It was Christmas 1975 and I was halfway through Basic Military Training at Lackland AFB outside of San Antonio, Texas. There were a couple of hundred of us who’d arrived four weeks previously. Most were recent high school graduates. Some had prior military experience such as high school ROTC so they came in with a nominal bump in rank.
Numerous buses converged on Lackland, packed with fresh meat. Everybody had their packet of paperwork and as we disembarked in the early evening we were told to gather over here or get in that line over there. There wasn’t any screaming until a couple of enlistees went to the wrong line. The US military had recently stopped allowing the sergeants to strike or curse a subordinate enlisted man. Some of the old timers had a hard time with that transition.
At this point we were still in our civilian clothes, sporting the long hairstyles and facial hair popular in the mid-1970s. We were called “Rainbows.” After the technical instructors (TIs) had confirmed everybody who should be in their “flight” had indeed arrived, we formed up and were given a few minutes of instruction in marching. Always start off on the left foot. Pivot, Airman! Pivot! Only those few who’d served in ROTC knew what they were doing. We’d get much more training in marching over the next few weeks. We were hauled down the street to the barbershop. Everybody else on the base had the opportunity to hoot and holler at us. “Rainbows!” “You’re gonna regret it!”
The barbershop didn’t take requests. There were several chairs and a line formed up in front of each one. We waited and then sat in a chair and the barber cut our hair/mustache/beard off without using a guard on the trimmer. The stubble left wasn’t even an eighth of an inch. We were then marched over to a dorm. The Army had barracks, the Air Force had dorms. The dorm had one big open bay for each flight of recruits. A flight consisted of roughly 50 men (or women.) The Army equivalent of a flight was called a platoon. Basic training was segregated by sex in the 70s. The various service branches have tried co-educational training, but most basic training is gender-segregated.
That first night was a long one. We filled out form after form and received training in basic hygiene. I was surprised how many guys were unfamiliar with brushing their teeth, shaving, and regular showers, but it’s a diversity of backgrounds to which the military provides exposure and I still think that’s a good thing. We were assigned our bunks and issued linens.
We were learning each other’s names as the drill instructors barked out assignments. The smallest guy was traditionally the “House Mouse.” He was a runner for the sergeants. “House Mouse! Go get distribution (mail) from the Captain!” The biggest men or those with an ROTC background were made section leaders. Four sections in our flight. Everybody rotated Dorm Guard. Two-hour shifts. You walked the dorm with a flashlight that had a light-subduing orange cone on the end. You woke up your replacement at the end of your shift.
The bunks weren’t bunk beds. They were singles, tubular steel painted gray. Our linens consisted of a mattress cover with string-ties known as a “fart sack,” two white cotton flat sheets, and two olive drab wool blankets with a big “US” in black in the middle. Feather pillow. White cotton pillowcase. We were shown how to make our beds; it was obvious right away we’d need more practice.
The bunks were three feet wide and we kept a three feet aisle between beds. We slept head to toe, me looking at the adjacent bunks’ toes and they looking at mine. Less spread of airborne illness. I remember going into the latrine before lights out and looking into the mirror, seeing my bald head, and asking, “What the fuck have I done?” It did get better. I figured that at least a million men had gone through this before me and I could do it, too. We lost a few recruits along the way, but 45 of the 50 in my flight made it.
In the morning we were awakened at 0430 (or 4:30 a.m. for those who just cannot grasp military time). We were still Rainbows as we marched over to the mess hall for breakfast. More jeers about being Rainbows. “I’d turn back if I were you!” Military food is better than its reputation. Hot and plenty.
After breakfast we “formed up” (arranged ourselves in four columns of a dozen men each) and marched over to some warehouses to get our uniforms. It was very organized and we moved along quickly as we began. No talking. In the door, grab a duffel bag, move along to the next station. The warehouse had low ceilings and smelled of old wood and new clothes. They didn’t ask your size. The men and women manning the distribution stations had been doing this for so long they simply looked at you and handed you the correct size. They understood that the overweight recruits would be slimming down and the skinny recruits would be bulking up. One poor bastard challenged the clerk on the size of his underwear and a red-faced sergeant screamed at him. “You think you know more than her, BOY! You some kind of Ein Stein!”
