I’ll Hold Him Down While You Punch

When basic military training begins, conscripts have to go through something called Confinement Week, which is actually two and a half weeks of staying in camp without the ability to leave. We all have to live in the barracks. Needless to say, the first week is exceptionally grating, as everyone tries to live with a dozen other strangers with their own bad habits.

We’ll either emerge from that as brothers or emerge wanting to murder each other. Alas, for my section, we emerge wanting to gut each other.

In particular, two of my sectionmates get into a feud during this week: [Sectionmate #1] and [Sectionmate #2]. They’re assigned the same bunk bed.

On our second or third night, [Sectionmate #2]’s alarm starts blaring and [Sectionmate #1] wakes up. He gets up and starts his morning routine, only to check his phone and realise it is three in the morning. He angrily shuts off the alarm and goes back to bed.

Later in the morning, [Sectionmate #1] confronts [Sectionmate #2].

Sectionmate #1: “Why did you set your alarm for three am?!”

Sectionmate #2: “Oh, I wanted to wake up at three am to go pee, so I set my alarm to wake me up.”

That night, the same thing happens. [Sectionmate #2] forgets to turn off his alarm and winds up waking [Sectionmate #1] again, and a few others this time. And the same thing happens again the night after that, which really makes [Sectionmate #1] cranky.

He forces his bunkmate to turn off his alarm in front of him and another two guys, all of them confirming that the alarm is deactivated.

On day seven, [Sectionmate #2] is confronted again, as his alarm keeps going off at five am, which is an all right time to wake up, but he never wakes up, forcing us to turn his alarm off for him. It doesn’t help that his alarm has the worst, and I mean the WORST sound. His response?

Sectionmate #2: “Ah, but it wakes you guys up. And you guys always wake me up, so it’s doing its job!”

We had to pull [Sectionmate #1] off of [Sectionmate #2], which wasn’t easy, considering that he was the biggest guy in the section. It didn’t help that everyone was tired of the alarms waking them up, so half the stronger guys didn’t help, and the other half only helped so that THEY could assault [Sectionmate #2].

Amazingly enough, those two made it through the remaining eight weeks of the nine-week training without a murder.