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The differences between boot camp and Officer Candidate School.
Creators & Guests
What is The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast?
The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast was born out of a place of grief. Having lost my best friend from the Marine Corps in the early hours of 2023, I realized that this feeling was all too familiar. I wanted to do something, not only for the loss I felt, but for the loss I knew many families were enduring day to day.
We believe that a major way to relieve the stressors of life is to talk, laugh, cry, and share our experiences without fear of offense. We hope to attract veterans and first responders as well as anyone who is interested in knowing more about what it’s like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.
PODCAST INTRODUCTION: Hello everyone and welcome to The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast. I'm your host Troy Gent.
Ghost Turd Stories' mission is to use humorous and challenging stories from veterans and first responders to reduce the burden of families whose veteran or first responder took their our life.
Ghost Turd Stories' vision is to use humorous and challenging stories to prevent suicide among our ranks and reduce the burden on families whose veteran or first responder took their own life.
We hope to attack veterans or first responders as well as those interested in knowing more about what it's like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.
LET US WRITE YOUR STORY! COMMERCIAL: At Ghost Turd Stories we tell and write the stories of veterans and first responders for their families and friends. We love storytelling and believe that there is nothing more inspiring and nothing that gets people to take action like a great story.
Family and friends want to know the sacrifices we made, the services we rendered, and the people we lifted so that they can be inspired and learn about the legacy we left.
Our podcast is the face of our company but we want every family who cares to know about the experiences their veteran and or first responder went through for them. We interview veterans and first responders, collect pictures, write their stories, and compile them in a book for their families and friends to enjoy.
Oftentimes it is difficult for us to talk to our loved ones about what we did, saw, and heard while serving. At Ghost Turd Stories, we bridge the gap. For pricing, visit linktr.ee/ghostturdstories and click on the second tab directly under the podcast link called Let Us Write Your Story!
REBECCA GENT: Welcome back to The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast. This is Rebecca Gent. I am here with Troy Gent.
I am your host today and also the editor and publisher of the podcast.
We wanted to dedicate an episode to the a discussion about the differences and similarities between OCS and boot camp.
So how are you doing today?
TROY GENT: Great and I just want to say that you are a better host than I am and it’s always fun to do another Ghost Turd Stories Bedtime Stories. I love these.
My business networking group that I belong to, a couple people in there will get up and say, “I love Troy’s podcast especially when his daughter is interviewing. The bedtime stories, I love them.
REBECCA GENT: No, it’s fun. I enjoy it. I enjoy being able to ask questions. That’s one of my favorite things to do in life is listen to other people and ask questions and be curious.
TROY GENT: Yeah, me too. I learn a whole lot that way. Mom has really helped straighten me out that way but up until my early twenties, it was always talk talk talk talk….
Now I listen ninety percent of the time and talk about ten percent of the time. I think some people think that… They take it sometimes like, “Well Troy doesn’t like me.”
I’m like, “No, I’m just listening.”
REBECCA GENT: Something that is common between us as well is we have a hard time taking compliments. Was that different when you were in your twenties as well?
TROY GENT: No, no. I’ve always hated it. I’ve always hated compliments but I used to be a lot more vocal or say things that were untactful and would catch people off guard.
“Why would he respond that way? I gave him a compliment and he hated it.”
Now I am just gracious with it. Like, “Thank you so much. I appreciate that,” and then I change the subject.
REBECCA GENT: Yeah, I do the same thing. I’m like, “Maybe I should relish it,” and then I always turn it around and ask them something different. I’m like, “I don’t want to draw more attention to myself.
Okay. To get things started, one of the most common things from a civilian standpoint that we think about when we think about military training is the physical challenges. How hard are you going to be pushed? How many different exercises are you going to do?
How was that different and how was that the same between Officer Candidate School and boot camp?
TROY GENT: Sure. I went into boot camp in really good shape. I was lifting weights a lot. My dad had gotten me into the weight room when I was a sophomore in high school so for the next couple of years I was just always in really good shape.
