care of first one, then two, then three, then four kids, now that’s Service Before Self. I disagree with a lot of things my mother taught me. Well I may as well come out and say it, there’s very little we agree on at all. But I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if I’d been neglected by her.

EXCELLENCE IN ALL WE DO

The core value of Excellence In All We Do kind of ties the previous two together. It’s hard to do an excellent job of something if I’m not totally honest about it. So integrity is tied into excellence. And I’ve never had much success with anything unless I did it selflessly. That’s where service before self comes in. Excellence In All We Do pushes it to the next level. It’s a conscious decision not to settle for mediocrity, or “good enough”, but to strive to do better.

Excellence is important for the warfighter, because you can bet the farm the enemy’s also going to be striving for excellence in all they do, so it’s literally life and death. But it’s just as important outside the military. Before I die, I’ll look back on the things I’ve done, and if I didn’t do them excellently, then I may as well have not done them at all, which would mean I may as well just die now. It’s not as literally life and death as it is for the warfighter, but it’s still life and death in a more symbolic way.

Excellence In All We Do, does not mean striving or tryyyying harder. Putting unnecessary effort into something is, well, unnecessary. The Air Force leadership really likes to emphasize the idea of minimal force. Minimal force means getting the job done with as little as necessary. That doesn’t mean half-assing it, of course. It means coming up with the elegant solution instead of the brute force solution.

But how does one even come up with the elegant solution? Certainly not by sitting there with forehead scrunched up trying to come up with it. If you’re a multibillion dollar branch of the Department of Defense, you could contract it out to thousands of scientists, but that’s really just a bigger version of the scrunched up forehead. For individuals, I think you just have to consciously choose excellence, and then wait for the elegant solution to come. Maybe it’ll take years, or maybe not come at all, but I think when you choose excellence, the mind becomes more receptive to elegant solutions which it might otherwise glance over.

The “Fourth Core Value”– Situational Awareness

In basic training and tech school, the drill sergeants and blue ropes talk about a fourth core value, “Situational Awareness”. This fourth, “secret” core value isn’t officially one of the core values at all, they just bring it up in the training environment because a lack of situational awareness spells pain in boot camp, an environment absolutely full of opportunities to screw up. Nonetheless, situational awareness is still a useful core value outside of military training environments. It sort of corresponds to the concept of “presence”.

Presence is the state of being in the present, in the here-and-now. Being present means being aware of everything that’s going on, both in the environment and also inside one’s own self. Consider the difference between a man who gets angry and goes berserk, vs. a man who gets angry and observes “I’m angry right now”. The second man is the more present one.

I’ve been working on improving my own presence. There are a lot of advantages to being present. With true presence comes a deep joy. You’ve probably experienced this, maybe while taking a walk you suddenly just became “aware” of the trees and grass and people all around, and felt inexplicably happy. Or I dunno, maybe you haven’t, but I hope you’ll experience it often. In any case, that’s presence.

Of course, the Air Force drill instructors are looking at it at a much more pragmatic, less spiritual level. And that’s fine, too. I’m a very spiritual guy, and that tends to color how I interpret things.

CONCLUSION

Blending the three core values together, as well as the fourth “extra” core value, they all strengthen and enhance eachother.

But don’t limit yourself to three or four core values chosen by a bunch of plane-flying wingnuts. One of the advantages of a systems of core values is that one becomes a stronger figure, with a more solid hold on one’s reality, just by having core values. A lot of people walking around don’t really have any strong, sincere core values. They probably have some default values, chosen for them by society and school and church, but a man with his own passionate core values is a rare and powerful man. Whether you feel these Air Force originated core values resonate with you or not, I hope my article will at least get you thinking about what are your own core values.

If you’re ever in San Antonio’s airbase and want to tell which trainees are sixth weekers and which are just trainees, it’s in the uniform. We were practically sparkling in our fancy Air Force Blues, the non-combat side of military dress. This was very convenient, since the green battle-dress uniform we wore until this point, was totally trashed by Warrior Week, and taking some much-needed R&R at the squadron dry-cleaners.

In some ways, the final week was easier, and in other ways, it was harder. We had a lot more freedom, with a lot of the supervision passing down from the drill sergeants to our own airmen leaders. On the other hand, as near-graduates, there was a sense that we had no cushion for failure. All the routine things like marching, making our beds, reciting military trivia, these were things we were expected to have nailed down like they were built into our mother tongue. In fact, this was largely illusionary, but at the time, we were all on the edge of our nerves expecting to be held back at a moment’s notice.

We were also expected to set an example for the younger flights. I don’t mean this in a good way, either. One time, while trying to inconspicuously slip out of the chow hall undetected and back to the dorm, some blackhat I’d never even seen before halted me and started ripping me a new asshole in front of a bunch of new recruits. See, my tie wasn’t on right. The reality is, this TI wasn’t even really talking to me. He was talking to his fresh meat flight, and I was just a prop. My role was to hold my composure like I was made of stone, and after a month and a half of practice, I was very good at it. After awhile, he called one of his trainees over. “What do you think, does Airman Face Man look acceptable!?” this towering red-faced sergeant demanded of the poor girl. “S-Sir.. Trainee Smith reports as ordered.. n-no sir..” the girl was terrified to have the spotlight on her. “Ask Airman Faceman whether he ironed his blues with a rock!” commanded Sgt. Meathead. At this point he was just having fun, and I even wanted to break out laughing at what he just said, but I stood at attention like a robot. “D-did you iron your blues with a rock?” she asked me, copying the TI exactly. “No ma-am” I replied coolly, no trace of emotion. That’s the sort of crap we were having to do constantly so drill sergeants could terrify their flights.

The truth is, if you made it to the final week, the only way you’d get washed back would be for really seriously screwing up– like getting caught drunk or something– or for medical/beaurocratical reasons that you have no control over anyway. As much theatrics as the training instructors liked to make, they were really only one step above trainees in the bigger hierarchy, and, believe it or not, the USAF’s primary mission isn’t to torture new recruits. Every minute an airman spends in the “pipeline” is a minute not contributed toward putting pilots in the sky.

FLAG DRILLS

A lot of what we did in week 6 was drilling for the graduation ceremony. This consisted of a parade around a big grassy field with lots of spectators watching, while patriotic music plays. There are three types of parade flights. First, the band, which goes first. This is made up of airmen who play instruments. If you let the people at MEPS know you can play one of the band instruments, then it’s off to a special music squadron for you, and you’ll spend the entirety of bootcamp worrying about music, in addition to everything else. I don’t know whether they make other things easier to compensate. I didn’t go to that squadron so I don’t know. Behind the band come the flagbearers. My fellow Wolfpackers and I fell into this category. Fortunately that’s less intensive than the band, and we only had to do special training for the week prior to the parade, instead of the entirety of training. Finally, there are the “normal” flights, with neither trumpets nor flags.

We weren’t allowed to practice with the flags themselves. First time we got to see them was at the parade itself. Meanwhile, we practiced with the flagholders. A flagholder is kind of sash-sort-of-thing that goes around your waist and your shoulders, and out in front, has a “cup” to hold the base of the flag. You have to carry your banner in a specific way. Needless to say, you don’t want to screw this up, since a mistake with a giant waving stars-n-stripes is gonna be very noticeable.

I must’ve spent twenty hours marching around in circles with that empty flagholder in preparation of the grad ceremony. Me and the other sixty men I’d spent the last three fortnights with.

THE DORM GUARD DISASTER

When we first stepped off the bus at our new home, what seemed like a lifetime ago, our dorm was guarded by then-mysterious young men in blue who vaguely resembled ourselves. Now it was time to return the favor. That means we were now working with not one but two sets of guard rosters, one for our own dorm, and one for the babies of Wolfpack.

When you pull night-shift babysitting duty, you don’t just wake up when it’s your turn and march to the other dorm. That’s a big no-no because they can’t have airmen wandering around after hours. Instead, you head over shortly before lights out, and you sleep in a reserve bed in the baby dorm, until your two-hour shift comes up. Then you do your guard thing, and go back to sleep. Pretty smooth, right? But it didn’t go smoothly when my turn came up to go watch the newbies.

I was in a deep, weary sleep when the retiring dormguard shook me awake and told me it was my turn to take over in a few minutes. I acknowledged him with some zombie-like grunt and shut my eyes for what seemed like thirty seconds. I climbed wearily out of bed. It was standard, in this situation, that you didn’t bother undressing until you finished your two hours, so I was still in full BDU’s, boots and all. I immediately noticed the silhouette of a TI standing between me and the main hallway, arms on his hips. “Hmm, that’s odd…” I thought. There shouldn’t have been any stripes around so late at night!

With my sleep-deprived mind, I calculated the best course of action would probably be to walk wide around him to get to the hallway where I needed to sign in, trying not to bother whatever he was doing. That was, of course, the exact worst thing I could possibly do, pissing him off more than he already was. As he halted me and started hollering profanities at me (surely waking up every guy in the vicinity) I had no idea what was going on.

We moved to the hall, me and the other visiting guardsmen, and somehow I ascertained what the problem was. Deep in the administrative halls on the ground floor, a TI was stationed every night to make sure the dormguards were present in all the rooms. This was done by transmitting to a speaker near the door of each dormitory. When he tried to confirm someone was guarding the new guys, nobody responded, which is why I found myself under the spotlight of one very pissed off, very sleep-deprived drill sergeant.

After chewing us out visciously, he took down our identities (AETC Form 341) and steamed off. As for us dormguards, we were utterly puzzled. The dormguards who took the first nightshift, they reported they were giving some advice to some of the incoming trainees in the latrine room. And that’s why they didn’t hear the speaker. But then who shook me awake? Where were the other dormguards when the TI angrily let himself into the dorm? I might have overslept, but my predecessors shouldn’t have left their station until I signed in. More puzzling, if I did oversleep, why did I wake up exactly when that blackhat was standing there? Did he just stand there and wait until someone got up?

I’ll probably never know precisely what happened. But we were all absolutely certain we’d be washed back. The next morning, our primary TI was livid. He made us stand in the hall, arms held straight out in front of us, holding some heavy books or something at the end of our arms. If you try this at home, you’ll see that it gets difficult and painful rather fast. But we weren’t washed back, to our infinite relief.

THE PERSONAL DRAWER CATASTROPHE

It was Saturday morning and we were all very excited because the final Saturday of boot camp, you get “town pass”. You’re allowed to depart the confines of Lackland AFB and actually see some of San Antonio. With about an hour left until our brief flirt with freedom, catastrophe struck. Without warning, the squadron Senior Master Sergeant let himself into our dorm and announced a surprise personal drawer inspection.

A word about your personal drawer in BMT. It’s the lowest drawer in your locker and it’s unique in that there are no guidelines for how it’s to be arranged. Every other inch of the locker, is required to meet ruthless standards. That bottom drawer, meant for storing things like letters and stamps and pens and change, is only constrained by a few general rules. No contraband (drugs, guns, etc.), but that goes without saying. No food, cell phones, etc. And nothing which rightly belongs somewhere else in the locker, e.g., no clothes.

So this dickhead of a SMSgt had us all standing at attention by our beds, and he was going around the room with our main training instructor, yanking out peoples’ personal drawers, the one inspection we had never anticipated or prepared for. Thanks to the lax rules, most men got away with just some verbal abuse about being disorganized and being slackers, and the inspector had no room to actually formally complain about anything. But a handful of airmen had clothes stored away in their private space, a common BMT cheat to make organizing the other drawers easier. I never tried this cheat, so I thought I had nothing to worry about, but I had forgotten one little cheat. I’d stored a pre-tied blues necktie in there, since I had terrible trouble tying the danged thing. Sure enough, he found it, and that’s all he needed to own my ass.

By misfortune, the airmen who got caught with clothes stowed away, were exactly the same group who’d been doing dorm guard when disaster struck there. We were berated at great length about how we were slackers, how we were dishonor to the military, how we were crackheads, etc. etc. But still we were not washed back, not a man. What SMSgt Dickhead did do, though, was strip us of half our town pass, commanding us to report to him. And then with malice in his voice he intoned: “And if you or anyone you know complains about this, I’ll make sure you get washed back.”

