One day many years ago, I was at a military training school as a student. The instructors there – as was the norm – were giving the students a royally hard time.
Also as was the norm, some of the students were put in temporary leadership positions (squad leader, platoon leader, etc . . .) during different times during the course. And in one case, that resulted in a truly interesting evening formation.
One particular evening, the instructors were apparently displeased with that days’ performance. They decided to screw with the students by calling an evening formation and “conducting some additional training” (or maybe just chewing our asses – for reasons I’ll explain, we never really found out what was intended that night).
One of the instructors called aside the student appointed to the class senior leadership position at the time – the student company commander, if I recall correctly. He told the senior student to have the rest of us students assembled in formation at a time that was about when it would be starting to get dark.
The senior student asked him, “What’s the uniform?” The instructor answered with words to the effect of, “I don’t care what they wear, just have them out there on time!”
As anyone who’s ever served with “Joe” knows, that was NOT the best way to phrase “just have everybody out there in uniform”. (smile)
I’d served for a couple of months on a temp assignment with the senior student. He was a great guy – but he could be one helluva smartass at times, too. And here he rose to the occasion.
The senior student assembled everyone. He told us, “OK, they’ve called an evening formation. But the instructor said he didn’t care what we wore. So wear the most outlandish sh!t you can think of to the formation.”
I wish I had pictures of the result. It was a military comic masterpiece.
I can’t remember what I was wearing – my imagination and creativity were not really “clicking” that day, so it definitely wasn’t memorable. But I do remember some of the others, and they had come up with masterpieces.
I think we had guys in bright red shorts and all sorts of outlandish civilian t-shirts, plus guys in their skivvies and shower shoes (I don’t think anyone showed up buck naked). I think we had a couple of guys wearing just a towel, too. But I really remember four guys.
One guy had taken the head off a mop and used it as a wig. I think he had his steel pot on holding the mop head in place. (I think he had a pair of garish civvie sunglasses, too, but I can’t remember for sure.) He was out front, so I got a good look at him and remember him.
If you’ve served in the Army, you’ve heard the term “green weenie”. Well, one guy gave us all a real-life example of same. He had taken a pair of the old knee-high OD-green boot socks, unrolled them, stuffed one of them full of other rolled socks (or maybe t-shirts), and was wearing either skivvies or shorts. That . . . sock was hanging out from under his shorts literally far enough to hit his knees. The Jolly Green Giant would have been envious.
But the two other guys took the cake.
They each got two helmet liners – this was the old steel-pot days, so I guess it could have been their own steel pot and liner instead. They found some way to keep them in place on the front of their chests, then managed to pull a t-shirt on over them. It looked for all the world like both were wearing a 42 bra with about an M-size cup. (smile)
One of them managed to provide the pièce de résistance for the whole show. He was there TDY from a unit where he’d been able to acquire and bring with him a small portable LZ strobe; they flash fairly rapidly, and are bright as hell. He put it on a string (or maybe his dog-tag chain) and wore it as a necklace.
He then hung the landing strobe between the two helmet liners, outside the t-shirt. I can’t remember for certain if he also managed to find a mop head for a wig. As the formation fell in, he turned on the LZ strobe.
There were a bunch of other crazy-ass getups, but those are the ones I remember.
At the appointed time, the senior instructor came out. The senior student called the formation to attention, and then reported to the instructor.
The instructor saw the formation, and you could see he was stunned – and pissed. For a minute I thought he was gonna stroke out on us.
Then he kinda smiled a bit, and said something to the effect, “Well, that’s what I get for saying I didn’t care what you wore.”
As I recall, the guy spoke to us for about 5 or 10 minutes, but that was all. I think we got our asses chewed some, but I don’t really remember what for.
But standing in that formation was priceless.
