One thing I didn't understand about the world when I joined the Navy was that in order to travel the world, one must be inoculated for many, many different diseases.  The expense and logistics of the thousands of shots needed for any given year by an organization that may have to ship people with no advance warning to just about anyplace on earth meant that for the Navy it was easier to just give all of us the vaccines for everything at once.  The best place to do that was boot camp.

The process was to line us all up at once and we would pass two corpsmen who held what looked like paint sprayers.  They would press them to your arm and pull triggers that used compressed air to force the vaccine into your body.  No needles.  They just kept spraying that stuff until the bottle was empty and then they'd change bottles and keep on going. An assembly line.

One real drawback to this method was that if you flinched, you could end up needing stitches to close the gaping wound that would result from not being absolutely still when they fired the spray gun.  We had a few guys who didn't seem to understand this point and they paid dearly for it.  The shots often made you almost as sick as the disease.  So, they liked to give shots on Fridays since there were no classes to fail on Saturday, and we had to practice our 2.5 mile run along with extended PT.  That made it the perfect chance to teach us how to work ourselves to death while ill.

One other thing about the third week, that was when, for some unstated reason, if you weren't allergic to penicillin you got a massive dose of it in your ass.   If you've ever received a dose like this you will know what I mean here.  Sure, the initial shot was unpleasant, but not debilitating.  Until you slept on it.  So it came to pass that on a brisk Saturday morning as we did our somnambulent hop from our racks to the cold tile floor we found that one of our legs was missing in action.  Almost everyone hit the floor with a resounding thump.  There is a reason that the expression "swore like a sailor" is used.  I personally believe it was directly related to this massive injection in our butts.  You would to if you'd been there.

You see, it wasn't just the immediate pain of trying to stand it was also the fact that Saturday was a day of prolonged physical training and this week was also the first timed stage of our fitness run. The whole company had to pass this test to graduate.  It was not that terrible, we had to get it done in twenty minutes, all of us or we would have to do it again that same day until we did.  All of us.

We finally got ourselves into formation for the march to chow and we looked like world war two Nazis goose stepping across the grinder.  I was thinking that moving it would loosen it up.  Wrong, we got to the chow hall and made a sight as we attempted to sit on the long hard benches without falling over due to our immobile hip.  We gimped back to the barracks and we changed into our PT gear and marched to the track.

A round of stretches and calisthenics had even the tough guys near tears as we were trotted over to the track to take our run.  Some of us had no problems on normal days making this run, really a fast walk would get you there.  Today we faced the dirt track with a great equalizer in place.  The penicillin hip.   It reduced the jocks to the level of the crybabies and the crybabies to real babies. 

One of the lessons that we were being programmed with was that in order to succeed we had to work together.   That we were not there to be individual stars, but that we had to trust the other guys with our lives and that they must be able to trust us too.  This is lost on a lot of competitive types.  They had a real problem seeing that it wasn't all about coming in first, it was about all of us making it the first time.  Being first meant nothing if the last man didn't make it in time. 

Some of us figured this part out and lagged at the rear of the pack to help the other guys along.  The only thing we couldn't do was carry them.  So that's what it took.  We cajoled, berated, insulted, pushed, boxed in and forced the stragglers across the line.  Some in tears, others hurling, but we made it.  The "winners" never got it.  They were all about first place.

Weeks went by pretty quickly there.  Sunday we had "free time", that is we had to scour and polish the barracks from stem to stern and scrub our sneakers.  No classes, and no infantry drill, unless you counted the mandatory march to chow.  We were also largely unsupervised from about noon Saturday until Monday morning.  We had our weekend watch bill and our POD's for Saturday and Sunday.   Snitches were everywhere too.

Our company was populated with people from every walk of life, well, there weren't any rich kids.  Races and religions were all well represented too so we had a lot of cultures mixing and clashing.  This led to the occasional fight.  Those could be exciting too, since they were reason for captains mast and could extend your stay in boot camp by a week or two.  Who wanted that?