Looking back on the situation now, I see the guy was completely bluffing, and that I could’ve gone straight to the commander and complained right away, and my tormentor would’ve been in much worse trouble than he could ever heap on me. Whether or not shortening my town pass was within his authority (and it probably was not), when he threatened retaliation if I complained, that was a giant no-no. I wish now that I had gone and made a stand, for the benefit of future airmen.

SEWING ON OUR STRIPES — NOT

During one of our final evening meetings in the common room– where we were now happily permitted to actually use the chairs– a list was read of airmen who were promoted. In AFBMT, we were all paygrade E-0 (“Airman Basic”), but some guys had stipulations in their contracts that upon completing training, they’d be upgraded either to E-1 (“Airman”) or E-2 (“Airman 1st Class”). Me, I got a promotion to E-1, thanks to having over 15 units of college credit I took at a community college while I was still in high school. Talk about irony. There I was, I’d just been severely reprimanded for not one but two big violations of AETC pedantry. I’d barely “passed” the situps test (by which I mean they turned me a blind eye and let me slip through). I could barely hit the target at the rifle range. In the first week, I couldn’t even tie my boots! …And now, I outranked most the flight.

The handful of us with contractually-stipulated promotions were permitted to take an hour to march to one of the many BX’s on base where there was a shop that would sew stripes on while you waited. Unfortunately, there was just one poor woman doing the sewing, and the shop closed rather early, so we weren’t able to get those stripes sewn on. But we did take advantage of our time waiting in line to buy some pizza, something they don’t serve in the chow halls of BMT.

FAMILY VISITS

In the final weekend, parents and family are invited to come for the big graduation parade. On Friday, each trainee got most of the day off for “base leave”, meaning we were free to go anywhere in the confines of Lackland, and if any family had come to visit us, we could be with them. On Saturday, joy of joys, we actually got the “town pass” which let us leave the base and walk around civilian San Antonio. And on Sunday, there were a few more hours of base leave. So that’s three days a trainee could spend with family.

Looking back on it now, as a 25-year-old who’s been living on my own for close to a decade, there’s a certain temptation to say, “what’s the big deal??” Why would you have your family come fly down to Texas just for a few hours with you? Bear in mind, though. For most of us, boot camp was our first extended time away from the shelter of our parents’ rooves. One and all, we were deathly homesick. It’s a lesson in how we take things for granted: to an exhausted sixth weeker, the idea of just chillin’ with family in downtown San Antonio seems like heaven on earth.

In my case, I definitely longed to see my family. My mother, father, and older brother flew down to visit me, and I was happy to the point of crying when I saw them. For mom, it was her first time ever flying in an airplane. (The three of them were coming from San Diego, CA.) On Friday, we hung out around the base. Looking back at it objectively, in a strict “compared to Disneyland” sense, they must have been pretty bored. But I was sooo happy to be with them! Saturday, we met in downtown San Antonio, explored the Alamo, ate at a nice restaurant, and generally just enjoyed being together. I’m still very touched that they came to visit. Throughout the whole second half of basic, whenever I was afraid of being washed back, it wasn’t just for my own sake, but because I would have half died if I had to tell my folks and my bro that they’d have to enjoy the Alamo without me.

FROM BOOT CAMP TO TECH SCHOOL

The fact that we were nearing the end of the nightmare only really sunk in when they took away our canteens. From day one, we’d all been lugging around those canteens everywhere. At first when we put on our blues, we carefully carried those battlefield water vessels, since they weren’t designed to be worn with a suit. But then they took ‘em away and that’s when it really sunk in: we’re goin’ to tech school!! It felt strange actually drinking from the flight water fountain, equipment which had hitherto been 100% decorational because no one dared add one more thing we’d have to painstakingly clean.

The last night in the dormitories, they flung open the closet with all the luggage we brought on the airplanes. Those who had them at the time (this was in 2001) were reunited with laptops and cellphones. A guy in the bed next to mine had a laptop and some movies, and we debated vigorously whether to watch “Fellowship Of The Ring” or porn. I think Tolkien won, but it didn’t matter much because we were all so exhausted we all went to sleep within ten minutes.

A question people ask a lot is: “Where do you go after Air Force boot camp? Do you get to go home?” For the second question, the answer is no. No rest for the weary, as they say. For the first, it depends where your tech school (AIT) is located, which in turn depends on your job. If you’re destined to a job with techschool at Keesler, like me, you get on a bus for one really long bus ride, Texas to Mississippi. Some jobs have their tech school in Lackland, in which case you take a ten-minute walk from one squadron to another. But no, you don’t get to escape Uncle Sam quite yet.

Air Force boot camp was a great learning experience for me. It really expanded my reality, forcing me to grow up a whole lot in just six-and-a-half weeks. You’ve just read the final chapter in my days under the tutelage of those kind, reasonable drill instructors. But the end of one story is the beginning of another…

Zero Week
First Week
Second & Third Week
Fourth Week
Fifth Week
Graduation Week

We bid a weeklong farewell to Wolfpack Squadron and to the usual posse of TIs who oversaw us. Our rucksacks packed with spare clothes, we boarded a bus which took us away from Lackland proper, to a camp somewhere off in the wilderness of San Antonio. My flight, and our female sister flight, weren’t the only ones arriving: each of the training squadrons sent their fifthweek flights to this camp, and there was some amount of inter-squadron mingling. It was chaos when we first arrived. Our usual drill sergeants were replaced with new ones, who wasted no time barking orders at us to get everything pinned down. From the boys I’d shared a dorm with and endured plenty of abuse and training with for the past month, sixty warriors would be born.

EVERYDAY LIFE IN CAMP

Most of the usual routines of BMT were turned on their heads. The emphasis was no longer placed so much on tedious details– we still had to make the beds (cots, actually), but it only took a minute and wasn’t inspected very rigorously. Instead, we suffered under time constraints which made the previous weeks seem like leisurely strolls around Lackland.

Take showering, for example. Rather than our own shower right in our dorm, there were a handful of shower chambers, one of which our flight was assigned. There was no timeslot alloted specifically for showering, instead we had to figure that out on our own out of the tiny amount of freedom we had in the evenings. Consequently, some airmen really skimped here, showering only every other day, or taking other time-saving measures. Of course we weren’t supposed to do that, but bathing was unsupervised so it was every man for himself.

About one-third of meals took place in a central chow tent, with ridiculous lines and a ridiculous rush to eat, and two-thirds were Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs). An MRE is what the U.S. military issues to soldiers in the field. It’s an extremely condensed meal. Each package has a main course and several sides. They’re actually pretty good. You could eat the meal cold or hot. Needless to say, a combatant in the field doesn’t enjoy the luxuries of any kind of kitchen. The way he heats his meal is rather interesting. There’s a kind of “pocket” you insert the meal into. The boundaries of the pocket are full of some sort of chemical (the food doesn’t actually come in contact with the chemical). You carefully add some water to the chemical, and a reaction makes it hot as hell. Voila, a hot meal, with no smoke to betray your position to enemy snipers. Modern warfare!

Besides giving us some practice chowing down like a warfighter, these packaged eats allowed us to pack a bunch more activity into Warrior Week, without having to constantly take breaks to divert the whole flight to dining facilities. That means the whole time was just that much more stressful.

In Lackland, we paid quite a bit of attention to keeping our uniforms clean and our boots shining. Not so much in Warrior Camp. The entire complex was covered in some kind of crunchy white gravel, and at the end of the day, everything from the knees down was covered in white dust. It was kind of funny seeing our shiny black boots turned white. And that’s not even the dirtiest we’d be getting during our tenure there.

After passing fourth week, there was a noticeable shift in supervision. We were less supervised by drill sergeants, and more responsibility went into the hands of our own airmen leaders. See, each flight has an airman leader, one of our own who was chosen for that role (largely based on rank– some men come in with higher rank as part of their enlistment contracts). Throughout the first four weeks, this didn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. Starting in this white-gravel hell, though, the airmen leaders took tons more leadership and our TI’s left us unsupervised far more often.

One of the biggest trials we faced here was sleep deprivation. There were fewer hours allotted for sleeping, and we still had to pull dorm guard duty (actually, tent guard duty now). To make things worse, if we had to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, we were required to use a buddy system, since the latrines were in a separate building. And sleeping conditions were poorer, sleeping on a tiny cot in a giant tent. As if to taunt us, our TIs forbade us use the coffee packets included in our Meals Ready-to-Eat. We sorely, desperately longed for that coffee just to keep our weary eyes open!

Throughout this whole time, we were carrying around fake M16’s, and there were lots of protocols about how you had to handle them. Basically always keep them pointed at the sky. Which leads us to the next topic…

RIFLE TRAINING

I understand that in the new AF bootcamp, significantly more time is devoted to learning to shoot. When I went through, it took up less than a day, and very little of that consisted of actually firing anything. Most of our training consisted of endless safety lectures. We also spent tons of time going over the process of cleaning and loading a rifle. I’m not very good at doing precise things with my hands, and had a lot of difficulty here. I guess if I ever have to kill me some nazis, I’ll just resort to some kung fu fighting

We got quite a bit of lecturing about how, at the range, we were only to aim our rifles at the targets. They really emphasized how the sergeants working there were armed, and how if they shot any stupid airmen waving their rifles around, those sergeants would be rewarded and promoted. And if you took your hands off a loaded rifle for any reason, they’d be pretty pissed. Leaving a weapon loaded and unwatched was a cardinal sin.

Finally we got to the range and got to play marksman. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s premier sniper. I barely hit the target at all, much less the bullseye. If I were in the Army or Marines, I would’ve probably failed boot camp then and there. Good thing I was in the Air Force, signed up as a weather forecaster.

FIRST-AID TRAINING

We received seminars on a variety of topics, including combat first-aid. Of course, we being mostly recent high-school graduates, we weren’t expected to be doing brain surgery. Mostly we were taught some basics to try and keep casualties alive until medics could arrive.

We got to take turns being casualties and take turns carrying each other. Rest assured, if you should get shot while reading Glowing Face Man, and enemies are closing in, I’ll carry you to safety.

NBC WARFARE

NBC stands for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical. NBC training was our introduction to these horrors of modern warfare. It was an all-day activity, and one of the most interesting experiences at boot camp. Mainly it followed a seminar format, airmen sitting in bleachers receiving lectures about the theory and practice of combat in an NBC environment. But, with a twist. We had gas masks, and the lecturer would periodically shout, “GAS! GAS! GAS!” At that point, you had a few seconds to throw the mask on and secure it. A gas mask isn’t easy to put on, at least not the monstrosities we had. Those of us with glasses had it worse, since we had to wear our special-issue “Spiderman Goggles”, extremely uncomfortable glasses-goggles made for wearing beneath a gasmask. I still have the things somewhere at my parents’ house.

Toward the end of the day, we dressed up in full-body protective gear. That basically means wearing a thick extra set of clothing over everything else. We did this in the sweltering Texas Summer heat. We had to make ourselves airtight, tucking the overpants into our boots, wearing gloves, the works. Add the gasmask and its built-in hood, and we were ready to dive into the trenches of World War I. Oh, and one other thing. That huge, thick extra layer of clothing we had to wear? Yeah, the insides were completely caked with charcoal.

I’ve never been dirtier than I was on that day of Chem Warfare training. See, charcoal is the one-size-fits-all countermeasure against all sorts of nasty stuff the enemy might pump into the air. By the time I got out of that bio warfare armor, the sweat my body was profusely pumping out would transform the charcoal into a nasty gray mud.

For the day’s climax, we sealed our gasmasks and lined up to enter a room where they’d demonstrate the masks’ efficacy. Inside that room, some fragrant incense was lit, and if you could smell it, it meant your mask was not secure. In a wartime situation, that would mean you were dead. Of course, none of us smelled the incense until it was our turn to take the mask off. Then, smelling the scent, we were assured of how the masks would have saved our lives if that room had been filled with mustard gas instead of incense.