I actually went to boot camp and between the food that I ate and the lack of exercise that I got based on my activity level before I went to boot camp, I got out of shape. That wasn’t the rule across the board. Most guys got into better shape but I gained twenty pounds in boot camp and that wasn’t too uncommon. There were guys that gained weight but a lot of times it was more muscle mass because their activity level before wasn’t as much.
I was always thinking I had to keep my calories up. Weight lifters are always like, “Calories, calories, calories,” and I was kind of always hungry in boot camp. They give you three meals a day. There are no snacks ever other than when you’d go to church.
Church leaders would always bring in cookies and stuff. Cookies! So on Sundays we got cookies. We got cookies.
But besides that, there were no meals in between, and in boot camp you were rushed through the chow hall so one of the things I would do to make myself feel full in boot camp was grab like six pieces of bread, grab a few packets of syrup, empty the syrup onto the plate, and I would just rub the bread or…. not rub. Rub is not a good word.
What do you call it when you’re going like this with it to get the syrup on the bread?
REBECCA GENT: You would soak up the syrup with the bread.
TROY GENT: Yeah, I would dip. I would dip the bread in the syrup and I would eat the bread really fast so I was getting tons of just bread in my gut, right? That’s probably the reason I gained twenty pounds of fat in boot camp.
I had always had good balance but because the weight was being stored in my gut and my butt, there was no even distribution of weight when I was doing activity in boot camp so I noticed I would get up to run and fall down or grab something to prevent myself from falling sometimes.
I kept thinking, “What is going on with me? This is not like me,” but during PT I started getting really clumsy. And then I realized, “Hey, it’s cause you’re eating all this bread and syrup.
The actual PT (running, pushups, pullups, situps, all that PT stuff), it was really sporadic in boot camp and kind of uncommon.
With exercise, it’s kind of funny. The other day I was doing a move job and I was lifting this really heavy bed. It was a monster. It was awful and the guy was like, “Yeah, he’s buff cause he does stuff like this,” but it’s like one rep, right? One rep for a couple of minutes.
In boot camp, on average, we might run once a week. There wasn’t a lot of time to actually do PT consistently but they were always looking for opportunities to, what we call in the Marine Corps, thrash you.
If I had something wrong with my uniform, they’d tell me to run up to the quarter-deck and they’d make me do pushups, situps, jumping jacks, or flutter kicks over and over and over again. They were always looking for opportunities to PT you more. They call it incentive training.
Physical fitness, the Marine Corps thinks it’s important. They think it is more important than all the other services, right? They're more consistent with it and they push weight standards and stuff a lot more but with all the training and the regime that we had going on boot camp, it’s almost like it was an afterthought. Like, “Oh we got some time? We better go on a run.”
I mean, that was my experience anyway.
REBECCA GENT: Yeah, I remember when I was considering going into the Marine Corps and I told you that was one of the biggest things I was looking for you were like, “If you’re looking for physical fitness, the Marine Corps is not going to give you as much as you’re probably thinking it’s going to.”
TROY GENT: For the average sedentary person, it’s a step up. But also, the Marine Corps wants to see how much initiative you’re going to take in your own physical fitness. After boot camp when there was more time, who were going to be the Marines who are going to go to the gym or go on runs by themselves or with buddies or put in the extra effort to be physically fit?
Even in the fleet, we tried to do PT in the mornings and we actually did PT a lot more than boot camp as a unit but they are also trying to get you to think and take ownership of your life.
My training for OCS, I was running a lot of distance and so I would wake up really early in the morning and I would run three times a week and every third run I would increase the distance by a mile. By the time I went to OCS, I think the furthest I had run on my own in the morning was…
And this is a big deal coming from me cause I’m a weightlifter. I’m a big guy. I think I dropped probably ten pounds doing that but I think the furthest distance I ran before I left to OCS was twelve to fourteen miles.
For me, that was a big deal. I know you runners out there are like, “Oh, he can’t run very far.”
