Drill Sergeant Lovato

Part 1

I'm not sure why I did it. Most people have a significant reason for joining the Army. I could have gone to college, I could have just laid low for a few years and worked some part time jobs. But not me. I've never been the type to settle for the status quo. 

My name is Selena Russo. I'm 19, and I just recently graduated high school. All my other friends were going to prestigious schools, certainly the girl friends I had. But me? I decided to join the Army. It ended up changing my life, but not in the way you might think. 

In order to understand all this, we have to go back to the beginning. Not quite as far as the recruiter's office, though that would make an interesting story in itself. Girls like me were not very common in the military. I had no family in the military, and I had no childhood dreams of joining. It was a very spur of the moment decision. That's the kind I make most of the time. 

So instead we'll start with when I got to boot camp - the name that everyone knows it by - and the start of the most surprising change of my life. 

You see, I was always the girl that was commended for her fashion in high school, and all throughout school in general. This is reason number one that joining the Army was so strange sounding to all my friends. I was going to join an organization where it was dictated what I would wear at all times? Was I out of my mind? Well, maybe. 

So when I got to basic training and got issued my uniforms, it was like saying goodbye to all my life prior. When I learned I wouldn't be able to keep my hair down, that was yet another surprise. I'd always seen females in military movies with long hair. But this wouldn't be the first wake up call that the movies didn't know anything about the real military. 

You might say to yourself, didn't you have a hard time getting yelled at all the time when you got to basic training? Not really. I've kind of always subscribed to the idea that there's no point to be affected by someone yelling at you if you don't even care about them. So when all these 'drill sergeants' screamed and yelled at me, telling me to hurry up in everything I did, I followed their orders, but I wasn't emotionally affected. 

The beginning of basic training, most don't realize, isn't in training itself. It's this little couple days long place they call reception. It's not a very kind 'reception' if you ask me. But it didn't surprise me. 

At any rate, this place - reception- wasn't permanent, and neither were all the people here that yelled at you. They weren't 'real' drill sergeants, we learned pretty fast. Sure they'd completed the school or whatever, but they weren't going to be our drill sergeants. So that gave me even less reason to care about all their ranting and raving about everything. 

So, the day came when we actually left to go to basic. This was the part that Hollywood got right.  

We stood in 'formation', basically an organized group of rows directly behind each other, in a field underneath a tan tarp. This was where we were told we would 'meet' our real drill sergeants for the first time. 

I could tell looking around that the other kids here were terrified. I was nervous too, I'm not gonna lie. We were told our drill sergeants were watching us right then, when we couldn't even see them, so we better be on our best behavior, lest we give them a reason to hate us before we even got to the training company. All up to this point had been easy for me. We had to deal with not getting a lot of sleep, and occasionally being told to hurry up doing something, and we didn't get much time to eat, but it really wasn't that hard. 

That was all before I met her. Our drill sergeant. 

She walked over in front of our formation, scanning the rows. She had deep brown eyes, and I could tell her brown hair would have been gorgeous looking, had it not had to have been put up in a bun under that ghastly brown hat that all drill sergeants wore. The skin that was showing: her face and her hands, were all that was visible since she wore the jacket, pants, and boots that were customary uniform. She wore a slight smile as she walked up and down our ranks. It gave the impression that she was nice.