As for me, my mask was secured, but it was somehow put on in a bad way. It was too tight, and was making it hard to even breathe. I was extremely relieved when I was finally able to take the mask off and rush back out into the free air. Good thing it wasn’t a real chemical war zone.

After doing a day of NBC, that set of clothes was totally filthy, and wouldn’t become wearable again until it got a vigorous treatment of dry cleaning.

WAR GAMES

On one of the later evenings of WarriorWeek, we actually played some short war games. The TI’s were the enemies, and flashlights were weapons, and we ran around “shooting” each other. I took it pretty seriously and really got into it, but a lot of the airmen just used our “main base” tent as a rare opportunity to get a few more minutes of precious shuteye.

I don’t remember many details about the game, but I remember the flight captains (airman leaders) went to a bunker and we were supposed to protect them. There was also some password we were supposed to keep the drill sergeants from learning, and warzone sound effects blared on some speakers. Overall, it was pretty cheesy.

The next day, we ran through some obstacle courses with lots of sound effects playing to make it sound like a battlefield. A kind of introduction to trench warfare. And we did a long march, complete with loaded backpacks, fake M16’s, and occasionally hitting the dirt as someone shouted warnings. The latter ensured we got pretty dirty. To be honest, though, I was a little disappointed in the difficulty of the march and obstacle course. It was pretty easy. I understand they’ve beefed up the field portion of BMT a lot since then.

FROM TRAINEE TO AIRMAN

To finish off the festivities of the week, we bussed out to a big obstacle course area for a day of patriotic propaganda and indoctrination. The obstacle course was much larger than the fake-live fire one I mentioned above. It included all kinds of components: climbing, swinging across water, crawling through tunnels, and so on. Unfortunately it lost a lot of its intensity because if you couldn’t pass an obstacle, you were allowed to skip it and there were no negative consequences. So it was basically just the honor system. There were drill sergeants scattered around, including our main sergeants from the previous weeks. It was interesting hearing Senior Airman Nichols shout something at me as I grabbed a rope and started climbing a vertical rise.

A lot of airmen got soaked falling into water when they failed to pass certain obstacles. Chalk up another point for the dry cleaners.

After the obstacle course came a long period of waiting around. After hours of sitting around waiting, our squadron commander showed up and we went through some very patriotic ceremonies. The climax was that we each got to march to the commander, exchange salutes, and receive an Airman’s Coin from him.

The Airman’s Coin is a coin every airman has, proving they got this far in BMT. When you get the coin, you officially change from a “trainee” to an “airman”. From now on, when you address a Drill Sergeant, instead of saying “Sir, Trainee Alexander reports as ordered”, you say “Sir, Airman Alexander reports as ordered.” It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a big psychological change. This signalled our entrance into the almost mythical final days that we’d all been waiting so long for. And that, my friend, is the next entry.

Air Force Boot Camp really toughened me up a lot. This is the story of my seven weeks of AETC Hell…

Zero Week
First Week
Second & Third Week
Fourth Week
Graduation Week

First, there’s an academic test. Throughout all the prior weeks, us trainees had been studying textbooks about Air Force doctrine and history, whenever we had to wait around as a flight. Waiting for your turn to go into chow hall? Textbook out, time to start reading. We didn’t really have any time specifically devoted to study, because we were mad crazy busy with other stuff all the time. The material wasn’t very difficult: ranks and insignia, chain of command, Air Force history, doctrine, core values, and so on. The only difficulty was that our only study time was in brief intervals while waiting in lines.

In university, if you tell students that the test is in three weeks, a good proportion of those students are gonna put off studying for two weeks and six days. There’s no such temptation in basic training. See, one of the things the sergeants like to do while they’re chewing you out is quiz you on stuff in that textbook. In hindsight, I understand they were just doing this to “encourage” us to study hard when we did have time. At the time, it just seemed like they were arseholes. But really they had our best interests in mind. Man though, every one of us was terrified of those drill sergeant pop quizzes. We studied our butts off, when we could.

Besides the academic test, there are dorm inspections which actually matter. In your “living space” (which I put in quotes because, of course, you’re in a dorm with about 60 other guys) you have your bed (a bunk bed you share with another guy), a tall closet, a shorter closet, and two or three drawers. The bottom drawer is your “personal” space and the only requirement is that you don’t put anything there that’s supposed to go in the other areas. For everything else, there are exact regulations that you have to follow to absolute precision. They’ll literally examine every button of every article of clothing. You don’t know when the inspection which “counts” will come. It comes by surprise sometime while the flight is out, and you’d better hope you pass. As for me, I barely passed.

Then there’s dress inspection. You may have seen these in movies. Our drill sergeant assembled us into dress formation, and the squadron commander came to inspect our uniforms. This is where all those hours of shoe shining were really put to the test. The way it worked is, our main drill sergeant went one airman ahead of the commander and had around 30 seconds to make any last minute adjustments to us while the commander was inspecting the previous airman. I don’t think there was much real danger of failing this inspection, as long as your uniform wasn’t really messed up– and believe me, if your uniform was messed up, the TI’s would pounce on your ass long before you got within sight of the squadron commander.

And finally, the last big event of fourth week was the physical fitness test. The three components were the mile run, pushups, and situps. With the pushups and situps, you could cheat, at least when I went through: there weren’t enough sergeants to count each airman’s sets, so you paired up with another airman and counted for each other. I know there were cases of airmen lying about each others’ numbers to help each other pass, but it really felt dangerous. And the sergeants who were there were definitely making their presence felt. As for the run, there’s no way to cheat that. We did it in the early morning, before the deadly heat of daytime struck. I was a little surprised that the course wasn’t the track we usually ran in our morning workouts– we actually ran through the main area of Lackland AFB, including running over some bridges. I passed the run with time to spare, but immediately afterward, I felt like I was gonna die. I shouldn’t have been running in my condition: I was still sick as a dog from all the stress. But it’s not like you got much choice, unless you felt like paying fat camp a visit.

There’s a reason all this testing stuff was taking place in fourth week. We were preparing for fifth week, which would be very different than the first four weeks: fifth week was “warrior week”, when we’d go sleep in tents, eat MRE’s, fire rifles, play war games, and so forth. We had to get past all the tests and inspections because they wanted to make sure we were ready for this change.

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Part of fourth week, and third week before it, was spent in classrooms, where we were lectured on the academic aspects of the Air Force. These were broken up with lots of standard briefings: suicide prevention, anti-drinking talks, driving safety, finances, and so on. If you’re joining the Air Force, get used to these generic briefings, ‘cuz they sure aren’t gonna end with boot camp. At the time, though, the classroom environment was a nice break from the usual labor of BMT. We weren’t able to put down our guards by any means– we were still always having to sit at attention, we couldn’t fidget or look around or anything– but it was easier than making beds or marching in the heat.

I actually got something like full marks or 99% on the test– I can’t remember which. I remember it because it was just about the only time in boot camp when I managed to excel at something. I remember we were sitting in the common room shortly after the test. We were sitting on our butts on the floor (not sixth week yet, so the chairs weren’t for us) and for some reason I had my back to the desk where the drill sergeant was. He said something like, “Airman Alexander, you’re good for something after all.” I responded with “Yes sir”, by pure habit without thinking about it. And without standing up and facing him or anything. I kept my back to him! I should’ve been *reamed* for that! I guess he was just exasperated enough, and the context was such that, he cut me a break for it.

DORM INSPECTIONS

I had a slight disadvantage in getting my personal area in order, because I was put out of commission for a couple days by the kitchen duty I wrote about in weeks 2-3. But more than that, I suspect I was a victim of sabotage. Maybe it’s because I was perceived as one of the “weaker links” in terms of Honor Flight calculations, and other airmen wanted me to be washed back. Or maybe some airmen wanted to make themselves look slightly better by messing with others. In any case, I had my personal area mysteriously messed with while I was sleeping, presumably by the dorm guards. And I wasn’t the only airman who experienced this. In our flight, we agreed that night dormguards would walk around and help airmen with their personal areas while they slept. Therefore, there was no suspicion when you got up to use the bathroom at night and saw the dorm guards rummaging around in someone’s closet.

If I recall correctly, we were allowed exactly four infractions on a checklist of something like four billion things (I exagerate, of course). I got exactly four infractions, so I passed the inspections by a hair’s breadth. Since I was at the very border, I was called into the TI’s office and chewed out.

THE PHYSICAL FITNESS TEST

I passed the run with time to spare, and I narrowly passed pushups, but I failed situps. If you fail one of the components of the test, you can go try it again in a smaller group of make-ups. The idea being that maybe you could’ve passed (say) situps, if you just weren’t exhausted by the run and pushups. I went to the makeup situp test, and failed it again. I felt utterly defeated. I was a walking statue of lead, just waiting to hear which flight I was gonna be washed back into.

Later that day when the rest of the flight was in the common room, I was called into the TI’s office, where two drill sergeants from my flight were waiting along with another airman. They informed me they were giving me another chance. I got in position and the other airmen held my feet. One situp.. two.. three.. fifteen.. my muslces were burning, I couldn’t continue. I collapsed on my back. “Come on, push it out!!” the drill sergeant shouted. I screamed with exertion and somehow struggled through a few more situps. I had passed!

I’m not sure exactly what that was about. It seemed a little… how shall I put it… shady. Obviously I wasn’t supposed to get that third chance. What’s more, regulations are very clear that if you rest between situps, you must rest in the up position, hugging your knees. Resting on my back like I did, should’ve disqualified the situp that followed. In short, it seems for all the world like those drill sergeants really wanted me to pass, and didn’t mind eschewing a regulation here and there to pull it off. Would they have done the same for any airman in the flight? Was it something to do with how desperate the Air Force was for weather forecasters (the job I was enlisted for)? I’ll probably never know. All I knew was it felt like angels had swooped down and rescued my butt.

(By the way, in the past couple years I’ve become a weightlifter, and now if I had to go do the BMT fitness test again, I’d ace it. Nowadays when I do situps I do it while clutching extra plates to my chest. If you aren’t already lifting weights regularly, I highly recommend it, whether you’re going to join the military or not. There are a million benefits to working out, it goes much further than just physical strength and appearance.)

THE TI TORNADO

Whispered rumors among trainees foretold an event of apocalyptic magnitude. The TI Tornado. While our flight was out on various errands, we dreaded coming “home” to find our dorm ransacked. Legends spoke of flights coming home to find their dorms trashed. Beds kicked around so badly they had to literally reassemble them. Clothes everywhere. I don’t know how accurate these legends are. Our flight got a very weak “tornado”: we came back one time and some of the beds were moved around a little. But it was no serious problem. I’m still not sure what that’s all about. After all, the TI’s didn’t really want to screw us over. They only put on that image so we’d get our asses in gear. Maybe some TI really lost his temper once and trashed a dorm? I’ll probably never really know for sure about the true nature of the ‘nado myth.

LAUNDRY

You’ve probably been wondering how laundry works for trainees at Lackland. In each squadron, there’s a laundry shop run by civilian contractors. They did dry cleaning, which was pretty much mandatory. One of the great examples of fraud and waste while I was in the Air Force was that drill sergeants pretty much forced us to get our uniforms drycleaned with starch. Thing is, starch ruins some of the properties of the uniform. I don’t know the specifics. It could just be rumor. I seem to remember hearing that the uniforms were designed to thwart infrared vision, cloaking human body heat, and that the starch ruined that property. It sounds a little science-fictiony, but it could be true. Anyway, we didn’t have much choice about starching up all our gear.

If you wanted to simplify your dorm inspection and didn’t mind paying a little extra to do it, one sneaky method was to put almost all your clothes in for cleaning, and leave them as long as you could get away with. While your clothes are at the dry cleaners, they can’t be inspected!

PATIO BREAK

The weekend of fourth week, we got our first real patio break. In the squadron, there was a little enclosed area with payphones and candy machines. The more advanced flights, if they were doing well as a flight, would occasionally be given fifteen minutes to a half hour of “patio break” when we were allowed to go to that area and relax. You could call up your loved ones on the phone, read or write mail, even buy snacks from the vending machines. (If you intend to do the latter, bring change with you to basic, as it’s hard to procure it while you’re in boot camp.) I can’t remember whether or not you were allowed to bring a cell phone to patio break. Obviously it goes without saying you can’t have a cell phone with you any time on duty at BMT.