Yeah, well you can have it cause I don’t want to be a runner. I’ve got Marine buddies that run like ultra marathons that are over a hundred miles. I’m like, “You’re nuts dude. Forget that.”
I wasn’t lifting weights a ton but I was doing a lot of pushups and a lot of pull-ups and a lot of ab work because I knew going to OCS, they were going to run us a lot more and they did.
PT in officer candidate school was a lot more intensive and a lot more consistent. We were running a few times a week. I think we had three PT tests. One at the beginning, one at the middle, and one at the end but there was no intensive training.
They call them sergeant instructors for officer candidates and they would call them drill instructors for Marine Corps recruits. They wouldn’t touch us in the squad bay. There was never one time that they said, “Hey! Get up here and do pushups,” or, “Get up here and do flutter kicks,” or whatever.
They would kick the crap out of us during the physical fitness portion. I don’t know if I gained a ton of weight during Officer Candidate School. I might have gained a few pounds. The food was just the same but I think my body composition changed because I was training a lot more before Officer Candidate School than I actually got in training in Officer Candidate School as far as physical fitness. Plus the sleep deprivation causes problems with your hormones and your balance in the body and stuff.
The sleep deprivation in Officer Candidate School was the worst I had ever experienced up to that point.
I think I stayed pretty consistent in my PT numbers. I think when I got to Officer Candidate School I ran like a 19:40 three mile and then at the end of Officer Candidate School, I ran a 19:19. So we at least stayed consistent enough to where I actually improved a little bit.
When I was enlisted, I thought officer candidates were like gladiators, right? I had this misconception that the Marine Corps only recruits gladiators and these PT studs to be officers. I thought I was going to be at the bottom of the barrel, right?
I got to the Officer Candidate School and was like, “What the hell? These are nothing but recruits with a four-year degree.”
Like it wasn’t any different really.
REBECCA GENT: What was the ratio of people who had actually been in the service before to people who just had a four-year degree?
TROY GENT: So I don’t know the actual statistic but I was reading in my letters that in a fifty-five-man platoon of candidates, we had six prior service Marines. That’s probably pretty consistent across the board. I would say more than fifty percent of them had been reservists. So they had gone to college, had enlisted in the Marine Corps either before college or during college, went to boot camp, did their MOS training, gone to some drills, and then switched over to become an officer once they got their degree.
Even then, it was apparent the difference between a prior service Marine and just a college graduate.
We were out in the field and we were doing some land navigation. That land navigation course was the cheesiest thing I’ve ever done. They gave two hundred and fifty candidates like five points to find each and it was just…
Because the area was so consolidated, you had two hundred and fifty candidates trying to find the same points.
REBECCA GENT: So it was like an easter egg hunt.
TROY GENT: It was like an easter egg hunt. That’s what it was. Perfect description. It was an easter egg hunt.
Gunner Sergeant Castione, who was our senior sergeant instructor, looks up in the bleachers and sees this candidate using his map as a fan. He was like, “Hey candidate! Stop using that as a fan! You look like a woman!”
REBECCA GENT: It’s almost like the cultural things that go on like the little things in your head. Like, “Yeah, you wouldn’t do that if you had been in the service before.”
TROY GENT: Yeah, it was more enjoyable. We had already been through boot camp, there were a lot of similarities, and so we actually had a good time watching the other candidates who were just college graduates.
There were guys that would just flip out, get angry, threaten to quit, and the sergeant instructors would just eat that up. A lot of the attention, for the most part, was taken off of us and thrown onto these candidates who didn’t know any better. They needed it but they also had a level of pride that recruits don’t have that they have a hard time letting go of.
They also have this thing in their head, “In ten weeks you are going to be saluting me and I am going to treat Marines like this because I got treated like this.”
I wouldn’t say that was the rule across the board. I would just say that some of them did have that mentality that, “You are going to be bowing to me in a couple of weeks.
REBECCA GENT: Were the sergeant instructors enlisted men or were they officers too?
