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Heads up...AOCS All Hands Reunion 27-28SEP19.
- Thread starter mad dog
- Start date
I didn’t see Foley on the updated roster...AND I didn’t see Mayo on the updated roster either. ☹
Was your DI Brian Snow?
Yes he was.
It’s crazy to see him in that role. He was my Scoutmaster and a huge positive influence in my life. I’m looking forward to seeing him when he is in town for the reunion.
So for the guys that went through AOCS back in the day was it harder/different than OCS? Someone mentioned there was a difference a few posts back from the surface one and it got me thinking. So what's the deal? Did the guys in Newport go to dining-ins and drink port while AOCS guys were getting crushed or what? I have heard all sorts of AOCS shenanigans but have heard zero about OCS in Newport
ROTC... Everything else is uncivilized!
GroundPounder
Well-Known Member
N
Army ROTC, so no real reference on the specifics, although I can say every Army school I ever went though and the past 29 years of LE has been the same.
Every single one was the last "hard " one, after that they went soft and made them easy.
" None of those guys would have made it through in my day, WTF has the world come to" Every old dude ever....
Army ROTC, so no real reference on the specifics, although I can say every Army school I ever went though and the past 29 years of LE has been the same.
Every single one was the last "hard " one, after that they went soft and made them easy.
" None of those guys would have made it through in my day, WTF has the world come to" Every old dude ever....
Combined OCS in the late 1990s definitely had easier PT. The rest of the Naval Officer communities were not onboard with AOCS-style PT.
The obstacle course still pass/fail but it wasn't a timed evolution (you just had to finish it).
The farthest we ran was five mile formation runs once a week in PT gear (shorter formation runs and other stuff M-F), but falling out was apparently not a show stopper for getting commissioned. Never had to run very far while carrying our rifles, only a block or two at the most like when drill ran a few minutes over and we were going to be late for academics.
We did get a lot of PT indoors when it was black flag outside (too hot and humid per the wet globe bulb temperature/magic 8 ball of how hot it is), hard enough to make the ceiling in the drill instructors' office drip with the condensation caused by our sweat (somehow 30~40 candidates could fit in there), or other really impressive calisthenics that included holding the rifle in unusual ways (a lot like Mayo had to but without the benefit of a garden hose to cool you off) in the p-way outside our rooms.
The A-4 tailhook was still in Master Guns' office for remedial PT for problem children- but there were rules on the minimum number of candidates for this activity in the interest of injury prevention. I am a proud member of the tailhook PT club (less than a quarter of my class got the invitation... slackers). There was also a mortar bomb, a small one around 60-80mm IIRC but surprisingly heavy. They stopped doing the mortar bomb PT after some guy tore something in his shoulder (he went on long term med hold and I think they eventually sent him to DCO school with a waiver, strange as that sounds...).
The "Pit" went away after a change of command at CNET, c1997 or 98. Along with that there were some rest rules added, basically after taps you got left alone as long as you were in your rack. Getting up for a head call was quite permissible- everybody had to piss a lot, they encouraged you to hydrate a lot for heat injury prevention, ergo head calls were part of that. But if you were dumb enough to hang out in the head to polish your brass (not a euphemism for something else) or you were moving around in your room working on inspection preparations or studying the OCR with your flashlight, then "standby" as the saying went.
There were random PT sessions in the grass on the way to class/lunch/dinner/etc. that weren't really random at all, same as it ever was.
