1. Golf Company. 2nd RTBN.

We were at Edson range.

He was a nasty non-hack with a history of integrity violations.

I had been posted as the duty recruit manning the hatch to our barracks while the platoon was out and about doing whatever was happening that day.

After about a hour, our heavy burst in with the recruit in front of him and posted him at attention facing against the bulkhead on the quarter deck.

I didn't even get the proper greeting of the day out all the way before the heavy had finished berating that recruit for whatever he had done to screw up, when the heavy turned to me, ordered me to keep an eye on that shit bird and stomped back out to rejoin the platoon.

I stood at attention stiff as a board staring straight a head for a few moments, as did the other recruit. My heart was racing. I thought when the DI had burst in I was dead for who knows what real or imagined slight, and was relieved I wasn't the target of the DIs fury. This time.

I glanced sidelong at the other recruit, his back was to me. Both of us struggling to keep our bearing, just waiting for the heavy to burst back in and bust us losing bearing or disobeying our orders.

He didn't come back.

After a while, I saw the recruit slip out of the POA and start looking around. I said nothing and stared straight ahead. Still.scared the DI would pop back in at any moment.

I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the recruit had begun moving. He walked off the quarter deck and INTO the duty hut!

The hatch had been inexplicably left open.

My jaw about hit the floor. I didn't know what to do and stood there dumbfounded for a few moments, positive that the drill instructors would burst back in at any moment and we would both be dead, ir that they would at least catch that recruit and handle the situation. The seconds stretched out into infinity, but they didn't come.

Instead, after a few more agonizingly long moments, the recruit popped his head out of the duty hut, looked me right in the eyes, grinned, and walked over to me.

He was eating something!

That shitbag had rummaged through the other recruits mail and started eating their treats families had sent from home. He was holding an armful of ill gotten snacks, boxes and treats.

He started to ask me if I wanted some.

This was a formative moment for me.

I had been very shy and quiet for much of boot camp. Trying to fly under the radar, but I had previously stood up for this guy when he was ganged up on for a blanket party by others in the platoon a few days before (that's another story altogether). But who was I to so anything about this? I WAS A NOBODY. Some dumb kid from a broken home with a broken past. I couldn't take charge if this situation. This guy was bigger than me.I was nobody's boss, not even my own!

But, I felt something build in me as he laughingly tried to hand me letters and food that belonged to others in the platoon. RAGE didn't just creep up on me, it hit me like a trcuk at full speed and consumed me.

Here he was now trying to make me complicit in some crime? Did he think we were FRIENDS because of what had happened before? I loathed this guy. He was everything that I didn't want to be sneaky. Dishonest, cowardly. I had stuck up for him only because it didn't seem.fsir that he not be given the opportunity to defend himself, and for no other reason. I was not his friend. I HATED this POS.

I snapped.

I came absolutely unglued and I exploded on him.

I screamed at him louder than my lungs have ever screamed before or since, I'm sure I used some choice language and epithets, and he cowered before me, as I cut off his excuses, him, shrinking back and dropping the stolen goods before I posted his ass back against the bulk head, nose against the wall. I regained my composure and ordered him back to attention. He listened.

I held him there at the POA with nothing but my seething fury nd knowing I was right, and a short while later the Platoon came back. I reported what happened, that recruit got rushed off somewhere else while the 1st hat took me to see our senior, who had me relate everything that happened in detail.

Im sure I had to report to someone higher as well, but the details are hazy.

That weekend, or maybe the week after. The whole battalion was brought together and he was publicly given and NJP and allegedly a BCD for integrity violations. We never saw him again, but didn't get much time to think abiut it as we pretty much went right into the Crucible shortly after that.

In the years since, I have often wondered if it was a test aimed at ME to see if I would join him and sell my integrity. I had previously stuck up for the guy, and had even reported my DIs for excessive force early in the training evolution, while I was still being broken down before re-molding and I find it odd that I was posted alone in the barracks while everyone else was gone. I swear they normally had duty posted in buddy pairs. Main hatch and back of the barracks?

Then I was left alone with this one specific trouble recruit that I had a history with. Where anything could happen. Only to have the DIs coincidentally appear immediately after the pivotal moment? I've often wondered if there are fake recruits in the mix during training just for these sorts of tests and social experiments. Still, I can only wonder, and whether I'm misremembering the specific details or embellishing the events or not due to my own faulty memory, this really did happen. Felt like a scene from a movie. Very surreeal. I learned a lot about myself in that incident, and I'll never forget it.