It’s really interesting to see how, when your situation changes, something as simple as a fifteen minute “patio break” can seem like the coolest thing on earth. Really makes you appreciate the everyday luxuries of life outside BMT.

SAYING GOODBYE TO THE DORMS FOR A WEEK

I almost felt like crying for joy that I had made it to fifth week. There was a tangible feeling of nervous excitement throughout the flight just before we ascended to fifth week: Warrior Week, a week we’d spend away from Lackland Proper, away from the Wolfpack Squadron, out in tents. What new experiences and adventures would we face, and would we make it through that last hurdle before the coveted sixth week?

Air Force Boot Camp was a defining experience in my life. I’m glad I went through it, even though I was in hell at the time. This is the story of my time under the wings of Lackland.

Zero Week
First Week
Second & Third Week
Fifth Week
Graduation Week

DORM GUARD DUTY

Our flight really got fully into dorm guard duty sometime in 2nd or 3rd week. Basically, any time there’s a trainee or airman in the dorm, there must be a dorm guard. In zero week and much of first week, sixth weekers from a brother flight came to visit and play dormguard for us. They were so cool, sparkling in their “Air Force blues” (the non-camo, non-battlefield, non-comfortable half of the air force uniform, which us trainees were forbidden to wear until sixth week).

When we were far enough along, we took over our own dorm guard positions. Each airman has to take several turns guarding for a night; the guard shifts were for two-hour intervals, some during the day and some at night. If your turn came during the night, it meant two hours less sleep, a devastating loss in Air Force boot camp, and yet, most people still preferred night duty over day duty. In daytime dorm guard duty, you had a giant spotlight on you, you were the most visible member of the flight.

There was a common mindgame the TI’s would play on the dormguards. See, the dorm guard has to check everyone’s ID through a window in the door. He has some specific lines to say, asking to see the ID, and has to say them absolutely correctly. When the person outside the door shows their ID, the guard has to read the name and rank aloud and then check it with a list hung by the door. The list must be checked, whether or not the guard recognizes the person who wants in. Even if it’s our primary TI (someone none of us’ll ever forget), we have to read the name and rank aloud and check it with the list.

This was a popular place for TI’s to mess with us. The standard routine is, a raging TI is pounding on the door, screaming: “You little piece of piss, if you don’t open this door right this instant, I’m washing you back to pre-school!!! (Punches the door)” The correct response is to ask to see an ID, and of course this “infuriates” the drill sergeant even further. But woe is he who gives in to the TI’s rage and opens that door without seeing an ID. That’s the trap, and in our flight it only happened one time. The TI who got in, a short fiery sergeant who was just returning to Lackland after being a TI some years back, shouted something like: “Bang! You’re all dead! I’m a terrorist and you’re all dead!” The whole flight, caught in the midst of the deadly morning rush, had to go down in pushup position for a long time while this guy ripped a new hole in the dorm guard.

Another reason night shift was preferred over day shift for guard duty, was that you could use the time to write letters. Writing letters “while on duty” was one of the cardinal sins of boot camp, something a lot of trainees got busted for, but night shift dorm guard seemed to be an exception. I’m sure my parents still have the letters I wrote while on night duty, I wonder what I wrote in them. Hmm.

Dormguards were also the point-men for fire drills. I doubt there was much real concern about fire in those hulking concrete dorms (if you’re thinking of smoking any cigarettes while you’re in basic training, think again). The fire drills were just another thing for our flight to be scrutinized and judged on. I messed up a fire drill once. The way they work is, a bunch of sergeants and officers come up, enter the dorm, and show the dorm guard a slip of paper or something saying “This is a fire drill.” The whole procedure smacks vaguely of a bank robbery, now that I think about it. At that point, the guard is to shout “Fire, fire, fire” just like that, three words, and then the flight is to summarily vacate to the drillpad, in dead silence. When our dorm was hit by a fire drill, I wasn’t the guard, I was doing something near my bed (probably shining my shoes) when I heard the guard shout fire. For some reason, I thought the thing to do was for me to repeat the alarm. So, as I took off for the door, I also called “Fire, fire, fire.” The flight lost some points toward “honor flight” for that, and I got a lot of heat for it. Somehow, I think if it were a real fire, sleeping airmen would’ve appreciated the extra alarm.

BOOT CAMP SICKNESS

A lot of airmen were pretty sick during these weeks. We were all wrapped up in a cocoon of pure stress, homesick, tired. For many of us, our diet had radically changed. For all of us, it was a drastic lifestyle change. And we were in a new land– most of us were not natives of Texas or of San Antonio’s dry summer heat.

Getting sick is pretty inevitable in any military boot camp, the Air Force is no exception. The symptoms are similar to those of the common flu. Not much in the way of specific complaints, just overall feeling like crap.

Some airmen– including yours truly– had trouble with nose bleeds. No doubt a combination of the stress and the dry heat. I must have had at least ten bloody noses throughout boot camp, but fate was on my side and they mostly seemed to occur when we were in the dorm. I shudder to even imagine how much it would’ve sucked to get one while marching somewhere or doing morning PT. The one exception was once my nose started bleeding during breakfast. I got up and marched to my TI, I don’t think I had to say anything, he immediately had me and another airman go to the infirmary.

The basic training infirmary isn’t a bad place to be. The nurses and doctors aren’t generally as mean as the drill instructors, in fact they’re downright kind (a human condition whose mere existance we were starting to forget). I remember I had to wait, tissue in nose, as the nurse dealt with a hysteric female trainee from one of the sister flights in the squadron. It seems she was so desperate to get out of basic, she was pretending to be sick.

When I did get seen, it was by a doctor who seemed genuinely concerned. Saying something about “nose polyps”, he sent me to get blood drawn for analysis at the main Lackland hospital, and scheduled a followup appointment. It felt strange walking “freely” around Lackland AFB. I met up with some tech schoolers (there’s also a tech school on Lackland AFB in addition to all the boot camp squadrons) and we got on a bus together, since they were headed by the hospital anyway and I was slightly lost.

When I went back to the infirmary some time later for the followup appointment, I was seen by a different doctor who seemed much less concerned. Apparently without looking at the blood analysis or anything, he gave me some generic nose drop crap.

KITCHEN DUTY

During these two weeks, in addition to everything else, the flight earned its keep by performing various chores around base. The way this worked is, different people got different chores. I got kitchen duty.

One of the downsides of kitchen duty was the early wake up. We had to get up and get dressed significantly before the rest of the flight, to make a march to a squadron mess hall. That early in the morning, it seemed like the dead of night, the very witching hour. We didn’t even service our own squadron’s mess hall, but some other squadron’s. (I probably should’ve mentioned this before, but I was in Wolfpack Squadron.)

There’s a stereotype about military kitchen duty, that it involves sitting in an otherwise empty room and peeling a mountain of potatoes. In actual fact, trainees aren’t allowed anywhere near the actual food preparation– civilian contractors handle that. Our responsibilities were things like washing dishes, taking out the trash, directing flights as they came in to eat, filling cups with water and “mystery gatorade”, and so on.

I worked with three other airmen washing dishes. Probably doesn’t sound very difficult, but it was actually really freakin tough. The thing is, when flights were rammed through for their meals, they generated dishes faster than the speed of light. We could barely keep up, and it seemed endless. This was in addition to feeling sick as a dog, though without any specific symptoms I could nail down.

The bright part of kitchen work was that we got to eat specially, apart from the other flights, and we got to eat with no drill sergeants or officers around. Basically, during those brief times when we didn’t have to bust our butts working, we had free reign of the dining facilities, and the civilian contractors were totally cool with us. We could eat brand name breakfast cereals or even ice cream, if we so felt. It was like being a kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Nothing like a little military bootcamp gulag to really make you appreciate the luxuries of life!

I didn’t even take full advantage of this free dining time. You see, I was very worried about my situps. Pushups and run, I was good, but my situps weren’t up to par, and I knew the fitness test was coming up fast (sometime late in fourth week). So, after wolfing down some food, exhausted from washing dishes like a dish-washing-machine, and feeling like crud all over, I went into the chow hall bathrooms and started doing me some situps!

We didn’t get back to our dorm until almost bedtime. In this sense, kitchen duty was worse than the other chores. It took up our entire day. I did kitchen duty twice. At least it got me out of making my bed a couple mornings!

Air Force Boot Camp changed me a lot. This is the story of my time at Lackland AFB. Here are the other parts of the story:

Zero Week
First Week
Fourth Week
Fifth Week
Graduation Week

The mindgames were endless, but they can roughly be broken down into two categories. First is the threat of being “washed back”. That means being sent back to zero week, to join a new flight and start over from scratch. Actually, in my flight nobody got washed back, and I wonder if washing back is even possible. But at the time, each and every one of us was dead certain we were a moment away from that terrible fate. In a later week, when one of my flight mates got in some *serious* trouble, I remember feeling some guilty relief deep inside, thinking, “well they can’t kick me back if they don’t kick him back first”. There were variations on this mind game, like the dreaded “fat camp” around which so many rumours were spawned, where airmen were sent who failed the pushups/situps/run requirements in third week.

The other mind game was the Air Force Anti-Martyr. This is where instead of punishing you for a transgression, the drill sergeants punish the entire flight *except* you. Think of the donut scene from “Full Metal Jacket”. It’s easy to be a martyr, someone who takes a hit for the team. Heck, it’s romantic and makes you feel all warm and good about yourself. TI’s know this, so if you’re thinking of being a flight hero, think again. Placed in such an adverse environment with 60 or so other guys, the bonds of comaraderie grow quick, and it really sucks when you make some minor slipup and have to stand there while the rest of the flight does pushups. The idea isn’t to torment you, but to shame you; the torment is mental and automatic.

A common example is the frozen pushup. Usually when pushups are assigned as punishment, you have to go down when the drill instructor says “down”, and up when he says “up”. So you screw up, your instructor makes the rest of the flight get in position and says “down”. Now you’ve got 60 men, arms straining, frozen halfway into a pushup, and the drill sergeant starts assaulting you with rhetorical questions. “Did your mom raise you to be a crackhead? I bet she worked real hard, working overtime, to buy you that Playstation. You wanna take a time out and go play Playstation now, you little crackhead?” Meanwhile your flightmates are groaning, arms trembling violently from exhaustion.

Besides the mind games, first week was when we started learning drill. Well, we started it in zero week, but first week was when things started getting serious. That’s when we began daily drill practice, really getting on first name basis with the drill pad asphalt. I wasn’t very good at marching. I’m more of an independent person, it wasn’t easy for me to keep my feet in perfect synchrony with everyone else in the formation. I also had great difficulty in an unexpected area: under the blazing Texas sun, my face would get sweaty and my glasses would start slipping, ever so slowly, down my nose. Obviously I couldn’t reach up to adjust them, my arms carefully swinging in choreography.

If you wear contact lenses, you should know that you won’t be allowed that luxury in Basic. Nor will you be able to wear your normal glasses: you’ll be issued the thickest, ugliest, biggest glasses known to man. We call them Birth Control Glasses. And there’s nothing optional about them.

An average day would begin sometime around 6:00am or so. Reveille would blare, and 60 airmen would scramble out of bed before the first note even ended. The morning rush was so frantic that every second was precious, and most airmen would lie awake at 5:59 ready to leap out of bed instantly. A few would even get up around then to “go to the bathroom”, to get a few minutes’ headstart. And then there were the sliders: airmen who would very carefully “slide” in and out of their blanket, to discrupt the bed as little as possible. Cuz that’s the worst part of the morning rush, making the bed.

