Army Officer Candidate School graduation photo, February, 1989. Officer Candidate Green is at left. I am third from right, looking earnest. CPT Roske is the one smirking under the black hat. Sadly, "field expedient PT cap" guy did not survive the 50% attrition. 

Field Expedient PT Cap
Army Officer Candidate School, Ft. Benning, GA. 1988.

Background.
The Army had funny ideas on how to turn youngsters into Officers. Based on the obvious areas of emphasis, the primary attribute the US Army seemed to desire in military leaders was a high tolerance for being yelled at. Our Officer Candidate School (OCS) class was roughly a 50/50 mix of Army enlisted, and kids straight out of college. Not ROTC kids mind you, but generic college kids that had simply applied for OCS. I was the oddball, having been a Marine Corps SGT when I applied for Army OCS.

OCS was three months of yelling and screaming. The yelling and screaming was severe enough that we lost half of the ~100 candidate class, and we did so in roughly equal proportions of prior enlisted and college kids. Many of the college kids crumbled under the screaming, which was, in their defense, quite high quality screaming. Having been a Marine SGT only weeks prior, my self-confidence that I could endure an entry level scream-at-us-a-lot environment was pretty unshakeable. But the individual ass-chewings, as we each seemed to get our own week of special attention, were significant enough that they once even had me honestly, albeit briefly, wondering if maybe I really was a "WORTHLESS FUCKING SHITBAG" after all.  

The Army prior enlisted types in OCS had been strong performers. They weren't going to be dissuaded by flying spittle. The frequent berating from officers didn't frightened them so much as it made them angry. Those candidates had worked with officers, good officers, for years. That's why they had applied to OCS. The prior enlisted types understood that officers yelling and screaming was very much at odds with how officers were supposed to behave and it pissed them off. Many of the prior enlisted types reached the point where they feared that they would snap, give in to their fury, and tear one of the cadre officers to pieces. The cadre officers being a bunch of sad sloppy angry bullies, I figured that they wouldn't last 5secs if the enraged prior service candidate suddenly turned into an berserker.

The screaming officers didn't really make me angry. It was irritating to be screamed at, sure, but I learned to put my brain in neutral and tune it out until they moved on. It all seemed pretty ridiculous and not worth getting worked up over.

The real problem was, in my opinion, the Army isn't very good at teaching hard chargers how to become leaders. The Marines obsessively train leadership. In contrast, the Army might show a few PowerPoint slides on the subject and call it a day. If a young Army officer is fortunate, in their early assignments they would be exposed to role models that would help the introspective type understand how to be a leader.

Instead of providing us malleable young officer candidates with cadre officers that were role models and mentors, the Army culture directed the cadre officers to yell and scream. The far better solution would have been a layer of non-commissioned officers (NCO) to be the ones that ran the show and applied the pressure. In that better solution there would be only a few cadre officers, but they would be highly charismatic and the best role models that the Army could provide. In the conduct of initial training environments, the Army could learn a lot from the Marine Corps.

Bernie Green. Officer Candidate Bernie Green was one of the funniest guys I've ever known. Green was 28 years old, going on 40, and had been a Warrant Officer helo pilot prior to OCS. When we stood at attention in the hallway outside of our 2 person rooms, Green and I faced each other, as we braced up against our respective cinderblock walls. 

One of the games the cadre officers would play was to wake us up in the middle of the night for whatever whim struck them. The candidate on duty as "Officer of the Day" (OOD) would be directed to go upstairs, knock on our doors, and holler that we were to "Fall in", which meant stand out in the hallway braced up against the walls. The OOD would also tell us the uniform that we were to appear in. Usually it was the Winter PT uniform, but it could also be Battledress Utilities, Dress Greens or Blues.

Sometimes getting rousted out of bed meant standing for inspection. This could mean inspection of uniforms, rooms, fingernails, or whatever the cadre officer felt like. By the second week of OCS we became fatalistic about the inevitability of the frequent wake-ups and hassle. If the irritation of the night was to be putting our rooms back together, it would start with a pro-forma inspection. Getting one’s room torn up over something imaginary, or so petty as to be imaginary, was a pain in the ass. The cadre officer might open a drawer of stacked t-shirts perfectly folded to within 1mm of the required dimensions, and shriek “WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, IS THIS DRAWER FULL OF LINT???” Then as you’re mentally groaning “Shit. Guess it’s my turn", the cadre officer would tear the room apart. Once the room was trashed, the cadre officer would march up and down the hallway and scream until they wound down. Once the cadre officer left, we'd all help the bad luck buddy-team put their room back together.

Sometimes the infraction, real or imagined, would result in us getting sent outside to do calisthenics for a while. This was weak sauce because not only was OCS coed, but the fitness spectrum ranged from the fittest prior service guys to the least fit college coeds. Some of the college kids only had a couple dozen pushups in them. So whatever physical punishment was employed upon the group of us had to be calibrated against the weakest among us. The cadre officers would, for example, stick the whole group of us in the pushup position to make us strain for a while, but within 30 seconds some of the coeds would start collapsing. The PT "thrashings" outside in the winter rain were generally so weak that even not-particularly-fit Officer Candidate Green could keep up a whispered monologue of hilarity for a while.