Everything went into the duffel bag. First station was underwear. Surprisingly, we did have a choice of boxers or briefs. White. Six pairs. T-shirts. White. Six. Handkerchiefs. Six. All cotton. Two towels, two washcloths.
We moved along and received our fatigues, still olive drab (OD) back then. The fatigues were utility clothing worn when doing manual labor or vehicle maintenance. No camouflage then. Pants, three. Blouses (shirts, but don’t call them that) three. Matching baseball hats. They’re called “covers.” As in “WHERE’S YOUR COVER, AIRMAN?” if you were seen hatless. Cotton web belt and buckle. Thick padded OD socks, six. Black leather glove shells and OD wool glove liners. And the best garment I ever owned, the M-65 field jacket. Lots of pockets and adjustments available through drawstrings and Velcro®. It was warm and durable. After basic training, one of my pockets would always be holding a paperback book for those “hurry up and wait” moments.
We moved on to the everyday uniforms known as Class Bs. Let’s call it business wear, to be worn when not getting dirty. Two pairs of the darker blue worsted wool slacks, three short-sleeved and long-sleeved pale blue cotton/polyester shirts, tie, and the darker worsted wool dress coat. Black cotton socks, six pair. Two hats. One was the more formal round service cap, the type you saw worn by pilots and taxicab drivers in the 1950s and 1960s. The other was the garrison cap, more frequently called the cunt cap, partly due to its shape and partly due to all the dickheads underneath them. The duffel bag is a little over half full by now.
On to shoes. All black. We received a pair of combat boots, chukka boots, and Oxford-style dress shoes. All to be “highly” shined soon. Here the line started to slow down. The Air Force did understand that if you were going to be marching all day, the footwear had better fit or there would be unnecessary injuries. At this station we were told to put on our padded green socks and the chukka boots. Civilian footwear chucked into the duffel bag. Once everybody was booted up we were formed up outside and told to remove our civilian jackets/coats and put on the field jackets. It was Texas, but December. We marched back to the dorms. The drill instructor was training/critiquing our marching skills along the way.
It was about mid-day when we returned to the dorm. Waiting on our bunks was an envelope containing our name tags, the US Air Force tags, a stencil with our names and social security numbers for marking the duffel bag and footlockers. We didn’t have footlockers, but some units did. We had a gray steel wall locker with drawers, a clothes rod, and a top shelf. There was also a stamp with the first initial of our last name, dash, and the last four digits of our social security numbers. Also in the package were our dog tags.
Duffel bags were dumped on the bunk and we learned proper care and storage of each item. First, everything was to be marked with the stamp provided. Neatly. If you smeared it, you’d get a demerit on every following inspection. Underwear was stamped on the elastic band to the left of the seam. It was to be folded into six-inch squares. They had to be “perfect” six-inch squares. No parallelograms, no trapezoids. Squares. A dollar bill is exactly six inches long so this was the ruler used by most of us. T-shirts were stamped on the collar and folded into exactly the same six-inch squares. Handkerchiefs were not stamped but folded in eighths. Fold in half, half again, and twice more. They were exempt from the six-inch rule.
Our fatigues were fresh from the mills with every seam and belt loop sporting errant threads that needed to be cut off. Our drill instructors were called technical instructors because we weren’t the Army or the Marines. TIs instead of DIs. TIs called these errant threads “ropes.” They could spot a rope from 100 meters away and they’d run over to you and scream at you about those ropes.
Smoking was still pretty popular in the 1970s, but it was a couple of weeks before it was allowed to new recruits. The smokers found that you could use a lighter to burn off the ropes. That worked great on the fatigues; the threads would burn down like a candlewick until the mass of cotton was reached and then the wick would snuff out. But when it was tried on the cotton/polyester blend shirts, often the fabric itself would ignite. Several members of the flight had charred spots on their Class B shirts and they received hell about it throughout basic training.
