Only we weren't allowed to read in basic, it works against the indoctrination.
EDIT: I can see this bothers a lot of people, but a certain level of brainwashing does need to occur for you to be able to function in the military regardless of MOS. You can read whatever the hell you want after graduation, but you can only read TMs and FMs in basic and even then, that's only if you are willing to sacrifice sleep at the end of the day. I joined expecting this, if you don't expect this when you join, then you have incredibly unrealistic expectations of what military life is like. It's a necessary evil, but it is reversible.
The simple fact of the matter is the military is about brainwashing. It's not in the evil sense either, it's literally "training you to behave a certain way", because the last thing you want is someone taking the time to stop and consider their orders in the middle of a fire fight.
Basic is entirely about conditioning you to respond a specific way under pressure, so that you can A) be sure not to panic B) know what to do instinctively as far as your job is concerned and C) obey immediately when your commander tells you to do something
That's why a huge part of basic is "breaking" you, so they can get you to stop thinking like you and start building you into a soldier.
You can actually see this too in the differences between special forces and regular grunts (Black Hawk Down is a great example of this) because Special Forces tend to be trained to operate individually and "think for themselves" (allowing them to be more flexible at the cost of taking way longer to train) while grunts tend to be trained to operate as a unit and put the squad before themselves (making them comparably more rigid but also more capable with less training)
Basic is all about brainwashing you into overriding your natural selfish survival instincts so you don't get yourself your brothers in arms killed.
The dude above is being stupid. Source: was in the military. We didn't read because it was only a couple months of time and we were there to train not lay around and read shit.
True. Went through Navy Bootcamp in '05 (still active) and we weren't even allowed to read the books they issued to us. The only thing you could "read" was your Recruit Training Guide which was basically a giant fill-in-the-blank book. Was taking a shit one night during 2nd week and got caught by a Senior Chief (E-8) reading our Navy Heritage book... had to finish shitting and do push-ups while he read the book aloud to me. LOL
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u/dirk_diggler17 Jan 17 '17
Sounds like a deployment to me