Food glorious food...

Let it be known that food is the singular comfort of basic training. Certainly letters from loved ones feed the spirit and it would seem death without them, but three times a day was the concrete comfort of calories rushing the blood stream. It would be reckless to take it one day at a time in a place so depressing, but living from meal to meal became a stabalizing pattern. Breakfast determined the forecast of the day. If the eggs were fresh and there were honest to god muffins on the fruit bar and there was time given to mash it all into your mouth and swallow before being herded out the doors, the day was hopeful of being tolerable. If the grits were too fresh, however, and burned with every hurried bite, it might be time to start worrying. They loved to work us the hardest in the morning, oftentimes smoking us directly after breakfast, so it was vastly important to consume as many calories as possible as quickly as possible. The worst morning I can recall due to the fiasco breakfast became was our first day of rifle training. PT went much longer than usual because of a new female drill sergeant anxious to prove her mettle. Therefore we ended up nearly an hour late for breakfast and, as an added benefit, we were more than the usual exhausted from our organized smoking. The yelling continued from the PT field back to company area, "MOVE! YOU BETTER FUCKING MOVE! IT'S TIME TO GO TEN MINUTES AGO!" I almost laughed thinking that all these adults were trying to make us feel guilty for the lateness that they themselves had caused, but my yearning for a breakfast I knew we wouldn't get enough of kept me anything but smiling. True to form, we had three minutes to sit down and cram and heaven help you if you were the last person seated trying to swallow whatever was in your mouth.

The other problem with food was waiting in the chow line. Platoon by platoon, we were herded through a series of chutes that eventually delivered us to the food line itself. Eventually. Generally we had a good thirty minutes to an hour of waiting in formation, in silence, with the drill sergeants coming up with whatever their mood dictated for how we should pass the time. We would be peppered with trivia questions pertaining to the chain of command, properties of the M-16, army values, and, Drill Sergeant Morton's favorite, the soldier's creed. On a good day, they would ask us questions to genuinely help in learning what we were required to know. But what fun is that. Much more often, the drill sergeants opted for the entertainment of asking us questions we hadn't even thought to consider. Trivia that a month studying the "smart book" might finally afford us if we were lucky. And we were most unlucky most times. If the drill sergeants got three wrong answers (and wouldn't you know they would always call on the people that always got the questions wrong during these sessions) then we would "owe" them later. Which meant we would be seeing a lot of pavement with our faces as soon as we were done eating. I soon realized they didn't take the medical advice to digest food before strenuous exercise very seriously. Again, what fun would that be. Drill Sergeant Morton usually pulled out the soldier's creed before dinner. Now, we had to say the creed every morning before PT in a loud and thunderous voice and as a company, but that's not how Morton wanted to do things. He would have us split in half so there was a pathway in the middle for him to pace and scrutinize our faces turned in on him. Whoever was the least successful at hiding fear would always be chosen. Morton would have the frightened individual stand in the middle of the pathway and attempt to say the creed as he screamed abuse in their faces. Apparently this was meant to prepare us for the certain fate of being captured and called upon to recite the creed to our enemies. Anyway, I was surprised at how long I made it before being singled out for the drama considering that my face has never been good at hiding anything and I was certain he should find fear there. Still, while much later than expected, he did eventually see me and order me to the designated area. "The Soldier's Creed!" he shouted triumphantly. "I am an American soldier...," I began, waiting for the screaming. But he didn't scream. He simply stood with his toes touching mine and his face within tongue's reach, and he made as if sniffing various parts of my chin and ears and cheeks, all the while keeping his wide dark eyes fixed accusingly on my own. I almost laughed at him. What a serious misreading of my character for him to think I would find this worse than screaming. How many times had I sat alone on a stage with dozens of eyes fixed on the smallest details of my body - my fingers, my face, my feet - and had to maintain the poise to perform such difficult and minute motions as playing Chopin or Beethoven or Rachmaninov. "What a fool," I thought. I kept my eyes focused on a piece of brick on the wall just past his shoulder and I recited the damn creed, and only later felt shame at what pride I had felt in performing well for something and someone so mindless and without value. Such were the poisoned victories of the place.