When I attended Officer Candidate School (OCS), my fellow candidates and I developed several coping mechanisms to deal with the daily rigors and stress of training. The Teaching, Advising, and Counseling (TAC) officers made us hit the wall several times a day. Hitting the wall was simply a modified form of standing at attention. From that modified form of standing at attention, the TAC officers would issue commands such as, “Eyes right.” Most of you who have been in the Army for more than a day or two know what the command ‘eyes right’ means. However, on the off chance that you don’t know what it means, I’ll attempt to provide an explanation. Eyes right is normally evoked while marching in a parade when a unit is passing in review. While marching in a forward direction, the parade unit turns their heads to look to the right for every column of soldiers except for the rightmost column of soldiers whose heads will remain looking forward. For officer candidates posted against the wall in the barracks, that rule obviously didn’t apply. Nobody was marching anywhere. Everybody was standing up against the wall at attention. So, upon hearing the command ‘eyes right,’ the candidates merely turned their heads to the right. Sounds simple enough, right? Naturally, we had to clown it up a bit. When the TAC called eyes right, we would simply say, “Eyes right Sir.” If we were outside when the command for eyes right was evoked, we would simply turn our hats to the right. Now usually, if one or two people did something stupid like that, they were told to write it up. However, when the whole company pulled some stupid shit like that, what were the TAC officers going to do, have everybody write it up? Not likely. It was too much of a bother. So, they would drop everybody for push-ups. Another routine that really frustrated the TAC officers was when they would walk up to a bunch of candidates and have them take an oath. Let’s suppose that they were repeating the honor code. It would start out something like this: the TAC would say, “Please repeat after me. I, ‘state your full name’.” That would be the candidates’ cue. They would say, “I, ‘state your full name’.” After two or three attempts to get that one line done, the TAC officer would get furious and start threatening the candidates. But what could he do? Not a whole lot. Yeah. We would catch hell on the back end. We would have to do more push-ups. We would have to run further during PT. And the TAC officers would harass us a little bit more every chance they got. But in the end, who won? I think you already know the answer to that. One of the rituals that the TAC officers took very seriously was the study hall time every evening. Generally, two hours were set aside every evening for study hall. During study hall, nothing could happen except studying. All officer candidates were supposed to be in their PT uniform and flip-flops sitting at their desk with one canteen of water beside their desk and nothing out but study materials on their desk. Well, that’s the way it was supposed to be. That’s not usually the way I did things. Now all of the timid little rabbit college ops (college options) and National Guard guys generally followed things by the book. However, us prior service guys tended to bend the rules ever so slightly. Study hall was for those that actually needed to study. Seriously. Military subjects were not that difficult. The instructors would stand up in the front of the class and stomp their feet and say something cute like, “You better write that down. You’re going to see that again. This is really important. Hint! Hint! Hint!” If you heard things like that, or you heard them stomp their feet, and you didn’t take a note or in my case, memorize it, you deserved to fail. My roommate would always ask me, “Masters, why don’t you ever open a book?” And I would reply, “Well, I don’t want to get these books wrinkled. Military books are paperbacks and they’re pretty fragile. Plus, I already got it stored up here.” And I would point to my right temple. Then, he would look at me and roll his eyes. But he couldn’t argue with success. And I was a perennial honor student. But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes. Study hall. They treated that almost as if it were religious. Something holy. Like I said, if I had more important shit to do, I did it. Case in point, we had a land navigation course or an orienteering course, I can’t remember which, on a day when it was raining cats and dogs. Raining and training means mud, lots of mud. Did I mention that there was mud? Hell, that was an understatement. The mud had mud. Naturally, all of our shit was caked with mud. There were layers upon layers of mud on our boots. And here’s the thing, the next day, we had a command inspection which determined whether we were going to get our first pass or not. There was no way in hell I was not going to get that pass. But my dumb shit roommate had gotten in trouble. He had done something so totally stupid, that he had to march tours around the quad all night in the rain, no less. So, that one hour of free time that all candidates would normally have after dinner to do shit like cleanup your gear. Yeah. He didn’t have that. Cuz dumb shit was outside in the rain marching tours around the quad. Outstanding in the rain. Fun. Not. I told him to do me a favor. I told him to leave his wall locker unsecure. The dumb shit asked me why. I told him somebody had to clean his shit. So, there I was cleaning his shit during, you guessed it, study hall. Who do you suppose showed up at my door? No. It wasn’t the tooth fairy. No. It wasn’t Santa Claus. Oh, come on. You’re not even trying. No. It wasn’t my mother. No. It wasn’t your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Give up? It was the TAC officer. His first question was, “Masters, what in the hell are you doing?” Because it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t studying. No shit. Take one. That guy had to have been a regular rocket scientist to figure that one out. So, I told him, “Well sir, it’s like this. I heard your whiny piss ant little voice down the hall, so I said to myself, I said, Masters, you had best put the shit away. So, I was putting something in my roommate’s wall locker.” When the TAC officer heard me call his voice a whiny piss ant little voice, his face turned nine shades a red. Then, he literally screamed at me, “Honor code violation! I’m going to bring you up before the honor code review board.” I said, “Excuse me sir. What did I do to violate the honor code? If you will kindly step over to this wall locker, I will show you exactly what I put away. There was no honor code violation here.” The TAC officer walked over to my roommate’s wall locker and looked inside. Then, he asked me, “What in the hell were you doing?” I explained to him that my roommate was out marching tours in the quad and that we had the inspection to prepare for the next day. I explained that I was cleaning his equipment to prepare it for the inspection because he couldn’t. I said, “Somebody has to clean the shit sir. Otherwise, we will fail the inspection. I ain’t going to let that happen. I don’t see how that’s an honor code violation.” Then, he said, “You’re right. It’s not an honor code violation. But it is a Class A violation. Write me a 500-word essay on why you shouldn’t use study hall to clean military equipment. Write it up.” Word traveled throughout the company rather quickly about my encounter with the TAC officer. But the TAC officer never asked me for the essay and I never heard another word about the study hall violation. Here is why. I hadn’t violated a policy for myself. I had violated a policy to help a fellow candidate. Sometimes, as a leader, you have to be willing to take risks. At the end of the day, you will be judged on whether you got the job done and how you got the job done. Not every undertaking will be an exercise in futility.
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