He's in the Army Now. Well, Almost...

A TIME Daily Special: The first installment in a series by our man in Fort Jackson, S.C., Frank Pellegrini, who reports from the trenches of boot camp.

  • EDITOR'S NOTE: TIME Daily writer Frank Pellegrini, at a ripe 27 years, has taken a leave of absence to join the Army Reserve. He is currently undergoing basic training — boot camp — and then will spend several months in an Army journalism school. Given the difficulty the armed forces are experiencing in recruiting qualified young people these days, we think his experiences and impressions are worth sharing. His dispatches, some handwritten and snail-mailed (Internet cafes are evidently not part of the standard equipment at basic training), are arriving irregularly. Here is the first, and others will be posted as they arrive.


    I was expecting something, well, more paternalistic. An Army that would take me off the bus with nothing but the clothes on my back, the tar in my lungs and the spare tire around my middle. Take me, mold me, whip me into shape, and, best of all, outfit me with lots of free stuff, everything in tough Army olive and built to last. Yet here was a list, in my "Guide For New Soldiers," of quite a bit I'd need to bring. Among them: Soap and soap case. Toothpaste. Dental floss. Two locks. Two towels and washcloths. I bought those at Bloomingdales, so help me. In olive.

    Three sets of underwear (white). Six pairs of white socks (no color bands, designs or logos). What was this, summer camp? Or just a hopelessly big bureaucracy trying to trim costs? The last few days bespoke a lot of the latter. My recruiting station says MEPS (I still don't know what that stands for) has lost my FS-86, a meticulous accounting of my history and friends that took me weeks to complete. (I do a short version — the last three years — in 20 minutes.) My future base in Flushing tells me they haven't heard from my recruiter since I signed on the dotted line (he got a transfer) and had assumed "I wasn't showing up." Was that still an option?

    Athletic supporter. Eyeglass band (if you wear eyeglasses). Running shoes — they don't make you run in boots anymore. "Today's Army" is how they answer the phones at the recruiting office, and that's what I'm starting to worry about. I'm doing this for the money, for the exercise, for the adventure of it, but also because I want some of what my father and my uncle and my boss and Bob Dole get to look back on when they're 64: military days. I'm going to boot camp at the same spot where my dad went less willingly: Fort Jackson, in South Carolina. I hear the whole place is built on sand. Dad, who shares absolutely none of my excitement about this, has a story about a fellow grunt who thought he was Napoleon, was always standing on a hill, surveying his men, when everybody else was running in the heat. Though I don't expect today's Army to take that sort of thing from volunteers.

    Shower shoes. Shampoo. Hairbrush or six-inch black comb. Am I going to have to ask them to shave my head? Elvis didn't, but then again he wasn't exactly volunteering either. I am assured by almost everyone that all the volunteering — the optional stuff — will cease with the first parting of my drill sergeant's lips.

    It ain't gonna be summer camp. PT (physical training) will still nearly kill me, and the verbal abuse just might finish the job. Smoking, by the way, is not allowed. (That's a new one for Army life, but good — getting the Camel off my back is part of what I volunteered for.) Nine weeks from now I'll be what John Candy signed up to be — a lean, mean, fighting machine — unless they've dropped that part of it too, along with the free socks. Some things never change, though: I leave the home front tear-stained, and with orders to write.


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