Everything in the wall locker had to be clean, pressed, and either folded in the drawers or hung on hangers equally spaced. The TIs would measure the spacing if they felt it wasn’t right. Toiletries had to be arranged exactly as instructed on a clean towel. And everything had to be spotless. No random hair in the comb. No random stubble in the razor. No hair on the soap. Your bar of soap had to be dry and clean. Most of us took to using shampoo as soap so that we could keep the bar of soap looking new. Some guys bought a decoy razor and kept the one they used hidden in a pocket. Bad move. Drill sergeants have a sixth sense about such things and always found the hidden items.
The next few weeks were pretty much the same thing every day. Wake up around 0430, down to the parade grounds which were huge asphalt parking lots without lines for parking cars to get Physical Training (PT.) Lots of calisthenics followed by running the perimeter of the parade grounds in formation. Every situation had its rules. For PT, only fatigue pants and a t-shirt. Back then we wore our combat boots but a few years later they started issuing sneakers for PT. Your dog tags’ chain was to be removed from around your neck and looped around the belt loop behind your right pocket and then the tags themselves went into that pocket. Nothing in your pockets but the dogs tags. No change, no lighters. Of course, rules get broken.
One morning we were doing sit-ups and a bunch of change rolled out of one guy’s pockets onto the asphalt. It took about a second before he was pulled to his feet and screamed at by the TI. The TI pointed down the road to another group of trainees doing PT. I can’t remember the exact distance between dorms but it was around 100 yards. The TI told the errant airman to run down to the next TI and ask him if he needed change for a dollar. The rest of us were brought to our feet and stayed in formation facing the distant TI and watched as our colleague ran to the TI down the road. We could see the outstretched arm of that TI pointing to yet another group of trainees even further down the road. And we stood and watched as the change-maker ran on to another and another. I think it was about six stops he had to make. The sergeant wanted all of us to learn this lesson by watching the change-maker run and we were very careful about not having any change in our pockets after that.
After PT, we’d go back to the dorm to shit, shower, shave and then clean the latrines. Fifty men in 30 minutes. Then back downstairs in the uniform prescribed for that day’s activities. We wore fatigues for weeks before we were allowed to wear the Class Bs. Then to the mess hall, and back to the parade ground for drill. Drill was marching training. Right flank, harch! Left flank, harch! Quick time, double time, change step. Flight, halt! Every command had a preparatory phrase such as “To the rear,” followed by the execution command, usually “March,” but the execution command almost always came out with an H for the first letter because it was easier to shout an H word. March became Harch. Mostly we didn’t count. It was “Your left, your left.” Every once in a while you’d hear the TI holler, “YOUR MILITARY LEFT!” Everything was meant to be done in lockstep. Everybody’s left foot was supposed to strike the ground at the same instant. And the TIs wanted to hear that coordinated strike. It wasn’t so easy to make noise with the rubber-soled combat boots but it was possible if everybody was truly synched up. Our first few attempts at “Flight… Halt!” were comical. The TI shouted, “Goddamn, that sounds like a cow pissing on a flat rock.”
We learned to come to Attention, ramrod straight with thumbs on pants seam. The attention position couldn’t be held too long because the locked knees would cause the occasional recruit to pass out and face plant. If we were in formation for very long we went to Parade Rest: legs slightly apart with hands in the small of the back, but no moving about. At Ease: able to shuffle around in formation position and maybe even have a quiet conversation.
We’d drill all morning until the midday meal. Our squadron leader, a higher ranking sergeant, was a “short-timer,” meaning he’d be retiring soon so he was more relaxed than some of our other stone-faced leaders. He’d shout “Short!” every so often to remind his peers, not the raw meat. At the dining facility (chow hall in the Air Force, mess hall in the Army,) he’d let us walk single file if there was no backup, but if there was he wouldn’t want us slouching about. He’d bring us to Attention, move forward one step, back to At Ease. “Huh Tension! One step forward, Harch! At Ease!” Repeat as long as it took.