/break
One of the funny things I remember was the rooms above the chow hall in one of the battalion buildings were in a reeeeeally long p-way. The doors directly across from each other as in all of the barracks, more on that in a bit. Let's say you wanted to go to talk to someone in another room during free time- you were supposed to exit your room, march down the p-way on the starboard side until you got to the end, square the corner to cross the p-way and march like two steps across, square the corner again, and march all the way back down until you got to the room you wanted to visit. You weren't allowed to walk straight across, no sir. We reasoned/sealawyered that if your feet didn't touch the deck of the p-way then you didn't have to do all that rigamarole, right?? What if we could just jump straight across? But the p-way was too wide to easily do that. Well, somebody figured out how to grab each doorpost with your hands and use your arms to boost your jumping power and basically launch yourself clear across the p-way into the room on the other side. If that room wasn't your final destination then you could just exit and turn right, march a bit, and leap back across as necessary... kinda like a Michigan Left, when turn right and U-turn because you don't feel like waiting for the light to turn green. From either end of the p-way this looked funny as hell- out of nowhere a candidate would fly through the air out of one door and disappear into the opposite room, and you were like "was it that door down there, or the one after that, or??" Our class candi-O (basically the chaperone for the class, all part of the game), well the poor guy about shit himself when he looked down that p-way and saw a bunch of us doing this...
There was another time when the classes got into a rivalry/prank war and started stealing each other's guidons, usually where all of them would be stuck in the ground outside the chow hall. Everybody quickly figured out how to post a rotating watch out there (including have a couple guys who could eat fast get up and relieve the guards before chow for the class was over, usually about 20 minutes total sitting down time). The drill instructors were like WTF at first but their curiosity actually kept them quiet for the first time ever so they just observed for a couple days. One day we marched up to the chow hall and there was a candidate with his drill rifle and another candidate with a ceremonial sword, both standing perfectly in front of their class guidon. Our DI was really like WTF this time but he kept his cool and matter-of-factly asked them why they weren't inside? They just said they were guarding their guidon. Gunny said something like OK and he left them alone. Well in the meantime the DIs, the class CPOs, and the LTs all figured out what was going on because later on our DI addressed our class. He said he knew there was a prank war going on, he was proud of us for not losing his guidon like some of those other idiot classes, but told us no matter what happens that it wasn't worth getting into "fisticuffs" and getting kicked out of OCS. Pretty sure all the classes got a similar speech, guidons found their way back to rightful owners, and that was the end of that.
I'm guessing both of those things and more repeated themselves over the years. Nothing "new" ever happened at that place.
The obstacle course still pass/fail but it wasn't a timed evolution (you just had to finish it).
The farthest we ran was five mile formation runs once a week in PT gear (shorter formation runs and other stuff M-F), but falling out was apparently not a show stopper for getting commissioned. Never had to run very far while carrying our rifles, only a block or two at the most like when drill ran a few minutes over and we were going to be late for academics.
We did get a lot of PT indoors when it was black flag outside (too hot and humid per the wet globe bulb temperature/magic 8 ball of how hot it is), hard enough to make the ceiling in the drill instructors' office drip with the condensation caused by our sweat (somehow 30~40 candidates could fit in there), or other really impressive calisthenics that included holding the rifle in unusual ways (a lot like Mayo had to but without the benefit of a garden hose to cool you off) in the p-way outside our rooms.
The A-4 tailhook was still in Master Guns' office for remedial PT for problem children- but there were rules on the minimum number of candidates for this activity in the interest of injury prevention. I am a proud member of the tailhook PT club (less than a quarter of my class got the invitation... slackers). There was also a mortar bomb, a small one around 60-80mm IIRC but surprisingly heavy. They stopped doing the mortar bomb PT after some guy tore something in his shoulder (he went on long term med hold and I think they eventually sent him to DCO school with a waiver, strange as that sounds...).
The "Pit" went away after a change of command at CNET, c1997 or 98. Along with that there were some rest rules added, basically after taps you got left alone as long as you were in your rack. Getting up for a head call was quite permissible- everybody had to piss a lot, they encouraged you to hydrate a lot for heat injury prevention, ergo head calls were part of that. But if you were dumb enough to hang out in the head to polish your brass (not a euphemism for something else) or you were moving around in your room working on inspection preparations or studying the OCR with your flashlight, then "standby" as the saying went.
There were random PT sessions in the grass on the way to class/lunch/dinner/etc. that weren't really random at all, same as it ever was.
