Need to prepare? For what? As to the question, I'm always prepared. In Basic training I had a Senior Drill that was a sadist, but then again didn't all of us that went thru Basic/Boot? His thing was when he first addressed the training company I was in he asked "What's the Boy Scout Motto?" Of course this good Boy Scout knew "Be Prepared" But the ignorant ones didn't! Soooo we as a company owed the sadistic sumbitch 1000 pushups by the time he was satisfied that all knew. He extracted the pushups at every turn, but also stuck in my mind, NEVER be UNPREPARED!
LOL!
My drill was a 6'4" Cav Scout with more combat and service stripes than sleeve space. Sadist is probably the optimal term for describing my drill sergeants. Even the "nice" drill Sergeant was a sadist. The Senior Drill may have been genuinely psychopathic.
Comically, the guy looked, and I kid you not, like Bull Tannon from Night Court.
Which made the random "WHUDD'ER YA LOOKIN AT PRIVATE? GET DOWN. JUST PUSH!" absolutely hilarious.
It was muddy. It was nasty. I tore my feet up on the march back. I bled about as much as I sweated.
I recal pugil sticks very vividly. I had just gotten done from working for a year at Apple Computer, and prior to that had been Helpdesk or Desktop support for varying companies.
The drill sergeant brings me, and this reasonably built dude to the middle of the pit. He stands us back to back. He asks the guy what he was before he joined, and the guy says, "I did construction, uh brickwork Drill Sergeant!".
He gets in my face and asks, "What did you do before you joined up?"
"Uh, Tech Support DRILL SERGEANT!"
HE steps back and looks at me and says, "Wai...Wait you did WHAT?".
HE then just shakes his head and says, "Whatever! Mason versus PC Nerd"
Then he blows the whistle.
Now, I don't know whether it was the amping myself I did prior to the fight, or the comment. Maybe it was a bit of both, but, as soon as we had taken our steps and the whistle blew, it was on.
I came around counter-clockwise and was intending to slam the right side of the stick into dudes helmet with kind of a right straight. I put all of my strength and leverage into this strike. I am talking proper extension aiming at a point several inches behind the target, rotation of hips. Everything I had was in it.
As I made this one sweeping motion, the poor guy dove in at me without his stick up, head slightly down, and my glove made hard, solid, positive impact at the base of his helmet, and drove right into this guys jaw. It really was a lucky blow, because frankly, he handed me the contact.
He went limp. Simply fell over and didnt move.
They called the medics over and after a while he started stirring a bit.
When I got up to go back to the sidelines after apologizing to this poor, groggy guy as he got support-carried back to the Ambulance, I looked over to my side and the Drill Sergeant was smiling at me and nodded. I didn't say anything cause I felt kinda crappy about the whole ordeal.
To top things off, the guy had a training exercise mishap on a previous cycle, and was already a recycle when I laid him out.
SO IF YOU ARE READING THIS DUDE IM SORRY!
lol.
Anyways just a cool basic story I thought I would share. Have dozens of em, but then again all us vets do. :lol: