Good evening Internet. My time of useful consciousness towards studying for this probability exam has been reached. Thus, it's time to transition over into blog time. It's kind of a nice routine, especially since I've pretty much completely adapted to life as becoming one of Dr. Donegan's orthopedic experiments. I just have to tough out the pain for class and a lengthy study sesh, but once I've hit my mark I can take my pills and enjoy blogging in the great mood I always end up earning.
DLX was last weekend. For those of you who don't know, including but not limited to my distant-future self who may start to forget all the details of my current youth, DLX is the Air Force training exercise in which we travel to Fort Knox and play Army for a couple days. During my GMC (underclassman) years, it was a major pain in my ass that I ended up completely dreading and just had to embrace the suck immediately following one of my ever-successful Spring Breaks. The days are long, only dwarfed by the 28 happily spent at Field Training. We wake up at 5 something, train nonstop until noon, break for lunch, train more until 4:00, and then finish the day off with some R&R at Fort Knox's classiest all-ranks club (which is very similar in style and appeal to the classiest civilian club found in someplace like Macon, Georgia). The next day is more of the same, just enduring nine more hours of good ol' fashion training.
This was my first DLX as a POC (upperclassman), which granted a vast difference in experience. As a POC, 100% of your training comes in the form of leading the GMC. Every POC spent a full month doing the exact same shit for 17 hours each day that we do at DLX. The POC have gone through so much of that type of training that there is absolutely no challenge to any of it. As a result, the POC spend all of DLX teaching, mentoring, evaluating—essentially we're giving the training rather than receiving it. In fact, the POC actually end up learning more critical lessons and gaining more valuable experience than the GMC. It's one of the many reasons the GMC just can't fucking wait to become one of us. It's awesome.
I obviously knew that; it's safe to say all GMC do. What I didn't know however, was the ridiculous level of enjoyment DLX becomes once you're no longer 200 scum or an excessively naive 100. I mean the amount of fun you have at Fort Knox goes through a big multiplier when you've earned your spot in the POC. I actually found it extremely interesting once I started to really ponder the reasons a weekend trip I used to dread literally more than any other aspect of Air Force ROTC (save Field Training, but even that was great compared to the GMC version of DLX) suddenly becomes a vacation filled with laughing with my friends and truly enjoying myself.
The first and simplest is what I've been describing already. As a POC you don't do any of the unpleasant shit you did the whole time as a GMC. You don't need to embrace the suck or tell yourself for weeks leading up to it that the dread is worse than the deed. Your time is spent doing a job, which is just delightful in comparison and really only takes up a small fraction of the trip. The majority of DLX becomes down time.
That leads me to the second factor involved. So much of your time is spent not doing anything, i.e. supervising. If there's nothing to supervise, the down time becomes chill time. And the best part, that which amplifies the good time, is when the GMC aren't around. Once the AOR has been claimed, governed, and restricted by the POC; there's no one looking up at us, no one needing us to set the example, and any sense of professionalism is no longer necessary nor practiced. Over a quarter of DLX becomes casual dicking around with your best friends. This alone is enough to get me actually looking forward to it. DLX goes from being a miserable weekend to resembling a High School field trip a right after the state-wide testing.
But what I found to be the most interesting, and the key source behind the transformation to a psychologically blissful experience, is the flashback to field training. It's such a counter-intuitive notion but not many POC can deny it. Almost everyone who's been through what was expected to be an awful month of Field Training can't help but admit that the enjoyable parts of field training greatly outweighed the miserable. You bond with almost everyone around you to an unimaginable extent. The circumstances and challenges you face every minute of every day eventually pushes the mind to create joy out of what should be the most terrible experience and hopeless part of your life. While the CTAs and FTOs and MTIs are doing everything they can to take the joy away from you, your mind will utilize the deep friendships you've formed with other miserable cadets and send the extremely little amount optimism through an amplifier. Since there's no television, internet, or any other possible source of happiness to put your mind at ease; laughter and joy will only come with a much lower standard.