/break
One of the funny things I remember was the rooms above the chow hall in one of the battalion buildings were in a reeeeeally long p-way. The doors directly across from each other as in all of the barracks, more on that in a bit. Let's say you wanted to go to talk to someone in another room during free time- you were supposed to exit your room, march down the p-way on the starboard side until you got to the end, square the corner to cross the p-way and march like two steps across, square the corner again, and march all the way back down until you got to the room you wanted to visit. You weren't allowed to walk straight across, no sir. We reasoned/sealawyered that if your feet didn't touch the deck of the p-way then you didn't have to do all that rigamarole, right?? What if we could just jump straight across? But the p-way was too wide to easily do that. Well, somebody figured out how to grab each doorpost with your hands and use your arms to boost your jumping power and basically launch yourself clear across the p-way into the room on the other side. If that room wasn't your final destination then you could just exit and turn right, march a bit, and leap back across as necessary... kinda like a Michigan Left, when turn right and U-turn because you don't feel like waiting for the light to turn green. From either end of the p-way this looked funny as hell- out of nowhere a candidate would fly through the air out of one door and disappear into the opposite room, and you were like "was it that door down there, or the one after that, or??" Our class candi-O (basically the chaperone for the class, all part of the game), well the poor guy about shit himself when he looked down that p-way and saw a bunch of us doing this...
There was another time when the classes got into a rivalry/prank war and started stealing each other's guidons, usually where all of them would be stuck in the ground outside the chow hall. Everybody quickly figured out how to post a rotating watch out there (including have a couple guys who could eat fast get up and relieve the guards before chow for the class was over, usually about 20 minutes total sitting down time). The drill instructors were like WTF at first but their curiosity actually kept them quiet for the first time ever so they just observed for a couple days. One day we marched up to the chow hall and there was a candidate with his drill rifle and another candidate with a ceremonial sword, both standing perfectly in front of their class guidon. Our DI was really like WTF this time but he kept his cool and matter-of-factly asked them why they weren't inside? They just said they were guarding their guidon. Gunny said something like OK and he left them alone. Well in the meantime the DIs, the class CPOs, and the LTs all figured out what was going on because later on our DI addressed our class. He said he knew there was a prank war going on, he was proud of us for not losing his guidon like some of those other idiot classes, but told us no matter what happens that it wasn't worth getting into "fisticuffs" and getting kicked out of OCS. Pretty sure all the classes got a similar speech, guidons found their way back to rightful owners, and that was the end of that.
I'm guessing both of those things and more repeated themselves over the years. Nothing "new" ever happened at that place.
N
Army ROTC, so no real reference on the specifics, although I can say every Army school I ever went though and the past 29 years of LE has been the same.
Every single one was the last "hard " one, after that they went soft and made them easy.
" None of those guys would have made it through in my day, WTF has the world come to" Every old dude ever....
I should have specified 1980s OCS. From what I understand there was OCS in Newport, or maybe somewhere else, and AOCS in Pensacola. The stories I've heard over the last 20 years about AOCS are legendary. I sort of witnessed it when I went to A school in Pensacola in 99'. I've never heard a SWO tell stories about SWOCS from the same time frame. So it made me wonder was there a difference between the two or have I not spent enough time around older SWOs?
Jim, that was the timeframe I saw and still remember thinking as an E1 this s&!$ is bananas. I commissioned via STA-21 so I didn't experience any of that pain.
Amen.
In the 1980s, there was a OCS at Newport that had extremely large classes (100+) and 90-95% of them commissioned, most with there original class.
AOCS started with 30-50 in a class and commissioned about 33% with a good 33% of those rolled from an earlier class.
It was a different time. The normal things the AOCS DIs did to us and said to us would get the in serious trouble today.
AOCS started with 30-50 in a class and commissioned about 33% with a good 33% of those rolled from an earlier class.
It was a different time. The normal things the AOCS DIs did to us and said to us would get the in serious trouble today.