The favorite wakeup call was to make us play janitor all night. We must have stripped the wax off our tile floor, re-waxed and buffed twice per week for the whole of OCS. You can lay wax down and buff forever, but being directed to use the wax stripping solution so often ruined the floor, something we long chuckled over.

Our hero learning how to be a leader of men. Note the fancy white ascot and fatalistic expression. Army Officer Candidate School, Ft. Benning, GA. early 1989.

The Field Expedient. This is a common military expression that describes a jury-rigged alternative. For example, if your radio antenna breaks and you know what you're doing, you can rig up a field expedient antenna with some wire. If you have no tent and it starts raining, you can tie some ponchos together over a tree branch to create a field expedient tent. 

The story.
Groggy as hell, I woke to the banging on our doors. It was the second time that night that we'd been rousted out of our racks. I heard the OOD yell that the uniform was Winter PT and our cadre officer, CPT Roske, IIRC, would be up in 2min. Although he was yelling loudly enough for his voice to penetrate the closed doors, you could sense the apologetic tone.

We clumsily rolled out out of our beds, hit the lights, opened up our drawers of painstakingly folded clothes, grabbed all the necessary pieces that made up the Winter PT uniform, and started throwing them on as fast as we could. After about 60 seconds candidates started appearing in the hallway and then "braced" themselves up against the two walls. This "braced" position is similar to the position of attention except that in an attempt to make it more awkward you're supposed to lean your head back against the wall.

By 90 seconds we were all out in the hallway, each pair of roommates absolutely motionless and braced against the wall on either side of their door. Roske was likely sneaking up the nearby stairwell even now so he could dart around the corner and try to spot someone moving. With compressed unhappy lips and sleepy half-lidded eyes we waited, each of us directly across from another, as the seconds ticked by until the inevitable explosion of Roske's arrival. "Maybe he’d just rant for 20 minutes and then go away," I hoped.

Directly across the hall from me was Officer Candidate Bernie Green, also decked out in gray Army sweats, leather gloves and black stocking cap. When the situation, as it so often did in Officer Candidate School, called for complete sobriety, Bernie Green was always a problem. He started making faces at me, one of his standard comic routines.

I ground my teeth in irritation and glared at Green. "For the love of god", I thought, "don't make me start laughing." Roske was probably just around the corner listening. If we made a sound just now, it would just go worst for us. If we weren't perfectly braced when he darted around the corner and laid his weasel eyes upon us, we could be outside in the Dec rain for hours.

It caught my attention that Green's facial expression foolishness seemed to have an odd pattern. He wasn't so much doing the usual "stupid faces to make Gress laugh" routine. Instead, Green seemed to be using his tongue to bulge out his cheek towards my left and then silently tittering. I studied his facial expressions trying to make out what the fuck he was doing. Then, to accentuate the tongue-into-cheek shtick, his pupils moved hard left, and then back to the silent tittering. Then I understood. Without actually moving, because Roske was probably a half second from being among us, Green was trying to get me to look to my left.

With a careful slow movement, I rotated my head a little bit and looked as far left as I could.

Oh my god. We were all dead. We were all fucking dead.

One of the other guys, a couple doors down and on Green's side of the hall, had a sock on his head. Where he should have had a black stocking cap, he instead appeared to have a black Army dress sock pulled down over his ears, just like one would wear a stocking cap. It looked like it was a very tight fit. The sock's foot hung down limply over his ear. I could not for the life of me imagine what the fuck he was doing. All I knew for sure is that when the entirely humorless Roske saw that damned sock, we were all fucking dead.

I turned my head back to direct-front and looked back at Green. He was, well, vibrating. His teeth were clenched together, his eyes were scrunched up closed, and his whole body was vibrating. It took me a moment to realized that he was inaudibly howling with laughter. I couldn't hold it back and I started inaudibly laughing too. I didn't understand what was going on but the sight of the officer candidate in Winter PT uniform with the damned sock limply hanging down over his ear was so damned funny I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel trying to keep silent. Sure, this was going to be bad, but it was also going to be hilarious.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the movement of CPT Roske darting around the corner. He was about an inch shorter than me, pasty-white and pudgy, and maintained a perpetual sneer. He started in on his planned tirade, but then stopped in front of the tall officer candidate with the sock. Roske's nose was about eight inches from the guy's chin. Roske spent long seconds looking up at the sock stretched tightly over the candidate's head, and then he tilted his head to examine the sock's foot draped down over the ear. Both Green and I had turned our heads and were taking in the drama with rapt attention.

Roske said, "What the fuck is that on your head?"

The officer candidate said, "SIR, FIELD EXPEDIENT PT CAP, SIR!"

Green and I exploded with laughter. Joined a second later by all the other candidates whom had seen the exchange.

Roske, desperate to maintain his reputation as an asshole, hustled downstairs where we wouldn't see him laugh.

What had happened is that in the seconds that we had to find all the parts of our Winter PT Uniform, the poor guy couldn't find his black stocking PT cap. That left him with a choice. He could either keep hunting and accept the risk of Roske bursting around the hallway corner and he's still in his room looking for the damned cap, or, thinking out of the box, he could put something black on his head and hope that Roske didn't look too close. And the sock was indeed a tight fit.
Roske tried to get us back, sure. But there's no counterbalancing one of the more hilarious moments of a lifetime. .


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