The Air Force wants airmen who pay attention to details. Instead of beating us with pullups or grueling runs with 80-pound backpacks, we were beaten with sheets and pillows. Beds had to be made to the most exacting, ridiculous standards. Every angle, every inch of sheet had to be perfect, and the slightest wrinkle would fail the whole bed. If they were allowed, I’m sure a lot of airmen would just sleep on top of their blanket, or even sleep on the floor, leaving their pristine beds untouched. But obviously that wasn’t permitted, and even if you could somehow pull off the flawless slide, once a week you had to take everything off for laundry anyway.

I was at a merciless disadvantage in the morning because it took me so long to tie my running shoes or boots. Remember in zero week when we picked up our uniforms, I discovered I’d forgotten the art of the knot. Well, the night after clothes-day, when I should’ve been asleep, I “went to the bathroom” and took my boots with me to get my knots under control. I could tie them, but it took several precious minutes, putting me at a giant disadvantage. More often than not, I had to get someone to help me make my bed. I’ve never been very good at doing specific detailed handwork, and I was really suffering in the morning rush.

Dressed in sweatgear, we took our flashlights and our wallets and headed to the drill pad to form up. From there we marched to the track field, a line four men wide and fifteen long, each carrying a glowing cone of light in the morning darkness. We were grateful for the earliness of our trek. A workout in the daytime heat of San Antonio would have been unbearable.

The actual workouts were pretty mild. First there were warmups (carefully synchronized to a sergeant or officer calling commands) and then standard stuff like jumping jacks, pushups, and situps. In a sentence, it was like junior high P.E., but without as much socializing or games. After calisthenics, we hit the track, dividing into A, B, and C groups depending on how fast you could run. A was the fastest, C the slowest– if you were in C group, you’d be harassed a lot by the TI’s, so you wanted to try and stick to at least B group.

Despite the less-than-encouraging conditions of bootcamp, everyone was pretty gung-ho about the run, at least. As I know, people did their best to keep to the fastest group they could. On rare occasions, the squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, would join us and shout lots of encouragement. He was a fast mo-fo, and would often create an ad-hoc “commander group” faster than A-group. If you could keep up, it felt really good- patriotic, somehow- to run with the commander. The reins of power generally give you the luxury of being the “good cop” while you can make everyone below you play “bad cop”.

After the run, we’d cool down (again, carefully synchronized) and form up to march back to the squadron. Released back into the dorm, the morning rush started again, this time it was the mad dash to shower and get your uniform on.

Our flight organized a really good system for showering. See, for an individual airman, the temptation would be too great to hog a shower for longer than necessary. The shower room had four showers in a square, no walls between them or anything. We arranged so an airman (a member of the “latrine crew”) would shout out orders to move. You’d start at one shower, and each time the order to move was shouted, you’d move to the next one. So you’d hit all four showers, giving you a total of about two minutes under the water. The water was cold, incidentally. That wasn’t mandated by the drill sergeants, but it was our own decision, because hot water produces steam and steam makes the bathroom much harder to clean, and believe me we had to have that place spick-n-span.

I had to do everything even faster than everyone else, just because it took me longer to tie my boots. The morning rush was so exhausting, it really felt like I was punched in the gut. I would’ve loved to just crawl back in bed and forget everything, but of course that’d be tantamount to suicide. We had a little “free” time, since not everyone would finish showering or get their uniform on simultaneously, but this was no time to slack off. Each moment was spent working on making sure everything was folded right, everything was clean, our uniforms were perfect, and so on. Anyway within a half hour we were forming up outside again, to take a short march to the squadron chow hall.

Amidst all the chaos and stress of boot camp, one redeeming feature is the food. We were fed handsomely. Granted, there was a strict protocol to follow to eat. In formation outside the dining facility, we were called in one by one. We’d sign our name on a sheet just inside and then take a tray and get in line for our servings. It was somewhat like a school cafeteria, except we had to be silent and stare straight forward while moving. Straight forward here means, straight forward toward the servers, and moving here means, sideways while sliding our tray along some rails.

We were given food generously by the servers- they were civilian contractors and a lot nicer than the mean ol’ drill instructors. Once we had our trays filled we advanced to the back of a line waiting for tables to be free. One airman from the flight had the job of watching at the head of this line and directing us which way to go. When we finally got to our table, we had to stand there at our seats and wait until there was a body behind each of the four seats. The fourth person to reach the table would say either “Trainees, be seated,” or “Airmen, be seated,” depending on whether or not there were any sixth-weekers at the table; if there was even one sixth-weeker at the table, the whole table had to be addressed as “airmen”, since sixth-weekers were no longer called trainees.

The food was delicious. Unfortunately I can’t remember specific dishes (it’s been half a decade since I was there) but I remember we were, to a man, struck by the quality. With each meal, we had to include one glass of water and two glasses of ambiguous colored beverage which we assumed was a nasty warm gatorade. Rumors, probably false, flew around that the “gatorade” was drugged. Usually, the rumors would go, the gatorade had something in it to make us more compliant, or to keep us from getting horny, or so on.

When everyone at the table was finished, the table would stand as one, and push the chairs in together as one. We’d take our trays, marching one-by-one, to a trainee who was doing kitchen duty. It wasn’t uncommon for a trainee to drop glass or something at this point, to be shattered on the floor. When that happened, TI’s would immediately flock around, shouting, “Don’t touch it! Do not touch it!” Basically, the Air Force doesn’t want its airmen to get cut picking up broken glass. There are civilian contractors to come sweep it up when it happens. It goes to show that even though we were being treated like scum, Uncle Sam actually did care about our well-being. (Well, if a trainee cut her hands picking up glass, she’d have to go to the infirmary and it would all boil down to lost time and lost money)

After breakfast, the day would become less predictable, that is, we did different things on different days. Besides generally getting the crap beat out of us mentally and physically, boot camp was also a place to do lots of in-processing and stuff. Basically, the Air Force got a bunch of guys from all different paths of life, all different upbringings, all different experiences, and the job of the training squadron was to uniformize us and make us grow up a lot. There were checkups: medical, optical, and so on. There were finances: every airman had to have a bank account with direct deposit (yes, they do pay you money in BMT– and before your first paycheck, you get a temporary government credit card), and if they didn’t have it when they came in, they had to get it there. There were briefings of all sorts: suicide prevention, driving safety, law… the list never ends. We were busy, and now that I can look back in on it, I really feel for our training instructors who had to “babysit” 60 guys through the ten thousand steps to becoming a soldier.

Lunch and dinner were similar to breakfast. Some time after dinner, we’d meet for the evening briefing in the flight common room. This room was lined with fairly nice chairs along the walls, but we all sat on the floor: the chairs were for sixth-weekers, not “trainees”. During the evening briefings, a drill sergeant would tell us about what was scheduled the next day; about boot camp and the air force in general, especially filing us in on what we’d have to do in the coming weeks; sometimes during these meetings we’d even get the occasional story or even, god help us, joke; but for the most part the sergeants were too pissed off for that. One thing we did get during those meetings, was mail.

If you’re going to Air Force Boot Camp, I recommend you tell everyone you know, to write to you. Got an aunt you met once or twice in your life? Have her write! Basically, whether you realize it or not right now, when you’re under all that stress, it really helps to get encouraging letters from home. Of course before you get to your flight, you won’t know your address there. Early on in basic training, you’ll send a form letter to your parents or whoever, with your address on it. Arrange in advance for them to disseminate that address far and wide to anyone with a pen. Trust me, you’ll appreciate those letters when you’re feeling like the world is collapsing all around you.

After the evening meeting, and after the evening showers (which were only slightly longer, and no warmer, than the morning showers) we’d actually get- gasp- some genuine free time. Like, a whole half hour of it. Of course, we were in a dorm, with no computers, no TV, no cell phones, no nothing. The number one activity during free time was reading and writing letters. If you weren’t doing that, you could talk to other airmen or work on further cleaning and organizing your already thorougly clean and organized stuff. The second most common activity, behind mail, was polishing boots.

When the trumpets played announcing bedtime (at the late, late hour of 9:45pm) we jumped into bed like our beds were paradise. Finally some sleep to free us for awhile from the horror of our being– and let’s hope you don’t have two hours of dorm guard duty that night. As our bodies hit the mattresses (or, in the case of the “sliders”, slid under the blankets like serpents) the de-facto leader among us trainees, a big tall guy from the south, would call: “Another day down, boys!”

I was changed a lot by Air Force boot camp. This is my story from those six-and-a-half grueling weeks in Lackland. Here are the other parts of the story:

Zero Week
Second & Third Week
Fourth Week
Fifth Week
Graduation Week

After a grueling day of paperwork, medical exams, briefings, signing things, and swearing oaths, I headed to the San Diego airport with a dozen other new recruits. The military entrance processing station (MEPS) gave us each about $100 for the meal at the airport- I’m not sure why they allotted that much for one meal, but it was the last meal I’d have as a free man for almost two months. A while after midnight, we touched down in San Antonio, Texas, home of Lackland Air Force Base.

A bus took us onto the base and to in-processing. In-processing seemed to take hours. Sitting in a room silently while a couple lowly personnel airmen did paperwork, occasionally calling us up by social security number. If I was hoping for a depersonalizing experience, induction into a machine, then that’s what I got. If I was hoping for freedom from the scrutiny I’d endured back home, then I was sorely disappointed. It’s true that Air Force boot camp is less physically strenuous than the other services (though, it’s since been extended with an extra couple weeks of field training, to make it more comparable to the Army and Navy). What is lost in physical strain is made up for with mind games upon mind games. I was in for one of the roughest six-and-a-half weeks of my life.

ZERO WEEK: HAIRCUT, SHOELACES

Contrary to the stereotypes, my recruiter was a pretty honest guy and the things he told us were generally correct. He did give me one piece of gravely wrong info, however. Whether as a joke or just not knowing any better, I was told I shouldn’t bother cutting my hair before boot camp, that it didn’t matter because they’d cut it anyway. Certainly the Air Force was going to cut my hair, but scrimping and saving one civilian barber trip was poor advice in my case. See, I walked into Lackland AFB with a beautiful head of shoulder-length curvy wavy brown hippy-hair.

Yeah. That didn’t go over very well with the training instructors.

An Air Force drill sergeant (technically called a “training instructor” or TI) is an interesting creature. At the time, we didn’t understand it, but his or her power is all illusionary. While they’re shouting at you, face scrunched up and turning red, fists clenched, body tense, and you’re afraid they’re gonna eat you alive, the truth is they’re little better off than you are. In the bigger hierarchy of a training squadron, the individual drill instructors aren’t terribly higher up than the trainees. Their threat is really quite hollow, indeed a trainee poses a much greater threat to a TI, the threat of writing a written complaint to an officer. But of course we didn’t understand that at the time, and for all I knew my E-4 training instructor could’ve been the secretary of defense.

At first, our flight wore civilian clothes. We sure seemed out of place, marching along in civies while nearby flights wore camos or blues. At around the end of zero week, the 60 or so men in Flight 671 (that’s my flight) marched our way to the clothing depot for our first set of standard issues.

If you’re going to Air Force basic training, I highly suggest you learn and memorize all your clothing sizes before you leave. In the high-pitched chaos of the clothing depot, that’s no place to not know your sizes. I learned that the hard way and payed for it until I got my butt out of boot camp and into tech school where I could buy some better fitting boots with my own money. In boot camp there’s a lot of crap to do and we were constantly in a rush to finish one thing and move on to the next. Not knowing my shoe size, I was in the unenviable position of trying on boots frantically, all under severe time constraints. Matters were made much worse by the fact that I couldn’t tie my shoes.

Yes, that’s right. I’d known how to tie my shoes before, as a kid, but for the years up to boot camp, I’d stuck to more comfortable footwear, sandals and velcros. I never saw the point of taking precious time every day to tie a pair of shoes when velcro works instantly, and I really still don’t see any point to it, but boot camp isn’t the place to make such social commentary. The thing is, I thought I remembered how to tie my shoes, from doing it as a kid. But it was so long ago, I’d forgotten. Only one word can describe my reality when I realized I’d forgotten that skill: Panic.