Once everyone hits a certain point in the latter half of the game, it no longer takes an R-rated Will Ferrell movie or a brand new episode of South Park to end up laughing and happy. The conditions required to bring laughter and a good mood are reduced to practically nothing. Any combination of the stupidest shit you'd expect to find in a 3rd grade classroom becomes more than enough to satisfy the desperate desire for any short-lived relief from the melancholy anxiety that never seems to end. Fart jokes, poop jokes, goofing around, poor impersonations of the poor cadet who's voice cracked during retreat on like TD-13 which is still the funniest fucking thing anyone on Earth has ever heard by TD-27; seemingly standard occurrences throughout the day become hilarious. The sense of humor is pretty malleable. If you go a week or two without laughing, the bar gets lowered and it's almost embarrassing what you find end up laughing at uncontrollably. It's like your slap happy. Someone will ask the time, for example, and whoever it is will check their watch with their hand in a fist but with the pinky finger extended; the whole flight cracks up. Factor in not being allowed to laugh or even smile while in formation and it's no surprise that the most pathetic fart by American standards is a game you just aren't going to win.
That's what I miss the most about field training. The blessing of finding everyday interactions hilarious. Imagine laughing at that Will Ferrell movie I mentioned, just a solid two hours of laughing at the well-thought-out comedy, and consistent humor behind everything you've been presented with. Now imagine if typical daily life was as funny as that movie, except it continues 18 hours a day for weeks without losing its charm. In fact the further you get from TD-0, the less it takes to bring you the same amount of amusement. It was so much fun! From TD-whatever onward I almost spent more time laughing than I did not laughing. When you spend that much time laughing, it's impossible to ignore the fact that you're happier at Field Training than semester after semester of college stressing about everything involved while no finite amount of internet could yield anything even close to the comical satisfaction of the person across from you farting in the middle of a standby inspection. If you lay it all out, I'd opt for the altered mentality instilled by Field Training than the lackluster atmosphere that fades in and out of my mindset as I force my way through college. Yeah I'd pick Field Training in a majority of the circumstances, as long as I could skip like the first two thirds of it. Whenever it comes up in conversation among the POC, it becomes pretty evident that I'm not the only one who's come to this conclusion.
It ties in pretty well with DLX and adds to the content of the POC by a fair degree. Those three days of exercise puts us POC right back into that euphoric perspective we so fondly remember from Field Training. Everything we do at Fort Knox quickly forms a dense accumulation of nostalgia: going to sleep way to early for college students, waking up way too early for college students, sleeping in PTUs, sharing rooms with ten other cadets, always hungry, always tired, always in a uniform, always dying to escape the strict professionalism, always knowing whether it's morning, afternoon or evening; noticing the current time of day is morning 100% of the time you check despite the statistical impossibility of that, the heated training forced on the GMC, the school buses jumping us around base, the compulsory lack of alcohol despite for some reason feeling an irrational desire to get hammered, casually talking with other cadets concerning the best of the available options if we were to get hammered, thinking almost single activity you do is a complete waste of time, realizing several hours later that you actually learned a lot from that 'waste of time'; it all takes us POC right back to Camp Shelby.
The parallels to field training are strangely comforting. I couldn't help but enjoy myself and treat it as a weekend getaway to the peculiar realm of Field Training. What really made it so much more fun, is that the POC were lucky enough to repeat the elation that came with the mental switch to robotic training mode. The high we felt several times a day at field training over something stupid like a fart or changing step every other second while marching came back! It was such a treat! Once a group of POC were alone, a hidden side of our military's most capable future leaders came out.
I almost feel guilty knowing that almost everyone in the world won't know what it's like to go through something like Field Training and consequently won't understand what it's like to have such a different outlook on happiness in a miserable situation.
Well I've put like three and a half hours into this blog post. I don't think I can finish what I was trying to get to; I'll have to finish it up next time and convert a memory into a permanent entity outlining one of the countless products, and adding to the massive array of experiences, both which fill my external identity with substance and comprehensively make up My Awesome Life.
That was a pretty poetic sign-off. It's a little out of place... I'm probably going to use that again, just a warning. And don't act like recycling your work is a fucking abomination punishable by death. Everyone does it. I bet you've done it before. Its' not a big deal. I wrote the damn thing, I'll copy and paste it wherever the hell I want. You can't plagiarise yourself so don't make a scene or anything because all you're gonna end up doing is make an ass out of yourself. Until next time...
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