TROY GENT: They were enlisted. Probably all of them had been drill instructors to recruits before.
REBECCA GENT: You were talking about sleep deprivation. How different was that from boot camp?
TROY GENT: Yeah, congress or whatever, whoever made the law, said that the lights are supposed to be out for eight hours. Marine Corps recruits are supposed to get eight hours of sleep. There were always loopholes.
They could put a recruit on two fire watches in one night so if I was found guilty of some infraction, they would put me on the second fire watch and the second to last fire watch.
A lot of times it takes time to transition into REM sleep and even in the first hour, you’re not getting a full hour's worth of REM sleep. Before you even really start sleeping, they’d wake you up for an hour's worth of fire watch. So that’s two hours gone and that gives you four hours in the middle to sleep heavy. They’d wake you up the second to last fire watch and then you wouldn’t get to sleep the last hour. You’d get to lay in bed but you wouldn’t sleep the last hour or fall into REM sleep.
That was a way that they would screw with our sleep in boot camp. In OCS, there wasn’t that rule so often times the lights would only be out for four hours. There were always things that you had to do to get ready for the next day. If there was a test the next day, we had to study. Or if we had a uniform inspection, we had to make sure everything was marked properly, ironed correctly, and set up correctly.
I liked to write letters. The only time I got to write letters to you, Emma, and Mom was during those lights-out hours and so I would stay up and write letters or I would do a little bit of reading in my scriptures.
I read in one of my letters yesterday that, “I got four hours of sleep last night and that was a lot of sleep for me here at OCS.”
The sergeant instructors, they’d make us do weird things. They’d punish us in different ways, give us extra fire watch.
You didn’t want to be caught falling asleep in class and there was this candidate in front of me who just kept bobbing his head because he was falling asleep. One of the ways they said to keep yourself awake was to slap yourself in the back of the head. I don’t know. It just hurts. I hate it.
So I am thinking, “I am going to help this kid out. I’m not going to slap him in the back of the head but I’m going to help him out.”
So I took my canteen and I filled the canteen top full of water and I poured it down his neck. He turned around and I thought he was going to jump over the seat and attack me. He was so mad at me.
But that would happen a lot. They would keep us up most of the night, they would feed us, and then they would take us to class. Yeah, OCS sleep deprivation was a lot worse.
REBECCA GENT: Did you enjoy the camaraderie more in boot camp or OCS?
TROY GENT: Definitely OCS.
REBECCA GENT: And why is that?
TROY GENT: My perspective was a whole lot different in Officer Candidate School and so when I joined the Marine Corps in 1997, there was no war going on. I met some good guys but war does something to people to heighten their awareness and it gives you a different perspective in life.
When I went to Officer Candidate School, everybody was there because they joined voluntarily during a time of war knowing they would go to war and some of them would be killed. They know they may get killed in combat, they knew that some of their Marines would be killed in combat, but yet they did it anyway and so I bonded really well with…
Like Jeff Mayhew was a stud. He had a twin. They both played collegiate football. His twin actually played for the Houston Texans.
He was this dude. He was like 6’5 / 6’6 and in college, he was like three hundred or three thirty or something. He was just a huge dude. He was two hundred and eighty pounds in OCS but he had broken his neck in college, at least part of a vertebrae or something, and so he couldn’t play football anymore. So he joined the Marine Corps as an officer and him and I really got along.
There was another guy. I forgot his first name. His first name was Bramante. He was so fast. He ran the three-mile in I think under fifteen minutes or something. He was this tall lanky guy that could just run.
I got along with him really well and I got along with all of them but prior service Marines… We just automatically had a connection with because we were already Marines.
REBECCA GENT: In boot camp, there’s not a lot of time to interact with the other recruits, right?
TROY GENT: Yeah and the confidence level wasn’t the same. Like me and the other prior service Marines… I stood across the aisle from a couple of them and we were always cracking stupid looks on each other's faces to try to get each other to laugh and doing stupid stuff to try and get the other ones to laugh.
