Word: battalion
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...front page of The Battalion, the Texas A&M daily, there was a photograph of the rescue in progress; a young man was trapped between tons of logs, and one could clearly see that his legs were broken in several places, twisting in the most unnatural of directions...
...been a torture, a purgatory out of Kafka, not Orwell, where the absence of directions becomes the scourge, and the authority becomes something you start craving, asking for. Was that the plan all along? Was all the rigid neglect of this Army Reception Battalion, all the days and weeks lost in chow lines and idle formation just a way of whetting our appetite for action...
...fact, the three-to-five-day lag time between the group's arrival and the time it is issued BTUs (Basic Training Uniforms) creates something of a hierarchy around the Reception Battalion.? Newbies start in civilian hair, civilian shoes and those ill-fitting sweats; as one more-veteran private put it to us, "Everybody loves the new guy."? (Love supposedly equals yelling and push-ups.)? Over the past few days we have shed the shoes, the hair, the wide-eyed look; now we want the camouflage, both literally and figuratively...
Fort Jackson is in a sort of paralysis. The specialist who met our Basic Training class at Columbia Airport thought we might be "processed" - the purpose of our current limbo at the Arms Reception Battalion - in three to five days, before moving on to the real thing, boot camp. That now seems a vain hope, and it seems unlikely we will have completed Basic by Christmas. I talk to two privates at dinner chow who've been here for three weeks since processing; they're still waiting to move on.?The current?in-the-wind estimate for the 13th Platoon...
...Grumbling is constant. Someone in the 20th Battalion has gone AWOL earlier in the day. And across from me a private, who is about to go home for a week because his mother died, is staring up at the underside of the bunk above and reading whatever someone has scribbled there: "The Army teaches you truth, and tells you lies." I feel sorry for him well past lights...