Then some sort of training inside the dorm like maintaining the property, shining the footwear, making the bed. Sometimes we’d be marched over to a more traditional classroom setting: First aid. Chain of command and military etiquette. History of the Air Force. The military justice system. Small arms training. We didn’t fire a weapon until we’d had several classes on safety, marksmanship, the nomenclature of the M-16 rifle, and how to disassemble and clean the weapon.
We were expected to maintain a certain degree of personal behavior. No hands in pockets. No leaning on walls. No catcalling. Once, as we entered the dining facility for a meal, a new recruit was engaged in a bonus round of violations. He was leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, and not wearing his hat. When we departed 15 minutes later, a sergeant had him face the wall with both hands up as if he were about to be frisked, but instead the sergeant had him hollering, “I’m holding up the wall, sergeant! I’m holding up the wall, sergeant!” He may still be there.
Every day we had an inspection. Our training sergeants would make sure everybody’s bed was pulled taut. If a single wrinkle was seen, they’d pull off the blankets and sheets and it would have to be redone immediately. If they saw several wrinkles or a sheet dangling from underneath the bed, they’d grab the steel cot and flip everything over. If they saw no wrinkles they’d try to bounce a quarter off it. A quarter that bounced would elicit praise, “Good job, airman.” I thought I had the tightest bed in the group one morning and the sergeant said, “You think that’s pretty tight, don’t you?” “Yes, Sergeant!” He then ran his fingers down the blanket from the head of the bed to the foot of the bed and then back up, creating a wrinkle. He slammed his hand down on the wrinkle, hoping to pull the bedding off, but he missed! The wrinkle had flattened out. It was a tight bed. He flipped it over at that point and said, “Make it again!” There was no winning in this game.
The Air Force didn’t like overweight, out-of-shape slobs wearing their uniform. Recruiters would enlist people at the maximum allowable weight and everybody would hope that the rigors of basic training would correct all three, the weight, the fitness, and the slobbery.
The guy who bunked next to me was one of these poor wretches. The training instructors gave these poor guys hell. “Why the hell you sittin’ on your fat ass? Give me 20 pushups!” Relentless. Our main training sergeant was on this guy’s case constantly. The sergeant couldn’t settle on the right insulting nickname. He started by calling him “Lard-ass,” but somebody must’ve reminded him about the “Can’t Cuss ‘Em” rule so he shifted to “Lard-butt,” then “Butter-butt,” then “Butter-bucket,” then “Lard-bucket,” before he finally settled on “Bucket-butt,” completely leaving out the lard and the butter.
Sometimes, to wake us up in the morning, whoever was on dorm guard would walk down the main aisle between the rows of bunks and run his flashlight along the uprights of our bed ends, like running a stick along a fence. One morning I woke as soon as the lights came on and was about to get out of bed and saw the dorm guard about to rattle my uprights and I said, “Touch my bed and I’ll kill you.” But I must’ve been in a hypnagogic state because Bucket-butt kept looking at me and looking away. I asked, “Hey, everything alright?” He said, “When the lights came on in the morning, you had one eye open, looked at me and said, “I’ll kill you.” We got over it.
For wall locker inspections, the different drawers were pulled and arranged on the bunk. Each person had a diagram of where every single item you owned was supposed to go; soap here, socks here, etc., but only items on that diagram were allowed. We couldn’t have a radio because there was no spot on the diagram for it.
There was another Martin in my flight, a black man from the Deep South. He could snore louder than any other human being I’ve ever heard. In the mornings, his bunk would be surrounded by pillows thrown during the night in an attempt to stop the snoring. I relied on exhaustion to counteract the snoring.