So one night, his last name was Grill. He was a staff sergeant and he had been in the Marine Corps six or seven years already. Love the guy and I didn’t see him do this part. He had stuck baby powder down his PT shorts.
So we are standing online. Every night we had a hygiene inspection. Me and him were staring at each other, right? The sergeant instructor is down the line checking somebody else. I’m staring at him, he is staring back at me, and we were kind of smirking at each other, and then he takes his hand and he pulls his waist band out as far as he can and then he lets go.
All this baby powder dust flies out and like engulfs the area, right? Six of us that were standnig around him were just… We almost lost it. We were trying so hard. We were laughing but we were laughing silently and our bodies were shaking cause we were laughing uncontrollably, you know?
We didn’t get caught and we didn’t get in trouble but man, he got us on that one. It was hilarious.
REBECCA GENT: For that reason do you feel like it was less competitive in OCS?
TROY GENT: One thing that I experienced was you’re always competitive. If you’re not competitive, you’re not going to win wars. You have to go out there and be crazy competitive. But at the same time, it seemed like everybody always had some humility with it. Sometimes there was arrogance but there was always a level of humility.
I never felt like I had to compete and cut anybody's throat to get ahead. I guess there were a few people that I worked with that maybe had that mentality. Their egos were like, “I’m going to get ahead and if people get left behind, it’s fine,” but for the most part, I felt like I had a great experience that way.
I didn’t feel that other people were trying to cut my throat to get ahead and I wasn’t trying to cut other people's throats to get ahead. I have plenty of other weaknesses but that part of my life is a strength I think.
REBECCA GENT: With that being said, let’s move onto billets and how billets work, if that’s a competitive process, and then how much of an opportunity that you got to move up a billet.
TROY GENT: Yeah, so in boot camp there was a platoon guide and four squad leaders. Those really were the only billets and those… Once they found a platoon guide that was pretty solid, that platoon guide stayed the guide for the duration of boot camp. I was a platoon guide in boot camp for two weeks.
They gave a questionnaire to us within the first couple of weeks in boot camp. I don’t remember all of the questions but basically, it was a questionnaire on what you think about these particular things in leadership and stuff, how you should move forward in a platoon, this, and that. So my answers impressed them so much that they said, “Who the hell is Gent?”
I stood up and I think we were cleaning weapons or something and when we cleaned weapons we were always sitting behind our footlockers, had our weapons taken apart on the foot lockers.
And they said, “Get up here!”
I said, “Aye, sir!”
I ran up there and they gave me the flag, the guide-on, and they said, “You’re the platoon guide!”
And I was like, “Okay…”
I didn’t even know what that meant, right?
REBECCA GENT: Well, it’s interesting because when I was doing the workouts with the recruiters at the office they were already training you how to be the guide. There were already guys competing to be the guide.
TROY GENT: Yeah, I never did the Poolie program. I didn’t live close enough to a recruiting station to participate in that. I lived in Beaver, Utah which is a small place.
I don’t even know how they found me. I think they were based out of Provo and they might have been calling around to different juniors in high school. We talked about this on a previous podcast but my buddy was like, “Yeah, come on down!”
He invited us and that’s how… Yeah, I never initially talked to a recruiter.
Anyway, so they gave me the billet of Guide and I didn’t know what it even was, what I was supposed to do with it.
So for the first week, they actually did a pretty good job at leaving me alone for the most part. They were letting me learn without really… They never really ITed me or I never really got in trouble.
I had a migraine headache for two weeks and it started right around when they gave me that billet of the guide. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to tell anybody because I didn’t want to get dropped. If you get dropped, you get stuck in the… Well, the only name I know for it is the Broke Dick Platoon. I forgot what they called it. I didn’t want that for myself so I just sucked it up.
