Letters Home From Boot Camp: 'Drill Sergeants are Easy to Deal with, Really'

I thought I was ready to send Tiffany off to boot camp. Little did I know...

At that time, I was a newspaper reporter and had just finished a summer-long project covering several stories at Fort Leonard Wood. Among those stories was following a young man through boot camp, so I knew what Tiffany was in for.

What I didn’t expect, though, was just how hard it would be for this mother bird to kick her baby out of the nest.

I bawled half the night before she left.

“08Aug99

Dear Mom,

I have an address now, but I’m not in basic yet.

Once I can pass the run test, I ship out to basic. People are here for a few days and some have been here for up to three months. I hope I won’t be here too long or I’ll miss my hard-start AIT date. If I miss that (Oct 29), then the Army has breached my contract and I have the option of going home or taking a new job. I don’t know which I’ll do yet, it depends on the job I guess.

We just had an incident. The Drill Sergeant just went through and counted everyone to double check our count. One person wasn’t in her bed. (Luckily, I wasn't the one who was counting.) The girl had been here before guard duty shift and wasn’t supposed to be counted. It was kind of scary but I knew I wasn't at fault and the Drill Sergeant wasn’t mad when I didn’t give him the count.

Drill Sergeants are easy to deal with, really. Stand ease, say “Yes/No Drill Sergeant” and do as you’re told. It’s easy until someone else messes it up for the platoon and we get either dropped or smoked. Dropped: go down or get up. Smoked... man I’ve been smoked a couple times. One thing we’ve done (twice) is for late to formation. We start out in either BDUs or shirt and shorts uniform for physical training in formation. Then we’re given about 10 minutes to climb all three flights of stairs, change into the other uniform, back down and be back in formation. Then, if we do it wrong, we go to the other uniform again. Then back and forth, back and forth. It sucks.

Now we have a girl in the shower who’s not supposed to be there and if the Drill Sergeant comes back and she’s in there, we’ll all get in trouble. Oh good, she’s out. Then there was the knocking and I was afraid it was the drill sergeant coming in from behind. It was one of the permanent party’s girlfriends. Scared the crap out of me, though. I’m so tired that I’m babbling. I should go for now.

Tiffany

P.S. If my checks have arrived, I need them ASAP.”


Imagining Tiffany in baggy camouflage BDUs isn’t hard. The girl spent her high school years trying out the popular grunge look, usually a huge sloppy t-shirt, jeans two sizes too large and sneakers. It was the look she chose despite my objections and useless efforts to get her to wear sweaters and cute skirts with pumps. The preppy clothes I bought hung in the closet, or worse, were tossed to the floor of Tiffany’s bedroom, and were never seen in public until they were sold in a garage sale or donated to charity.

The uniform was one thing to visualize but what she was doing in that uniform was another. I had a hard time imagining my daughter in basic training, a soon-to-be-soldier doing push ups, running laps and training to fire a rifle. That’s not my daughter, the couch potato who loved spending hours playing video games and typing away in Internet chat rooms through her high school years.

Tiffany is smart. She scored one of the highest scores her Army recruiter had ever seen on the language aptitude tests. But her lack of effort in high school led her to join the Army instead of going to college right out of high school.

Her step-dad and I, who grew up in poverty and worked hard to climb to middle-class status, told Tiffany we couldn’t pay the college tuition because we couldn’t trust her to go to classes and do the course work. When the Army offered a $40,000 Army College Fund and the GI Bill when she finished her four-year stint in the military, Tiffany signed up. It looked like an easy way to get the cash she would need for school.

Little did she know...