During inspection, the House Mouse (the littlest guy) would accompany the training instructor with a clipboard and document any infractions or demerits. Too many demerits and you wouldn’t be allowed to go to the local store (the Base Exchange) to buy a Coke or soap. Demerits were arbitrary. If you had unauthorized items in your clothing drawer, for example, you might get five or 50 demerits depending on the sergeant’s mood. He was seldom in a “good” mood.
After one recruit upset him with an unauthorized item, he said to House Mouse, “Unauthorized item in clothing drawer! 50 demerits!” The clothing drawer was then flipped off the bed, scattering everything. The unexpected noise of the drawer flipping caused several pigeons that were roosting outside a nearby open window to suddenly fly off. The sergeant moved on to the next bunk, which belonged to Martin the Snorer. A single feather blew in through the open window and drifted downward. The drill instructor and the rest of us watched that white feather come down, floating to the left, then the right. The feather landed right in front of the sergeant, right in the middle of Martin’s beautifully organized clothing drawer. The TI bent over, leaned in and got a good long look, grasped it between thumb and forefinger, pulled it out, looked at it as if he’d never seen a feather before, and then turned to House Mouse and said, “Unauthorized item in clothing drawer. Ten demerits.” We all agreed later that it could have been worse.
True or not, it was made clear that there was no way to get out of our enlistment contracts. Two exceptions were for previously undiagnosed health conditions and homosexuality. Back then, homosexuality was against Pentagon rules. The enlistment contract had a checkbox you specifically had to address stating that one had never engaged in homosexual acts. I remember when I was signing my enlistment contract that the clerk next to me was working with an illiterate enlistee (must’ve been going to the Marines,) and had to read most of the contract to him. When he got to the part about homosexuality, the enlistee didn’t understand the word. “Are you a homo… sexual?” “What?” “Are you a homo… sexual?” “DO YOU LIKE BOYS? OR GIRLS?” “Oh. Girls. Yeah. Girls.”
One of the enlistees in our flight didn’t understand that it was a game and that you had to learn the rules and play along. He had a very hard time with the simplest tasks and instructions and got a lot of hell from the sergeants. He went to the chaplain and convinced him that he was a homosexual and needed to be discharged immediately. He didn’t care about the Bad Conduct discharge or any of the long-term repercussions. The chaplain processed his request almost immediately. He was gone from the dorm that day.
When he first returned to the dorm, he was beaming because the chaplain had told him to pack his duffel bag and return to the chaplain’s office to process a discharge. We didn’t know about his visit to the chaplain; we only knew this guy was happy and packing. We were all shining our boots, ironing our uniforms, and working on our wall lockers and he started throwing all his gear into the duffel bag. Our main instructor was also one of the meanest men I’d met to that point. He returned to the dorm and moved straight to the newly-gay recruit and started screaming.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Air Man?”
“I’m packing. I’m leaving.”
“WHO THE FUCK SAID YOU COULD LEAVE MY FLIGHT, AIR MAN?”
No longer beaming, the recruit said, “The chaplain.”
“WHAT THE FUCK? HOW THE FUCK IS THE CHAPLAIN GETTING YOU OUT?”
At some point, I realized that the sergeant is in on the circumstances. The recruit mumbles something to the sergeant none of us can hear.
“DID YOU JUST SAY YOU’RE A HOMOSEXUAL? YOU’RE A QUEER?”
Finally, the recruit says, “Yes, Sergeant.” The instructor got him to admit that he was a homosexual in front of all the other recruits he’s been training with for weeks. You’d think that would be the end of it.
“DOES THAT MEAN YOU SUCK DICK?” “DO YOU SUCK DICK?” “HOW ARE YOU A HOMOSEXUAL IF YOU DON’T SUCK DICK?” “DO YOU WANT TO SUCK MY DICK RIGHT NOW?” “YOU NEED TO SHOW ME YOU’RE A HOMO AND SUCK MY DICK RIGHT NOW!”
