Time Surved in Military Purgatory

During Army Basic Combat Training (BTC) located within Fort Leonard Wood Missouri, I ran, marched, and poured sweat with two-hundred and fifty of my fellow soldiers.  By being unfortunate enough to be small and a few other standard complications involving a pelvic fracture, I never saw much of my military future that didn’t include typing behind a computer screen, much as I am now with typing my life for an unseen public.  Injuries in the military are almost inevitable to some degree, and this kind of affliction happens to roughly forty percent of all short white females in training.  As a student, the military was required to send me back home for school so my drill sergeants had no choice but to send me to a place to wait until my mandatory return home date. This place was the Orderly Room.

It would be more accurate to say that the Orderly Room was part of a much larger building, each sectioned off for the different companies so that no company interacted with another.  It housed the main supplies, the linens and the equipment that the low ranking soldiers used for training purposes. Also there were the offices for the highest-ranking sergeant and captain, mostly un-used as they were usually overseeing the company’s training.  Inside, there are linen bins, forgotten clothes that were sent for cleaning and never retrieved, and broken supplies.  Like the soldiers there, each broken fan or scale would wait to be fixed, moved or sent away completely. 

Calling this place “orderly” was irony in itself being more of a hang out spot for wounded soldiers (the Broken) and soldiers waiting for their training to start (the Waiting) and could never be organized.  We spent every single day in camouflaged purgatory  Understandably, there was a lot of general confusion about where to be and what to do.  While there, even I found it difficult to complete even the simplest task without a direct command.  Later and with additional experience it unfolded that this was almost as common as military injuries.  The hive-mindset is infectious. 

The building was set up as follows: the main office was blocked off with a ceiling high chain-link fence earning its name as the cage. Crammed into the opposite wall was the concrete block of a room that held all the weapons and then a corridor connected the two.  This corridor was where soldiers would come and sit on plastic milk crates and more often, the floor, and would be given little jobs such as cleaning the offices or moving objects from place to place.  Sometimes we just existed quietly in this place where all we did was hurry to wait.  Every day we would go back to the gray cement walls, floors, atmosphere; this place could be oppressive because no one wanted to stay in BTC any longer than originally planned.  But as they say, necessity is the mother of invention so we got really good at entertaining ourselves.

Although the general feeling of the place was as gray and moldy as the walls, we had a great time there more often than not.  We would frequently watch drill sergeants joke and talk like people rather than domineering hate machines.  Not all of them were rotten but some we liked more than others.  It was from the back of a cattle truck that I had the great pleasure of watching the company’s meanest drill sergeant crutch his way to the Orderly Room with his foot in a cast.  I would love to say that I pitied him but what ever made him break his foot was now saving the rest of us from his tyranny because he was taken the rest of the rotation off to heal.  Only the Broken got to watch this great moment in our basic training history and I would have sold my soul for a video camera right then, but as this was a lot better than hearsay, I was very happy to be privy to this glorious sight.  It was him that led the march so hard and fast that many of us, myself included, sustained grievance injuries and were taken out of training.

Along with this there was a sense of almost pure harmony.  The dimly lit rooms with its grungy windows and cobwebs hanging like garlands from the ceiling, we had laughter, which was rare in Basic Training.  We had close associations with the employees and amongst ourselves.  As soldiers we came together like a small company of our own.  We would meet up every morning, from our different platoons, and would shed the animosity and rivalry the training soldiers felt like a moth-eaten coat.  Together we stood up for one another and would spin yarns about our situation and ourselves.  Although the Orderly Room was anything but, it still managed to give the Broken and Waiting a place to call our own.  I would have given anything not to have been injured, but I wouldn’t give up the memories I got from being in our makeshift clubhouse for the world.