Brainwash Training

Jason Leonard

I never would have imagined I would leave the Army brainwashed. Everyone has the preconception that basic training would be kind of hard and that you would leave in shape. Everyone finds boot camp challenging, and the reward you get for completing it? You leave a brainwashed killer.

I joined the Army National Guard while I was a senior in high school. I was tired of Bristol and my unfulfilling life in Tennessee. I could not wait to leave and go far away from home and see what other places had to offer. In August I left for Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, a basic training post. There were a five or six of us that left from Knoxville by van to get there. We arrived around midnight. As soon as we stepped out of the van we were ushered into a room like cattle. There was already over a hundred people sitting elbow-to-elbow on the floor. This room was extremely small and overcrowded, but I managed to wedge myself between two people. Someone was standing behind a counter telling that we could not have weapons, drugs, pornographic material, and things for gambling with. After that, the people in charge, drills sergeants started yelling at us and telling us to get up and run out of the building. They ran us to another building. This building had our beds in it. We were told to go upstairs, put our things on the bunks, and come back down. The drill sergeants said that we had one minute to accomplish this and that fifteen seconds of it had passed. All of us darted up the stairs, knocking each other down, trying to make it back down in time. All of us arrived back down stairs to the screaming of drill sergeants. They were saying, "Front leaning rest position move". Once the drill sergeants saw me they got really angry. I was just standing there because I did not know what front leaning rest position was. One of the drill sergeants came over and began to verbally assault me, yelling, "Are you deaf? I said, FRONT LEANING REST POSITION MOVE!" I told him I did not know what that was. He replied that it was the push-up position in a very unfriendly manner.

He said it was all right that I did not know what that meant, because I was another dumb inbred from Tennessee.

Every day was like this. They would look for any weakness you had and use it against you. They would either make you or brake you. They wanted soldiers that were obedient. If they said jump, the only response any of us would think of saying was "How high drill sergeant." They wanted a soldier that would do anything without question, even kill. Whenever we went somewhere we would sing cadences about killing the enemy. When we did our running in the morning we would sing cadences like this one,

They wanted to keep us in a mentality of being able to kill someone, because that is what basic training is all about.

After the first week we began our training to kill the enemy. The first thing they taught us to use was the bayonet. The bayonet was the blade that attached to the barrel of our rifles. We would train at the bayonet assault course. There were over a hundred logs stuck in the ground with a tire nailed to the center of them. Inside of the tires were giant foam disks. The logs were supposed to represent the enemy. One of the drill sergeants gave us a demonstration of what we were supposed to do. He took one of the bayoneted rifles and thrust it into the belly of the wooden enemy and with great force raised the log out of the ground, over his head, and slammed it onto the ground. After which, he started to continually slash it. The drill sergeants told us to stand in front of one of the wooden soldiers and wait for them to tell us what to do. We had to practice using them in case we were in battle and ran out of ammunition. We would have to kill the enemy with the bayonet. They began telling us what moves to use to kill our wooden enemies and with each move we had to scream kill or yell with rage. After our slaughter of the wooden warriors our drill sergeants took us over to the edge of a hill and told us that the wooden enemies were still alive and their base was up on the hill. We could not let them get away.

We had to kill the enemy and show no mercy. Our drill sergeants put us in lines and began telling us to run up the hill and destroy the enemy. In the background I could hear grenades and mortar shells exploding. This was supposed to simulate a conflict in war. While I was running up that two-mile hill, I discovered I hated those wooden people. I have never hated someone that I’ve never met until I learned to hate the enemy. I began wanting to kill the enemy. Whoever my drill sergeant said was the enemy I hated and there was only one thing I wanted to do to the enemy, kill them.

The next part of my training to kill was learning how to use the M-16A2 rifle. They told us our rifles were our best friend and to treat it as such. We carried our best friend everywhere. If we dropped our best friend, we had to get down in the front leaning rest position and apologize forty or so times. The drill sergeants started taking us to the rifle ranges. We started shooting at targets that were only 30 yards away. Once they were confortable with our shooting performances, we started to kill the enemy at a further distance. Eventually I could kill the enemy at 300 yards. Now all the enemy was to me was a target. Killing the enemy would just be like shooting a target.

I do not know where the transition from nice guy to kill the enemy took place, but I felt like I was not the same anymore. My parents were allowed to pick me up from boot camp and take me to Georgia, where my tech school would be. We stopped a few times along the way and each place we went I would look around and think to myself, would I be able to kill these people? At that time I would have been able to and not think twice about it. Now that I’ve been done for five months I do not feel the same about killing someone anymore. I would only kill the enemy if the U.S. were at war, but if I was just out of basic training and my drill sergeant said you were the enemy, I would have killed you.