The poor guy finally breaks down and starts crying at which point the sergeant tells him he’s a disgusting pussy and to get out of his dorm. He packed quickly, departed, and was never seen or heard from again.
Another of our enlistees had to get a medical discharge. He was a burn victim and wanted to become an Air Force fireman. His whole head and upper torso were horribly scarred and the skin grafts he had undergone had been done in long thin strips crisscrossing themselves like a checkerboard. Between the grafts the raw wounds hadn’t fully healed. His ears had been scorched off. No hair on his scalp. He was hard to look at, but he enlisted to serve his country and was doing all that was asked of him. I gave him major credit. After a particularly grueling day, he went to sick call. Lights out came and he hadn’t returned. I was scheduled as dorm guard from midnight to two, patrolling the locked dorm with just the orange-coned flashlight. Everything is dark when I hear a knock on the door. I shine my light at the eye-level foot square window and that scarred face is staring in. It scared the holy hell out of me. I got over it and opened the door. We talked for a minute when he got in. The grafts and the scars were preventing him from sweating normally. To me it was a great tragedy that so many men don’t want to serve while there was a man who wanted to, but got dealt a bad hand. He packed up in the morning and got a medical discharge. I hope life treated him better after that.
Most flights were assigned chores around the base, usually “policing the area,” which meant picking up litter and cigarette butts. Sometimes a flight would get an all-day assignment, like moving new furniture into a new dorm for a soon-to-arrive training flight. Flights were usually assigned KP a few times during basic training. A flight would be awakened extra early and marched to the dining facility and assigned chores there. People were peeling potatoes, refilling the big milk coolers, stocking ice, or washing dishes. The wise-crackers and jaw-jackers were quickly sized up by the chow sergeants and put on Pots and Pans, which usually meant you needed some attitude reconditioning.
This particular Christmas morning our squadron was scheduled for chores. We formed up in the dark and cold and the sergeants asked if anybody knew how to paint… house painting. The cardinal rule in the military is never volunteer for anything. You’ll get killed, you’ll get a shitty assignment or you’ll be relocated to Alaska; nothing good comes from volunteering. But I knew how to paint. I raised my hand along with three other cursed volunteers. We were marched off to paint on Christmas morning. It was a suite of offices unoccupied because of the holiday. We were provided everything needed for the job and right before we started we were told to strip off our fatigues, turn them inside out, and put them back on. That way, if we spilled any paint on ourselves, we didn’t ruin our uniforms. That’s one of the best things I ever learned in the military that can also be used in civilian life, second to First Aid. We were brought bag lunches. And we finished up the suite of offices in the mid-afternoon. All four of us volunteers could actually paint. We were marched back to the dorm and told, “Good job.” We were to work on our gear (shine shoes, master that 6” fold of my briefs).
The rest of the flight wasn’t back to the dorm when we got there. We did as we were told. I could never get that reflective spit shine that was easy for certain recruits so I worked on that. Each would swear by their particular method. Use only water and Kiwi shoeshine wax. Or only spit. Or use rubbing alcohol with the Kiwi. Or… light the Kiwi on fire for a few seconds and use the softer, melted wax. Warning: a tin of shoe polish burns like a can of Sterno. I tried all the recommendations. My boots always met the standard of “highly” shined, but were never a mirror finish.
When it was time for the evening meal, we marched ourselves (a first!) down to the chow hall. We were told the cooks prepare a fine meal on holidays and we looked forward to it. When we arrived we learned the fate of the rest of our flight. KP. All of our flight-mates were stocking milk, washing dishes, stacking trays. The cooks let us go back in the kitchen and give ‘em a ribbing, which we did. We, the painters, ate and then marched back to the dorm and it wasn’t until after eight or nine that night that everybody else got back. I found out a few weeks later that our sergeant made a deal with our labor and that, in exchange for taking KP on Christmas, our flight wouldn’t be scheduled for KP the rest of our time in basic training. And that’s how, by volunteering to paint, I managed to avoid KP for my entire enlistment.