Picture this. A flight of 60 airmen in brand new, un-ironed camo’s, marching in sync under the merciless Summer Texas sun, each man burdened with 50 lbs of clothing in his pack, and one man among 60 has his shoelaces flapping free in the wind. There go my hopes for slipping through the pipeline undetected (as if those weren’t already shot by the hair). The sergeant’s explosion when he noticed the shoelaces turned into blinking surprise when I explained my embarrassing dilemma. Bad haircuts, those are routine. But this? This shoelace thing was truly a new experience for the young drill sergeant, something he hadn’t run into yet in his drill sergeanting. I had the unique experience of having a lividly angry drill instructor kneel down and tie my boots while I was standing in formation with 60 other trainees.

Zero-week was so-named, it seems, so that the Air Force could boast a quick “six week boot camp”, when in fact the boot camp is closer to seven weeks. (I understand that now, though, the whole thing’s been extended to include an extra couple weeks of combat training.) According to some sources, boot camp didn’t actually “start” until first week, but the truth is it started when our shoes hit the pavement at Lackland. We didn’t begin the (fairly easy) daily workouts or the real marching drill until after zero week ended, but the mental games began right away and wouldn’t stop ’til we were on the busses to leave.

CHURCH

Sundays were a special day in boot camp. They couldn’t deny religious freedom to the religious airmen, and thus Sunday morning was Church Time. You could go to a service or you could stay in the dorms and clean; you can probably guess that after a week of mind games and shouting, every airman, down to the most athiest athiest, went to church. Now that I’m looking back on it in hindsight, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was rigged that way by some religious zealot in the upper ranks– “we’ve got ‘em under our thumbs, let’s proseletyze ‘em while we’re at it!” I’m sure quite a few Sunday Christians have been spawned in boot camp, the type of Christians with no real spiritual foundation, but they hate gays and vote Republican. Still, I was pretty grateful for the much-needed break; I wasn’t the only airman to shed tears of joy for the luxury of sitting in a pew listening to a cookie-cutter sermon (pretty much the same sermon every week) with no drill sergeant in sight.

This is the story of my time in Air Force Boot Camp. A boot camp is an experience that can really change your life; I learned a lot from the hellish experience. Here are the other parts of the story:

First Week
Second & Third Week
Fourth Week
Fifth Week
Graduation Week

It was a long ride by bus from Texas to Mississippi. I listened to Pink Floyd on my CD player which had long lain neglected in a closet at the training squadron with most my other personal belongings. It felt so wonderful to listen to music; we tend to take music for granted until we’re deprived of it for awhile (I would later experiment further with music deprivation: read more here). “Gone with the wind and the rain on an airplane…” went the lyrics, and I felt like they were speaking directly to me, even if the cheap contracted bus we were riding wasn’t exactly a Boeing.

Lackland had exposed me to the draconian mindgames of the Air Education & Training Command (AETC), numbing me somewhat to them, but it would be at Keesler where I would really learn to understand this beaurocratic branch of the USAF. Under the tutelage of the blackhats, I had learned to endure pain; under the tutelage of the blueropes, I would learn that the pain was illusionary to begin with. But not before going through a lot more of it first.

Pingers and Poptarts

In tech school, certain airmen were pingers, certain airmen were poptarts. Let me explain this unusual slang. When we stepped off the bus from San Antonio, we were reveling in our relative freedom. We were naive. As we waited outside the training squadron, veteran techschoolers shook their heads knowingly at us; there was something about our behavior and our demeanor which set off their radar, and that’s why we were called Pingers, because of how a radar monitor goes “ping”. The sergeants in charge of us picked up on this signal too, and knew we were easy targets.

I was not a poptart. Poptarts are airmen with short training periods, people who practically start outprocessing as soon as they finish inprocessing. For them, Keesler was just a brief stopping point between bootcamp and their active duty stations. At first, some of my friends from BMT fell into this category. But soon, they graduated. And the poptarts of the next week, and the week after that. No, I was not in this category. I watched fresh meat come off the bus, giddy with freedom, and I watched them leave a few weeks later, all during a tiny fraction of my own training. They became a blur, and us toughened veterans in the weather school, we came to envy them.

Blueropes, Greenropes…

The blueropes, already mentioned above, were Keesler’s version of the drill sergeants from Lackland. While TIs were identified by their black hats, blueropes were identified with a blue rope looped through one shoulder lapel. Our jubilance at escaping bootcamp was shattered when our blueropes opened their mouths and began heaping the same familiar abuse we’d resigned ourselves to in Texas.

There were ropes of other colors, as well. Red ropes, yellow ropes, and green ropes. While these ropes also bossed us around and generally exhibited their superiority complexes, they were no sergeants: they were our fellow airmen and classmates. This was all part of the deep, insidious community of backstabbing and informing which the powers at be fostered amidst us.

Green ropes volunteered for the position, and the only requirement was that they be “Airmen First Class”, meaning they had two promotions under their belt. On the surface, this seems like a good way to pick out natural leaders, but bear in mind that merit-based promotions don’t actually occur until well after tech school. In practice, there were two ways to get those two stripes: have them stipulated in your contract, or be Air National Guard. National Guard promotions work differently than active duty, and Airman First Class is much easier to get there. The perverse result was that we were lorded over by “Airman Leaders” whose “Leadership” derived entirely from the fact that they had made less of a commitment to their country!

I pray I never end up in a POW camp with a bunch of airmen. Beginning in tech school, comeraderie among the ranks is actively discouraged, replaced with one big contest to see who can get who in the biggest trouble. Later during my weather training time, my own contract’s stipulations kicked in and I myself became an Airman First Class– a rare active duty one! I thought about becoming a greenrope: the propaganda advertising the position was very convincing. In the end, I’m glad I decided against it.

Freedom

At first, we were elated, the blueropes’ abuse notwithstanding. Every weekday, we had three or four hours of free time. Depending on a complicated formula depending on our seniority and behavior, we had differing levels of privilege. At the very minimum, we could wander the dorm and the base almost unrestricted, though we had to do it in uniform. Compare this to Lackland, where a fifteen minute “patio break” with snack machines and payphones was a heavenly luxury! As your privilege went up further, you could walk around in civilian clothes when you were off duty! And if it went up even further, you could go off base, and explore the sophistocated metropolis named Biloxi There was even a privilege level where you were relieved the enforced bedtime, but in practice nobody really got that high. On the weekends (including every other Friday), the whole day was free time!

It was almost strange being able to plan your own independent trip to the BX to spend some of that cash they’d paid you in boot camp. I immediately invested in a better pair of boots, “jump boots” designed for paratroopers. My feet thanked me all the rest of my tenure in weather school.

It was on off-duty time that I had my first “nightclub” experience, at a “club” designed especially for us students. Of course, there was no alcohol, since that was strictly forbidden for anyone underage, which was virtually all of us. And to disappoint any guys who went expecting to see girls dressed up sexy, most of us weren’t privileged enough to wear civies, so most of the dancefloor was dressed in jungle camoflage! The place was called “The Vandenburg” and it was basically a scheme for some slick civilian to bleed our bank accounts. It was located right beside the $1/10 min (or something) internet cafe which must have made someone a millionaire.

Inprocessing and Hurricane Duty

The first week or two at Keesler were devoted to inprocessing. When you’re in the military, it seems like everyone and their pet dog has to give you a briefing about something. Days and days were spent listening to one hour-long briefing after another. We were briefed about driving safety. Suicide prevention. Financial planning. Base protocol. Sexually transmitted diseases. Anything you can think of, someone was paid to stand in front of us for an hour and lecture us about it. Mostly, it was stuff which had been covered already in Lackland. The military is not big on efficiency (the briefings would not end when tech school ended– they would continue all the way ’til I escaped the service completely, but that’s another story).

After in-processing, what comes next is the actual training for one’s career. But often, there’s a waiting period until the school launches the new class, usually because you’re waiting for more classmates to graduate bootcamp. During this period of limbo, you usually play dormguard, but I did hurricane duty instead. One of the fun parts of living on the Gulf of Mexico is the periodic whirling storm of death that comes your way. I spent a lot of time filling sandbags. Many things may happen in my lifetime, but I’ll always be secure in knowing I’ve shoveled my fill of sand!

Stuffing giant bags with dirt was actually cool in one sense: for the first time since leaving home, I was doing real work, not just fantasy dorm guard duty or making beds just to have them torn apart by irate drill sergeants. It was fun working with sergeants outside the AETC, who treated us like normal human beings and revealed a human side of themselves we hadn’t seen in our overlords prior to that.

Weather School

I don’t know how intentional it was, but when my weather forecasting classes finally started, I found myself playing the suspect in a “good cop, bad cop” film. The bad cop was everything I’ve mentioned above– the blueropes, the greenropes, the informers everywhere. The good cop was the weather school itself, fifteen minutes’ march from the dorms. The sergeants and civilians who actually taught us our jobs, were a whole different world from the harassment and abuse heaped on us from every other direction. For once, tedious military protocol took second priority to actually learning about what goes on in the atmosphere and how to predict it.

Here’s how a typical weekday would go. Unlike bootcamp, there was no trumpet blast to wake us all up. We slept in rooms with one roommate, and it was our own responsibility to get up on time. I only slept in once. It wasn’t pretty. I don’t remember exactly what happened, probably my mind scrambling to suppress traumatizing memories. I do know that after that one mistake, I never overslept for the remainder of techschool.

Upon getting up, we quickly cleaned our rooms and made our beds, but not to the exacting precision required in boot camp. It was only necessary to make the bed like a normal person really makes their bed– no need for perfect hospital corners. In addition to quickly cleaning our own rooms, we each had a part in cleaning our floor. These were assigned by our Air National Guard airman leaders.

Breakfast was optional. What wasn’t optional, was showing up in uniform, flashlight cone at your side, in formation outside the front of the squadron. It was still cold and dark as we fell into carefully determined positions in line to be counted and accounted for. A bluerope shouted at us for awhile and we turned and saluted as a microphone blared the national anthem. Then came the march to the schoolhouse. Since most of us skipped breakfast on account of having to get up so early already, we arrived at school tired and hungry. Nonetheless, we were happy to step into the school building, as that was the shift from bad cop to good cop.

The one good thing about all the abuse we put up with from the “military training” side of techschool was that it made the academic side tolerable. This is very important, because we were in class for around ten hours a day. By contrast, the workload in, say, undergraduate university is pretty small! There’s a cool practice in military school, which would be useful in civilian universities as well: when you felt drowsy during a lecture, you could go to the back of the room and stand. It’s a lot easier to stay awake when you’re on your feet!

Weather school was split up into different modules, which were handled differently. Most modules were lectures, and by lecture I mean powerpoint presentation. If you’re techschool-bound in any sort of technical field like weather, be ready for lots of powerpoint! The U.S. military probably has more powerpoint presentations than it has bombs and guns.

I developed a note-taking method which is pretty powerful in lectures where you need to memorize lots of presented information. I call it repetitive note-taking. Basically, you write down everything you hear, and when you have time left over, you rewrite it again. To conserve paper, I eventually started writing notes over other notes, making the whole page unreadable. That’s fine, this method doesn’t actually involve reading back over the notes– it’s the mere act of writing them which will hammer the data into your brain. Doing this hours and hours a day for months upon months, I even started developing my own crazy shorthand, which I’d later perfect in university.

(Too bad I didn’t know about spaced repetition systems back then. Follow that link and marvel at the wonders of cutting edge memory techniques which would make most of weather school a breeze for anyone.)

Seeing Through the AETC’s Mask

While I was doing great in class, I absolutely hated the other portion of techschool. While it wasn’t as bad as bootcamp by any stretch of the imagination, the thing is that it was longer. For me, ten times longer or so. Many people pass through Keesler in a few weeks- poptarts- but us weather forecasters stayed forever, and as the months stretched out, so too did our patience for the circus which was our dorm.

At all times, whether in uniform or civies, on or off duty, we had to carry a little form in our pockets, the infamous AETC Form 341, the “Excellence/Discrepancy Report”. The way these work is, anyone in any sort of authority position (whether real or pretend), can demand you fork over your 341. Once it’s in their hands, they write something in it and turn it in to the blueropes. In principle, what they write can be positive or negative (hence the “Excellence/Discrepancy”), but in practice, only negative reports are issued.