The second week of being the Guide, it’s like they flicked a switch. They trashed me so bad. They trashed me all the time because I was always failing. I was getting ITed constantly it felt like. I was getting screamed at constantly because I was failing the platoon and one reason I was failing the platoon was because of my migraine. Another reason was because I just didn’t have enough experience. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I got fired the day we failed initial drill. I was told that we failed initial drill because I sucked as a platoon guide and it was all my fault. So they fired me. I never got another billet during boot camp.
In Officer Candidate School, they didn’t have a guide but they had Platoon Sergeant, Platoon Commander, Squad Leaders, and Team Leaders. So all those billets were being filled at the same time by different candidates.
The Platoon Sergeant billet was the most difficult one to get. I had it for two days. They torched me. For two days, they rode me constantly. They were screaming at me all the time, verbally assaulting me, telling me I was the most worthless human being on the planet, telling me that everything the platoon was doing wrong was my fault.
It was stressful. I remember thinking, “Man, this sucks. This is like the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life.”
It was awful but what I did have going for me was that I had been in the Marine Corps for four years before that and I had experience being a squad leader. It’s like I knew what to expect but I was still surprised by the intensity of it I guess.
Later on, I also got the Platoon Commander billet and I also got a Squad Leader billet. I was a Team Leader a couple of different times so there are a lot of leadership opportunities in Officer Candidate School.
They say that one of the most difficult things that you can do is lead your peers and that’s true. Your peers don’t want to listen to you but the interesting thing is they want to be listened to when they’re put in one of those billets.
It’s like why can’t you see the writing on the wall? I’ve always felt that I am a good follower. So even my peer, who is leading me, I always gave them a lot of grace and a lot of patience and forgiveness because I’m like, “When I’m in that billet, I would hope that they would treat me the same way.”
That’s my mentality with it, is like, “I want to just do the best that I can for this person because what they are going through right now sucks.”
They're also trying to get an officer trained enough so that when he steps in front of his platoon that he’s given when he gets to the fleet, he’s had a ton of leadership opportunities.
Yeah, for that year of training in OCS, it was just billet after billet after billet. You’re like thinking, “I don’t want that billet,” and you get the billet. “I don’t want the billet,” and I get the billet.
But then by the end, you’re just trained so well that you’re like, “Eh, what’s leading a platoon now?”
There’s still intimidation. There are still problems. There were a lot of mistakes I made as a platoon commander but they weed a lot of it out of you before you even get there.
TROY GENT: You said that billets can be a part of your role in the fleet. So the billet that I was in in the fleet was a platoon commander and that never changed.
REBECCA GENT: You can have a billet both in training and in the fleet.
TROY GENT: Yeah so a corporal might be given a team so he is a team leader in an infantry squad. But then that squad leader gets promoted and goes somewhere else and then that corporal is the highest ranking person in that squad now so he becomes the squad leader. So he just changed his billet from Team Leader to Squad Leader.
REBECCA GENT: So is it almost like a subrank in a way?
TROY GENT: No, it’s just a different name for what they are doing. He’s a team leader. That’s his billet.
REBECCA GENT: But it doesn’t have precedence over some that has a higher rank, right?
TROY GENT: Well, there’s been plenty of Marines that have…
So like in Vietnam, if you had a company that’s in contact for a couple of days and you have the company gunnery sergeant killed and the company first sergeant killed and the next highest rank you have in that company is a staff sergeant, then that staff sergeant becomes a first sergeant but he is still a staff sergeant.
Even a company commander could be killed and then a second lieutenant moves up to become the company commander until either they can promote him or another captain can be transitioned from wherever he’s at to become the new company commander.
Does that make sense? So that second lieutenant is filling the billet of Company Commander.
So I guess the billet is the position and the rank is just the rank.
REBECCA GENT: I guess with the last two interviews, the ones with Mark, I was just a little bit more curious about that and how it worked because he was speaking about billets in the sense of like… He had been out to Afghanistan in a certain billet and then he came back and he was working with people of a certain rank but they had only ever been in one location their whole service. So I guess he was just debating who was more superior.
So will the rank always be superior to the experience?
