My first MOS in the Army was 25M, or Multi-Media Illustrator. For those readers who are not Army, that was my Military Occupational Specialty. M-O-S is how soldiers say J-O-B. Now for some strange reason, the Army felt that the only possible use for Illustrators was in Airborne units. So all 25Ms had to go to jump school after their MOS training. So just imagine my surprise to find out that I was the only one who was going to jump out of planes. It would appear that my recruiter had lied to me.
Step one: Don’t be this guy.
Don’t lie to your soldiers to get things that you want from them. Your soldiers remember what you do, and they can talk to each other. You don’t want your troops to feel like you’d sell them out.
Nonetheless, I went off to jump school. I did promise to do so when I enlisted, and the extra money looked nice, so I kept up my end. The especially fun part was that I went during the summer. Which is when the cadets also attend jump school. This is significantly less fun than it sounds. Some of these cadets were from military academies, like West Point. They were generally pretty squared away and at least knew how to act like they were in the military. But many were ROTC cadets. Which meant that they were college students wearing a uniform. I have nothing against college students per se. But if your well-being depends on them not acting like college students, well, you might start to have some issues. The problems ranged from the comical, “Hey look…one third of the formation went the wrong way”, to the significantly less comical “Everyone is restricted to the barracks because one third of the formation went the wrong way”.
Here is one incident that stuck in my mind. At one point a bunch of us were on an assignment stacking reserve parachutes onto a storage rack. We were passing them in bucket-brigade style. One of the cadets near me said “One of these just came open, get a SGT Airborne quick”. So another private and myself ran off to grab an authority figure to report the problem to. All three of us returned to discover that all of the reserves chutes are fine. The SGT Airborne was angry. “Why did you waste my time Private?”
“That cadet told me one of the reserves came open.”
“SGT Airborne I have no idea what that Private is talking about.”
Step two: Don’t be this guy either.
My buddy and me wound up doing roughly a bazillion push ups over this. To this day I have no idea whether this was an accident or just a dumb punk kid’s idea of a funny joke. But in any case, don’t let your soldiers take the fall for your mistake. And if you do, try to have the decency to not look surprised when you discover what they did to your toothbrush.
But the worst offender is a guy who I will refer to as Cadet Snowflake. When I arrived at Ft. Benning, my luggage didn’t. Two other soldiers and one cadet where in the same fix as me. At one point after a formation, those of us that were missing our luggage were taken to see the Sergeant Major. He asked us a few questions about our luggage and which barracks we in so that he could make sure that we got it when the airline delivered it later. He made sure all of us had access to toiletries and that no one was missing any critical items. He summed up the whole thing by assuring us, “Don’t worry boys, Sergeant Major will get you squared away!”
“You’d damn well better!”
Four faces, totally incredulous, slowly turned to look at Mr. Special Snowflake.
“What. Did. You. Say. Cadet?”, asked the very senior, and should be noted, incredibly huge and scary NCO.
“I said you’d better get this taken care of. I’m going to hold you personally responsible for this.”
At this point the other soldiers and me tried to very slowly scoot ourselves away from Cadet Snowflake. We knew what was coming was going to be bad and we certainly didn’t want to get any of it on ourselves.
“I think I may have misheard you cadet.”
“I made myself clear. You’d better do what I say. I’m going to be a Lieutenant soon and then I’ll outrank you.”
For those of you who have not been in the military, I will give you this analogy. Imagine walking up to Chuck Norris. Now imagine telling him he’d better treat you nice because someday you’re going to start learning martial arts. And as soon as you train up enough to hold multiple black belts you’re going to kick his ass.
Now, a cadet mouthing off to the Sergeant Major is about a hundred times dumber than that.
Step Three: Definitely do not be this guy.
In fact, try to not even know this guy.
The lower enlisted were released and we got to hear the opening of a Grade-A ass chewing as we hurried away from ground zero. I never found out what happened to Cadet snowflake, but I strongly doubt his military career lasted for much longer. I do know that he didn’t attend jump school with us.
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