When the blueropes get a negative 341, they take punitive action. At a minimum, you can expect to be assigned a 12-hour dorm-guard shift sometime during the precious weekend. In this case, you can luck out and get a day shift, or you can get the dreaded night shift which will completely destroy your sleep schedule and leave you sleeping away the rest of the weekend. A repeat offender can expect worse, like spending the whole weekend doing marching drills, led by everyone’s favorite classmates, the greenropes. Sometimes, they’ll even send an airman to visit a real military prison, with people who have really been courtmartialed. Actually, I kind of wish I’d been sent there for a day, since that would make a totally awesome story…

This might all sound fairly reasonable if a negative 341 was reserved for something serious like drinking under age or even just being late for class. Most of these forms, however, were pulled by greenropes and dorm guards, on the flimsiest grounds imaginable. I had some National Guard prick with a rope try to get my 341 once because he felt I “wasn’t respecting him enough”. Because I didn’t call him “sir”. While off-duty, civilian clothes, in line for dinner at the chow hall. When he and I were the same rank in reality, and I probably had more time-in-service than him. Guy wasn’t even from my squadron. I was pretty fed up with 12 hour shifts, so I refused, and when he persisted, I abandoned my half-full tray unpaid for and walked out of the cafeteria. It worked!

That was the first time I “dodged” a 341. It would not be the last. The next would be a major eye-opener for me, giving me insight into the true nature of the AETC. I was walking into the dorms, in PT gear, and I stopped at the dorm guard desk, where some kids fresh out of bootcamp were pulling guard duty. I needed to write something on a form, and figured I may as well do it there. I started filling it out, but this dorm guard stuck her nose in my business, telling me self-importantly: “You can’t fill that out in blue ink!” Okay, I thought, whatever… I grabbed the nearest black pen and started using that, but it was felt-tip and Ms. Form-Inspector objected to that too.

Fine, I thought, I’ll just go do this in my room. I crumpled up the form and asked this self-important guard to put it in the trash under the dormguard desk. That, apparently, was below her dignity. “Airman Alexander, give me a 341!” she exclaims, as proudly as if she was reciting a line in a 1st grade school play. This was a girl who had been in the Air Force a tenth the time I had, who I outranked by two paygrades. I was exhausted of all these games. My voice must have rung with exasperation and irritation when I demanded, “Why??” Turns out she felt I was “disrespecting” the elite dorm guard position by having them throw trash away for me.

I decided then and there I wasn’t pulling a 12-hour shift because of this nonsense. I tried to argue with the girl, but now people were gathering around. I wasn’t going to be able to just walk away from this one, like I had in the chow hall. The situation looked bleak. There was only one escape, and that was right into the lions’ den: the dreaded bluerope hall, where our military training instructors had their offices. I told our upset dormguard friend that I was going to go talk to one of the sergeants about our dispute. I gathered my courage and walked into the office hall.

I walked right up to the office of the highest enlisted person in the squadron, the dreaded master sergeant, who routinely tore airmen to shreds. This was a woman who’d made more grown men cry than I’d eaten hot dinners, and I walked right to her office, rapped on the door and followed the appropriate protocol: “Ma’am, Airman Alexander reports.” She gave me an impatient glare and told me to wait, and wait I did, standing outside her office. Things were very busy in the hall. At length the master sergeant got up and went into an adjacent office, ignoring me. I easily heard the conversation with her fellow bluerope:

“Look at all these 341s. These will take forever to process! Where’d they all come from??”

I was shocked. Our overlords were as frustrated with the system as we were! Of course… it meant more work for them! Finally, the master sergeant demanded to know why I was standing outside her office. I explained the episode at the dorm guard desk, and I think Ms. Master-Sergeant’s brain short circuited. An airman sticking up for himself? This was unheard of, and I like to think the battle-hardened warden didn’t know what to make of it! She told me to summon the dorm guard, who donned a look of sheer terror on her face as soon as I informed her she was wanted in the snakepit.

Now we were both standing before the angry and confused master sergeant. The universal, axiomatic truth in the AETC is that any accusation is true and any accusee is guilty. But who was the accusor? The dormguard was pressing charges against my “disrespect”. And I was pressing charges against her uncalled-for behavior. The axiom of truth bent around and contradicted itself, causing the universe to violently explode in a big military paradox.

After getting the story from both of us, and switching erratically between supporting one and supporting the other, it was clear our boss was stumped. Finally I spoke up and suggested it was all a misunderstanding and she should let us both off with a warning. Normally, I imagine I’d've earned myself a 12-hour shift for that kind of insolence, presuming to make suggestions to a sergeant, but I think she was just glad to see a way out of her predicament. She took my suggestion and I kept my 341 and my weekend!

After that incident, my eyes were wide open to how the mindgames of military training really worked. The truth was so obvious, I should’ve seen it all along, from day 1 of boot camp. The TIs and the blueropes, they were only barely one step above us in the big picture. They were small potatoes, and they were as scared for their hides as we were… in fact, we were immune, and they were vulnerable. See, any black marks we got in the pipeline would be wiped away and ignored once we got to our actual duty stations. It was just make believe, pixie dust, a bunch of jumping through hoops. But a black mark on the sergeant’s record would follow him the rest of his career.

What’s more, the axiomatic truth, that every accusee is guilty as charged, ignores rank. At least as long as it applies to the enlisted rank and file. I don’t know how it would work against officers, but I realized that I had a terrible power, that by merely filling out a complaint form, I could sink whatever military training bigwig I wanted. Colonels and generals, they turn a blind eye to the abuse heaped on students, but when you shove a complaint form in their face, they can’t do that any more. A TI spitting in a trainee’s face is commonplace and ordinary at Lackland, and no-one thinks about it twice, but if the trainee actually writes a complaint, Sgt. Hartman is suddenly in a world of pain. The TIs and the blueropes know this and they secretly fear it.

It was like waking up and realizing you’re a superhero and just never knew it. I was virtually invincible to any further 12-hour shifts. After that day, when anyone tried to get me in trouble, I’d rush to get my complaint in before theirs got in. I never saw another 12-hour shift at Keesler.

Graduating Techschool

I graduated, a sparkly new Weather Forecasting Journeyman, shortly after the incident with the dormguard. But as far as I’m concerned, that incident was my real point of graduation. The word “graduate” comes from Latin “gradus”: a stage, a degree. The etymology of the word teaches us that graduation ceremonies serve to divide society into classes and hierarchies– “degrees”, if you will– like lines on a measuring cup. I felt like I had already transcended the artificial stages and structure of military training, so graduation was just a tradition to be followed.

My career in the Air Force was just beginning. I bid farewell to the institution which had served as my prison for the past half year. I bid farewell to the Air Education & Training Command and all its hoops and circuses. I didn’t realize that the mind games and nonsense would continue no matter how long I stayed in the Air Force. They just become more spaced out. But I had a different perspective on them thanks to my techschool revelation.

1. Where is Air Force Boot Camp?

It’s located at, and makes up a huge part of, Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas. It’s less than an hour’s drive from The Alamo.

2. What’s the schedule like?

When I went through Basic, it was a six-and-a-half-week process, and now it’s been extended to an eight-and-a-half-week one. (They’ll tell you “eight weeks” to make it sound easier, but don’t be fooled, the partial “Zero Week” which they aren’t counting is traumatic enough it should almost count twice).

I can’t speak from direct experience since I went through pre-change, but the weeks are roughly: In-Processing and Intro to the Military (Zero Week), More Intro to the Military (First Week), Intro Drill and Ceremony (Second Week), Combat Preparation and More Drill (Third Week), More Combat Training (Fourth Week), Even More Combat Training plus Leadership and CPR (Fifth Week), Even More Drill and Combat Training (Sixth Week), Air Force Trivia and More Combat Stuff (Seventh Week), Graduation Ceremony and Happy Sappy Stuff (Eighth Week).

3. Is Air Force Boot Camp hard?

Yes. It might be harder than anything else you’ve gone through in your life so far, at least if you’re anywhere near as sheltered as I was. This is not a vacation.

4. What’s the hardest part?

Obviously that varies from person to person, but for most people, the worst part is psychological. In other words, mind games. Never ending mind games. You’ll wish they’d just make you do push ups and call it a day. Push ups? Paradise. You’ll be insulted, humiliated, torn to shreds in front of all your flightmates, spat at, cursed at, and generally made to feel like scum of the earth. You’ll constantly believe you’re a hair’s width away from flunking back to zero week.

5. How hard is the first night?

It depends largely on the dorm guards. On the first night (and throughout the first week) your dorm will be guarded by trainees from a more advanced flight from your squadron. If you’re lucky, they might give you tips and advice. If you’re unlucky, they might yell at you and give you a hard time. Much later, you’ll get a chance to return the favor to a new flight.

6. Are there any requirements for BMT?

Yes, and they’re identical to the requirements for enlisting in the first place, so if you manage to enlist, you’re golden. The biggest hurdle is weight: you can’t weigh too much or too little (I had to pack on some pounds because I was actually in danger of being too scrawny). If you have asthma, you’ll probably have to make due with attending Boot Camp vicariously through this blog. For more details on requirements, ask your recruiter– this is one area where even the sketchiest recruiter will generally tell you straight facts, because if they send someone to MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) who doesn’t make the initial cut, it makes them look bad.

7. What’s the food like for trainees at Lackland?

Surprisingly good. You might have seen comic strips where miserable privates skin mountains of potatoes, but actually Lackland employs civilian contractors to do the cooking (don’t worry though, you’ll get plenty of chances to do other manual labor). The food is served up school cafeteria style, the main course varies day by day and is always pretty decent. With every meal, you’ll be required to drink at least one glass of water and two glasses of a lukewarm gatorade-like beverage. There are rumors that the gatorade is laced with drugs to temporarily kill your sex drive, and if that’s true, you’ll probably be grateful, since Basic isn’t a very easy place to find action. On certain days, you’ll eat “Meals Ready to Eat”, aka MRE’s, which is what real soldiers eat on the front lines. These are highly advanced rations engineered for compactness and efficiency, and they’re also pretty decent.

8. How soon can I ship out if I sign up today?

If you’re in a rush, I believe the only constraint is that you’ll need to wait til a new flight (i.e. class) is ready to form. You don’t need to worry about securing the exact date, MEPS will take care of that. If you’d rather not ship out right away, you can put it off for up to six months with the DEP program (Delayed Enlistment Program). You won’t be paid or gain rank while on DEP, but it’ll count toward the mandatory 8-year commitment (regardless of how short your active duty contract, you must remain inactive reserve for as many additional years as necessary to make 8 total years), and you can still change your mind and cancel the enlistment up until the actual ship out date.

9. How does training differ between active duty, national guard, and reserves?

As for Boot Camp, the answer is not at all (well, technically it might influence how many stripes you can sew onto your sleeves in graduation week– see further below about stripes– and how much you’re paid during training, but neither of these make any difference in the training itself). Big differences will arise after BMT, when you proceed to tech school, where national guard and reserves are given many blatantly unfair advantages over active duty.

10. How does training differ between males and females?

I was obviously never a member of a female flight, so I can’t say very precisely. What I can tell you is the sexes are strictly separated. In BMT you will never even speak to a member of the opposite sex, unless either they’re one of your superiors or else a drill sergeant is directly ordering you to speak to them. One guy in my flight got in enormous trouble just for talking to one of the dry cleaning ladies! Girls do have slightly easier physical fitness requirements than guys, despite whatever you saw in G.I. Jane.

11. How does it differ between officers and enlisted?

Officer Training School (OTS) is completely different and I have absolutely no experience there.

12. What’s the best time to go to BMT?

Probably Autumn or Spring if MEPS will let you. San Antonio can get quite hot during the Summer and quite cold during the Winter. Myself, I was there in the Summer, and it was terrible. The only benefit was that when the thermometer got really high, they occasionally canceled the day’s drill practice.