TROY GENT: I would say in peacetime… There might be something to this. In peacetime, when there is no war going on, I would say the rank becomes king. But when bullets are flying and things are extremely stressful in that way and combat is happening and there is a war going on, experience is going to be more vital to accomplish the mission and save lives because the experience is going to make things happen, not someone that’s a higher rank.
There’s someone who might be a first sergeant who’s never been to combat and he can’t do the job because things are extremely stressful, he’s going to get fired or someone is going to step up to take that role to make sure things happen.
You still respect the rank and the position but mission accomplishment is more important than that when it really really matters.
I know there’s been soldiers, Marines, whatever that have… Like when they're that stressed out and bullets are flying, they can’t make decisions. And so someone steps in to make a decision, that person isn’t going to try and override those decisions so much because they can’t even function in the first place anyway.
That staff sergeant isn’t gonna care. If he has to step up and be the first sergeant, he’s going to do that in order to accomplish the mission and save as many lives as possible at the same time and he’s not going to care if there’s any repercussions that come back on him for doing that because once he gets in that mindset and that role, he’s going to push forward until it happens regardless of the consequences, I guess.
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REBECCA GENT: Which did you enjoy more? OCS or boot camp?
TROY GENT: After about two or three weeks in boot camp, I got into the lifestyle role or mode and I enjoyed it to some degree actually. I started to find some humor in it.
But in OCS, I had a whole different perspective on life and the Marine Corps and I enjoyed OCS a ton more.
I never got in trouble for laughing but it’s just because I never got caught laughing. I perfected the silent laugh.
I had this candidate. He came up to me one day and he said, “I just don’t think I could ever handle getting yelled at by a female sergeant instructor.”
We had a female platoon below us and their sergeant instructors were females.
And I said, “Man, I hope it never happens.”
He said, “I just can’t stand them. They just sound so gross and their females screaming at the top of their lungs. They sound like witches!”
One day, we were given the command to fall out, which means the whole platoon runs outside the squad bay and forms up in a platoon formation on the marching quarter-deck. This asphalt pad is like the size of three football fields.
You are supposed to respond to everything, every command, with, “Aye Aye, sir,” “No sir,” or “Yes sir.”
So in this case, our sergeant instructor was a Staff NCO. We were given the command to fall out to the parade deck. We all sounded off, “Aye Aye, Staff Sergeant!”
But the thing I like to do to make things more entertaining for me, they would say, “Fall out to the parade deck!” and I would say, “Aye aye stafha sehghent!” Something like that, right?
The sergeant instructors couldn’t hear it cause they were far enough away but the six candidates in my vicinity, it just killed them.
We started falling out and Treece decided that he was going to make fun of me and so he’s running by this tree and he goes, “EHHH EHHH, Sheveh sheveh!!!”
I’m like a football field ahead of everybody. I’m just sprinting down this parade deck to be the first one in formation. So Treece is yelling making fun of me and then all of a sudden, we hear this, “Freeze candidate freeze!”
Like this really loud female voice says, “Freeze candidate freeze!”
So everybody just stops where they are at and whatever position you stop in is the position you have to stay in until they unfreeze you. So some people have their arms up and then some people have a stride in between each leg.
And then she says, “Whoever the moron was that sounded like a retard just now, you need to come over here and stand in front of me at the position of attention!”
Nobody moved. She says it again basically and gives like this big threat. I got in the habit during OCS to try and take things for the team. It was just another way for me to have fun. The sergeant instructors would often leave me alone because I sounded off so loud. It was like uncomfortable for them.
So I’m like, “Ok, I'm going to take one for the team,” right?
I start running to this chick and she’s like, “No! It wasn’t you! I know it wasn’t you! Get back!”
Something like that. They were always saying, “Get back.”
So I stop and freeze again and she’s like, “It was you!” and she points at Treece, right?
I’m like, “You have got to be kidding me.”
And so he runs, locks himself up in the position of attention in front of her, and she just starts laying into him, berating him, right? And she says, “Everybody, get back in the squad bay except you!!”
