Transcript: Back to basics in the military

Nick Lees: The corporal opens the door, and we walk out and we’re just like, ‘What the hell have I just got myself into. What is this? This…this is it? Like, what am I doing here?’ Everyone’s got their head shaved and everyone is marching in unison. It’s like some weird bizarro scene from Pink Floyd’s The Wall or something. I’m just like, ‘What is going on?’”

Nick Lees: You go in there and it’s intimidating. The first week is always gonna be tough because you’re running on six hours sleep, you gotta change your cycle and how you eat and stuff. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t overwhelming but there were people in the platoon that were overwhelmed.  It was a bit terrifying at first.

Nick Lees: Getting yelled at by a complete stranger, you just wanna flip them the bird and walk out the door. But you have to learn to take criticism. You have to let yourself  be open to take criticism because there’s gonna be situations where you’re going to have an insubordinate who’s not responding well. You’ll have to perform the same conclusion and start yelling at them as well. You know growing up you have experiences where you get yelled at by people or strangers, but you just have to brush it off.

Nick Lees: Once you realize and you see how other people respond to it and you develop a good camaraderie with the people in your platoon, they really help you out. Waking up in the morning, getting ready for going downstairs, we all would work together. There’s a teamwork side to it that I think really helped with that transition. You have to get up in the morning and shave and do all that stuff. We would always check up on each other to see if we’re doing it because if one person got jacked up, as a platoon, we’re gonna do push-ups or something like that.

Nick Lees: So, three times a week you’d have to run. In the morning, you wake up and that’s the first thing you do. There’s a gym module that comes with it.  There are chin-ups and you’re doing plank position. Doing anything to do with the ropes, doing anything with chin-ups that was very, very tough.

Nick Lees: You have to learn how to salute properly. Something as simple as saluting properly goes a long way. You have to march in sync, which was very tough. Learning the steps, I mean they drill it into you. In a literal sense, they do it for a couple hours a day. It was overwhelming at the start, but I would say certainly the hardest thing is having everyone in sync working on it was the toughest.

Nick Lees: The last few weeks I really appreciated because it was out in the field and the garrison and the field are just, it’s apples and oranges. It’s something completely different. It was pretty impressive for me because it kind of tied everything in together. We’re holding rifles, we’re doing drills and we’re in our complete garb. I think that’s when it sunk in that this was a great experience at that point.

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Posted by Dave Gauthier on Nov 10, 2009. Filed under Transcripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.