I’ll never forget this one DSgt we had at basic who, for some reason I’ll never understand, seemed to take a liking to me. Maybe it was because I was a few years older than the rest of the people in my platoon, maybe it was because I could shoot, or maybe it was because I just shut up and did what I was told.
At any rate, he would always make sure I had an MRE with candy in it. Most of the time it was Skittles, but occasionally there were (I believe) peanut M&M’s? These same 4 people in my platoon would fight over who could buy them from me for $20. Every. Single. Day.
They had it set up to where we’d either have fire guard or CQ every night we were there. We’d usually have one of the shifts every other night and since there were two types of shifts, it magically happened to where you had one of the two hour shifts every night. Great.
Except these same four candy fiends, and I’ll never understand it, in order to “make money” and apparently support their candy habit, would take my shifts for $20/ea. If you’re following along, I never did either of the shifts when I didn’t want to just because I was getting MRE’s with candy. I’d usually pull one or the other if it was the first shift so I could stay up and write letters home, but ended up leaving basic with like $1,000 in folded twenties from selling MRE candy.
We did have this one CQ shift, the first one of the night, however, where the DSgt on duty was pretty cool with us. Again, I’m not sure why, but 15 years later I can assume it’s that we (my buddy Rose and I) were a little older, not loud mouths, respected them, and did what we were told. That was perfect, because what happened to my buddy Rose that night wouldn’t have worked otherwise. We knew they liked us, we just didn’t know how much.
Since it was the first shift of the night, this DSgt had ordered a pizza and was watching tv. We were to be cleaning the company area and some other BS. Rose pipes up and asks if he can have some of the pizza. I thought this was taking it a step too far because he only had us clean for like 20 minutes and then let us pile up on the couch and watch tv. Anyways, DSgt says if you can do 1,000 push ups during this two hour shift, I’ll give you a piece of pizza.
Rose takes off. I’m thinking after the shit they’ve been feeding us, if I ate some of that Papa John’s, I’d be in the latrine for the next week, so I politely bow out and encourage Rose. He managed to get the push ups done with about 15 minutes left in the shift, goes to parade rest right in front of the desk, and asks for his piece of pizza.
The DSgt gets up and goes 100% DSgt on him, turned it up to 11, and berated him for asking for some of his pizza. Smoked him until he couldn’t get up. I got smoked for laughing. It was hilarious. The DSgt was laughing. It was incredible. That’s where I got the saying “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”
But - the last week after we turned all of our shit back in and had graduated but hadn’t had the ceremony, yet, Rose and I got called down to the company and that same DSgt had ordered a pizza for us.