Everybody starts running back to the squad bay and he is getting screamed at. I run right by him right? I am just like beside myself thinking about how his worst nightmare was to get screamed at by a female sergeant instructor and the fact that he was getting screamed at because he was making fun of me because I was making fun of the system… I couldn’t even get up the stairs. I was laughing so hard.
I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was having a heart attack. Mayhew, my big buddy who played collegiate football, started dragging me up the stairs. He’s like, “Gent! What is happening, man? What is wrong with you?”
I’m just laughing so hard. We get back to the squad bay and are at the position of attention. Eventually, Treece comes back. They were like, “Gent, what happened to you?”
Later on, I don’t know how, but I explained the whole thing, you know, but that’s one of the greatest memories I ever have. I loved Treece. He was a really fun guy to be around.
Do you have any more questions or should I tell one more story about blood flow?
REBECCA GENT: Um, yeah. I was just going to ask if there was anything else you wanted to tell us.
TROY GENT: Man, we could do like ten podcasts just on OCS probably. I’m like three weeks into the letters and I’ve got so many stories that came out of it. It’s crazy.
So one night, we had fallen out to formation and we were all standing there at the position of attention waiting to march to a class or something. I’m not sure.
There was a sister platoon that was formed up right next to us. The staff sergeant, he was a big muscular guy. Like 6’4, native american, just buff, really buff, and he starts screaming at this candidate. I don’t know what he was screaming at him for but he would say, “Go get some blood flow!”
And then the candidate would say, “Aye, aye staff sergeant!”
And then all you could hear was, “Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump…” down the parade deck. Then you would hear the sergeant instructor say, “Get back!”
And then you would hear this, from a distance, “Aye, Aye staff sergeant!”
And then you would hear this, “Thump, thump, thump, thump…”
The sergeant instructor would start screaming at him again and then he would say, “Go get some blood flow!”
“Aye aye, staff sergeant!”
“Thump, thump, thump, thump…”
“Get back!”
“Aye aye, staff sergeant!”
“Thump, thump, thump, thump…”
And it happened half a dozen times. I was standing in formation and I had perfected the silent laugh at this point and I just… There were like four of us around me that were just shaking so hard because we were laughing so hard. It just happened over and over and over and there was no other sound on the planet at that moment.
PODCAST OUTRO: Thank you for listening.
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TROY GENT: We were told that if we had to use the head, which is go to the bathroom, the drill instructor, if they said no, then you would say, “This recruit has an emergency head call.”
The drill instructors would always let you go because you were going to piss your pants basically and they didn’t want you to piss your pants.
So this one day, we are all sitting on the quarter deck, cross-legged, getting a class and this recruit raises his hand and the drill instructor goes, “What?”
And he stands up and says, “Sir! This recruit needs to use the head, sir.”
This recruit requests permission to make a head call sir. That’s the proper way to do it.
And he says, “No! Sit down!”
He says, “Aye, sir,” and he sits down. A few minutes later, he raises his hand. He’s like, “What do you want?!”
And he stands up and says, “Sir! This recruit requests permission to use the head… to make a head call sir!”
And he says, “No! Sit down!”
A few minutes later he raises his hand and he’s like, “What do you want?!”
And he said, “This recruit requests permission to make an emergency head call, sir.”
So on the third time, he decides he’s gonna bring a whole new level of intensity. It’s an emergency, right?
And the drill instructor says, “An emergency, huh?”
He said, “Yes sir!”
He said, “Alright. Since it’s an emergency, this is what I want you to do. I want you to start running around the squad bay and I want you to sound like a siren while you run around the squad bay and while you’re doing that, everybody else is going to make a head call.”
And he starts running around, going, “Woooowoooowoooo!” all round the squad bay. Over and over again while we are taking a leak. He’s like, “Woooowoooowoowooo!”
I think after we were done and sat down, he let him go another lap and said, “Alright, get in there and make a head call!”
So he let him make a head call but it was funny.