Sleep? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Sleep

You often hear about how the Drill Sergeant gets right on the bus when you arrive and yells "Everyone off the bus! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!!" Reality was a letdown...at first. We moved off into a big hall for the first part of inprocessing. A few girls had their hair hanging down. A female Drill Sergeant let them know, at the top of her lungs, to get that hair up NOW! A few more incidents like that, and a couple of girls were near tears. We spent much of that evening going from one station to the next, getting PT (physical training) uniforms, voluntarily giving up contraband, getting checked that we actually gave it up, and a few other things that have become too much of a blur to recall anymore. One thing I learned that night was that, in a typical group of recruits, there are always a bunch of screwups that draw the Drill Sergeants attention. It would be a few more days before I realized how serious the Army is about "if an individual fails, the team fails."