13. What are showers like at boot camp?

There’s a large shower area, adjacent to the toilet-and-sinks area, with about six showers (no walls separating them). The only explicit rules the TIs gave us were that we had to wear shower sandals, and we had to wear towels when exiting the latrine. Besides that, theoretically you’re free to take a nice leisurely hot shower… theoretically. In practice, your own flight mates will agree to much stricter rules. This is because of two things: first, there’s very little time to waste, and everyone has to get a turn showering; second, your own flight is responsible for keeping the shower area absolutely clean. In my flight, we took very short, cold showers, to save time and avoid producing steam (steam is very tough to clean after).

14. Will I be able to write letters home from Lackland?

Yes, but only during free time, of which you’ll have precious little. Getting caught writing letters while “on duty” is one of the most common infractions, and your sergeants will not take kindly to it. The only exception to that is, they turn a blind eye to dorm guards writing letters while pulling night shift guard duty. Make sure to take postage stamps and envelopes with you when you ship out!

15. How can I get in shape for Basic?

The three fundamentals are: push-ups, sit-ups, and running. For the push-ups and sit-ups, it’s better not to train at all, than to train using incorrect form and have to correct your form later: so if you’re gonna work on them in advance, be sure your form is flawless! If I recall correct, girls are allowed some weaker form for push-ups, but double-check this with your recruiter. Also ask your recruiter about specific details on form or on how many reps are required: I don’t remember the exact numbers and they’re always changing anyway. As for running, train for distance, don’t bother training for sprinting.

I’d recommend you try weight-lifting if you aren’t already. It’s not required for boot camp, indeed you won’t even have access to weights there. However, it will strengthen your immune system, which is extremely important since everyone gets sick sometime in boot camp; and you’ll feel better overall, giving you a much-needed morale advantage. Heck, lift weights whether you’re joining the military or not! If you enter the DEP program, supposedly it’ll give you access to the base gym on any military base, but I never tried this.

One thing you might consider is doing a 30-Day Workout-Every-Day Challenge. Follow that link to read about the first one I did.

See also my article: Progressive Training.

16. Besides getting in shape, how else can I train?

Having good self-esteem and a positive attitude will go a very long way. You can strengthen your self-esteem and make your attitude more positive using Positive Affirmations. If this idea seems silly at first, just remember, you’re reciting these positive affirmations so you can kill people and break their stuff

Be sure you know how to tie your shoes, and if you’re a guy, how to tie a tie. Know what size shoes you wear. If you’re a guy, ignore any advice your recruiter gives you to the contrary, and get a short haircut or even a crew-cut beforehand. It’s not actually necessary, but if you go in with long hair as a guy, you’ll catch lots of flak for it.

17. What can I bring with me?

Try not to take much luggage: most of it will get stowed in a closet until the very last day of camp. There’s no need to take more than five days worth of clothes, because you’ll soon be given standard issue, and then all your civies will join the rest of your luggage in the closet; the only exception is underwear. The clothes you take should be plain and ordinary, not because that’s actually required, but just because you want to stay out of the spotlight as much as you can. Do take postage stamps, envelopes, paper and pens/pencils, if you want to write letters home (you probably will). Take some cash; $10 should be plenty. When I went through, it was vitally important to bring plenty of quarters to operate the pay phones, but I’m not sure whether that’s still the case. Take a pair of sandals or flip-flops to use in the showers on the first few nights, but note that you’ll probably have to throw them away after the first flight shopping trip because your flight will want to have matching flip-flops after that. If you have glasses or contacts, take them even if you never wear them, because having the lenses will simplify the eye doctor appointment (but note you’ll be required to wear standard issue glasses very soon after arriving); heck, take the actual paper prescription, if you have it. Take a good toothbrush, razor (if you need one), toothpaste. Make sure the razor would get through airport security (this is sort of required anyway unless you actually live in San Antonio). Obviously take a picture ID, and a birth certificate and social security card if you have ‘em.

18. Will I get paid during boot camp?

Yes. You’ll start in pay grade E1 (“Airman Basic”), unless your contract states otherwise. You won’t get your first payment immediately, you’ll get it at regular intervals just like every other service member, so they’ll issue you a temporary debit card with some money on it which will be taken out of the first paycheck. If Mexico invades Texas, and San Antonio becomes a battlefield, you’ll theoretically get the combat zone bonus. When I shipped out, they even gave us about $100 each to spend on dinner at the airport (but you don’t get to keep the unspent portion). However, you will not get any sign-on bonuses until you reach tech school. (Who the heck needs $6000 at Lackland anyway?)

19. Do you have to swim during basic military training?

No. You might fall into water during the obstacle course, but it is shallow.

20. What happens if you get sick during training?

If you inform your drill sergeant, they’ll arrange for an escort to take you to the squadron clinic, where (if your experience is like mine was) you’ll enjoy the company of some very cheerful and friendly medical staff. Beware: if they find a medical condition which you hid from MEPS, you’re in big trouble. A guy in my flight got kicked out completely, all because he hid that he had once had a broken arm.

21. Are hair cuts necessary?

For guys, certainly. They’ll shave you almost bald. For girls, I’m not sure of the exact rules. I don’t remember; I drank so much of that drugged gatorade that for once in my life I wasn’t checking out all the ladies around me

22. What if I have glasses?

Sometime during zero week, you’ll see an eye doctor (whether you have glasses or not). If you need glasses, they’ll give you a prescription, and within a few days, you’ll receive a pair of the thickest, ugliest, nerdiest glasses ever created. These are combat glasses, about as hard to destroy as Robert Patrick in Terminator 2. We call them Birth Control Glasses, or BCGs, and no, they aren’t optional, you’ll be wearing them until tech school.

23. Is there any free time?

There are a few minutes of free time every day. What free time you don’t spend writing letters, you’ll probably spend trying to get your locker straightened out for room inspections. Occasionally, the flight will be awarded with extra free time, a “patio break” when you’ll have access to candy vending machines and pay phones, usually for 15 minutes or half an hour. These are rare. On the final days of training, you’ll get tons of free time: hours of on-base leave on Friday, and, miracle of miracles, hours of off-base leave to explore San Antonio on Saturday. Most airmen have their parents fly in to spend time with them during these final hours, ‘cuz whatever you think of home before you ship out, you’ll probably feel the harsh pangs of homesickness.

24. Know any Boot Camp jokes?

“Did you iron that uniform, dirtbag?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Did you turn the iron on first?”
(or…)
“Did you iron it with a rock?”

25. Tell me about AF Drill Sergeants.

They’re technically called Training Instructors, or TI’s for short. They wear distinctive black hats (hence the nickname “black hats”), which your subconscious mind will come to associate with dread and terror. They wear special metal bits on the bottoms of their boots so you can hear them coming from a mile away.

No Air Force regulation actually requires that TI’s be such heartless mothaf’ers. That arises out of necessity. You’d be a bit irritable too, if you had to herd 60 fresh high school graduates to an appointment across base in exactly 14 minutes and some idiot didn’t know how to tie his boots. Think of it as tough love. VERY tough love.

The truth is that the drill sergeant’s power is illusionary. He or she is actually more vulnerable than you are. If a trainee pens a written complaint against a TI, it’s a permanent black mark on the sergeant’s record, but nothing the TI can do to you will endure past the bus ride to tech school. A TI is really only one step higher than the new airman, in the bigger hierarchy. She lacks the power to flunk you or kick you out of the military even if she tried: the squadron commander (lightyears above the TI) handles those things.

26. What are the Core Values?

See here.

27. Tell Me About Life After Boot Camp. Can you go home?

No, you can’t go home right after BMT. You’ll go on a bus to your technical school. You can read about my tech school experience, which was relatively long and grueling and hopefully yours will be easier, here. You’ll be able to take leave after tech school, or possibly during it if you’re there long enough to hit the Christmas season.

28. Does the experience change people?

Profoundly. For many, it fills that gap where our ancestors used to perform coming-of-age ceremonies. In other words, I went in as a boy and came out as a man. In a certain sense, the hellish and unrelenting nature of Basic is great: it distracts you from the deeply raw emotions which would otherwise accompany such drastic and abrupt personal upheaval.

29. Can you fail BMT?

Yes, but most failures are for medical reasons, for serious illegal activity, or for continued inability to pass the PT test. The TI’s will make you feel like you’re on the verge of failing because you didn’t make your bed correctly (and you’ll probably still think that despite reading this very blog), but that would be highly impractical. Remember that the whole point of the Air Force is not to make beds or make life hell for new airmen. The point is to kill foreigners with napalm. You don’t do that by paying young men and women to make beds and then sending them back home.

I was so certain I was going to get washed back to zero week. I failed the sit-ups part of the PT test, and then I failed it again at the make-up PT test. I felt absolutely terrible, because my parents and brother had already bought non-refundable tickets to visit me in graduation week, and I thought I’d have to disappoint them. A couple TI’s dragged me aside that evening and pulled me into their office, where they gave me a completely out-of-regulation third try, totally ignoring my terrible form near the end. In other words, I should have washed out, and the very TI’s who had me convinced they wanted me gone, stuck their necks out and bent all the rules to save my butt!

30. How can I send mail to my son/daughter/family member at Lackland AFB?

Very early in zero week, your airman will be given a form letter to send you. This will contain his or her mailing address. Also, check the form letter to see if your airman maybe added any secret messages to it, say, by circling or underlining certain characters. Feel free to share it with anyone else your airman would like to hear from. Your letter will arrive at the squadron with all the other letters to other trainees, and your airman’s TI will deliver it to your airman in the evening. Believe it or not, receiving letters is a kind of status symbol in the twisted world of the AETC. I’ve heard that some trainees, distraught at the lack of incoming mail, will actually send a letter to themselves, just so their mates don’t see them as That Guy With No Loved Ones. Of course, the TI’s always notice where the letter was mailed from, and when they see a self-addressed letter, that trainee will never live it down: so don’t let your airman go unloved!!

31. Tell me about the footwear they issue.

There are actually two trips to the clothing depot (no point issuing fancy dress blues to an airman early on if he’s going to get caught smoking in the bathrooms in the third week, kicked out, and never wear the things). The first trip, you’ll get one pair of combat boots and one pair of civilian running shoes. You should be very certain of your shoe size before shipping out, because poorly-fit boots will torment you for many weeks to come (random history trivia: in Nazi concentration camps, cigarettes were worth more than gold, and decent shoes were worth more than cigarettes). Of course you’ll also get a bunch of camouflage gear (BDU or Battle Dress Uniform) and other clothing, but for some reason, a lot more people ask me about the footwear. The second trip, you’ll get a pair of fancy dress shoes called Low Quarters. One activity that’ll chew up a ton of your time at boot camp: you’re gonna learn how to shine shoes!

32. What’s with those stripes on some trainees’ sleeves?

Some people get clauses in their contracts saying they get to enter at pay grades higher than E1: E2 or E3. This can be for any number of reasons. I got E2 coming in, because I had 15 units from community college. A lot of people get E3 right off the bat because they were JROTC in high school. If you’re ballsy, the guys at MEPS might have certain leeway to haggle over the contract, and if you insist on getting free rank or you won’t join, it just might work. Anyway, that’s all the stripes mean. Near the end of basic, if you have rank, you’ll be allowed to go get stripes sewn on. One stripe for E2, two for E3. Go early in the day if possible– the seamstress closed her shop on me and I couldn’t get my stripes sewn on til tech school (which, technically, was a violation of the UCMJ… wearing an improper uniform…) If you’re E1 (“Airman Basic”), you get zero stripes, which, ironically, can actually make you look like an officer, since they wear their insignia on their collar/hat instead of their sleeves.

33. How does Air Force basic training differ from other services?

The old stereotype is that Marine Corps Boot Camp is hardest, then Army, then Navy, and Air Force is the easiest. I never went through any other service’s pipeline, so I wouldn’t know. I do think that the stereotype is based largely on the physical components, ignoring the incessant mind games of AFBMT (though, of course, every branch will have some mind games). I’ve also heard from some sources that the new, 8-week, Air Force Boot Camp is actually harder than the army… but don’t quote me on that