That actually reads like good training. Is there any effort towards creating attrition - making trainees quit?
Absolutely. We were 7 minutes late showing up. Part of this was because we had 18 inches of snow the day before, the last such snow storm I can remember. We also stopped for Wendy’s because it would be the last good food we would have for a week.
Anyway, after a nice welcome speech from the captain, they called us up and “smoked” us until every one of us collapsed. This continued where they were determined to make examples of the four of us. I had a trooper in my face that entire first week, including the first night, I had this giant bald trooper sticking a drop out form in my face. He had the nerve to push it into my face, then he asked why I looked so mean and mad-like I wanted to hit someone. It made me think of my wife, who says I look as approachable as a flaming bear-part of where my user name came from. Anyway, thinking of her saying that made me smile-which caused a screaming fit, which only made me smile more-increasing the target on my back.
The troopers got seven to quit that first night and another three fled during the night. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing people crying in the bathroom and in their rooms. It reminded me of Shawshank redemption.
The craziest thing was that after everything I went through-everything the troopers put me through, they had the fucking audacity to ask me to come back and join them. I was approached by four of the instructors trying to talk me into it. This was graduation day, and I remember telling the head trooper-a tiny, nasty little bastard we called el Diablo pequito(little devil) “not a fucking chance in hell” then I walked out and stepped directly on their patch on the floor-the number one offense to them-if anyone stepped on any of the patches on the floor or special tiles in the courtyard, your ass was going to run all damn day until you puked-a few made that mistake and the result was ugly. Just a few years ago, the state police changed their policy for certified police being able to get through their training in 8 weeks to become a trooper. I was asked by two troopers to go through the training to get on with the state police. One trooper was in the drug unit and promised that I would be transferred directly into his unit. While being flattered, there was no way i would start a new law enforcement career.
This little bastard had a bad habit of yelling in your face while he had chewing tobacco in his mouth, causing it to splatter your face. That first night, he went ballistic on me after I dared to wipe the Copenhagen off of my face. I remember thinking I could crush his little head in my hands.
And since I hated running with a passion, he would often run beside me and taunt me. I ultimately think he liked me, because i am a funny guy, and especially after the boxing. He used to say how, as a marine, he would love to stomp a mud hole in any of our asses-but after the fights, he added “except for nhbbear.”
Overall, I look back on the experience fondly because of the pride I felt for getting through it. I realize now, that I was battling severe depression for most of my teen and adult life, but that academy really affected me in a negative way. It was not all bad though.
The last few weeks, we began prank wars amongst each other, and especially enjoyed fucking with the cadets. One day, we woke up covered in fingerprint powder, which does not come off easily. I looked at my roommate and broke out in laughter and he did the same, neither of us realizing we had also been covered in the dust. We very harshly paid those bastards back with Elmer’s glue in their tighty whities, pubes on their toothbrush, punctured paintballs left over from the many firefights with the troopers, placed in their bed, so when they laid down, they burst all over them. The beds that we did not sabotage in that manner, we hung out the window using their bed sheets. It took them a long time to find them, and when they finally did, their beds were almost frozen(it was early May, but the temps dropped that year and we got snow). It made for an uncomfortable sleeping condition. We used superglue to glue down all of their toiletries and the lid to their deodorant and toothpaste. Also we secured their doors shut with bedsheets tied to fixed objects in their rooms so they couldn’t get into their room.
At the beginning, we had bathroom duty and the shower got clogged, causing it to flood. We discovered it was a piece of plastic, but we decided to tell everyone that is was hair that clogged it. This was during the last meeting before we were released on Friday for our first weekend, and we asked everyone to shave their body hair. It was hilarious seeing a bunch of hairless cops come back that next week-they looked like preteens, and i remember laughing so hard in the shower, that I collapsed.
As for fucking with the cadets, it was much of the same-gluing down their possessions, as well as hiding all of their beds in an empty room, then securing the door via bedsheets tied to the beds, then I had to climb out of the window and shimmy over to the next room by hanging onto the small ledge that ran under the windows.
But what really pissed them off, was they I brought a mask with me the last week, and streamed down their hallway in a velociraptor mask, bobbing up and down and squawking loudly. My roommate from my department, who also briefly became my best friend until he became a self destructive alcoholic, dressed up as a ghost with a sheet-guess that would have been considered a hate crime because he looked like a kkk member even though that was not the intention. Anyway, as we sprinted down the hallway, he couldn’t see and ran into a fire extinguisher, knocking him almost unconscious. I lay there laughing histerically while naked and in a dinosaur mask while he writhed in pain. He had two black eyes for graduation and it took a lot of convincing that it was not from a fight.
During the dui training, they had grain alcohol for the purposes of having someone rinse their mouth with it to demonstrate how mouth alcohol” would mess up a test and make it invalid-hence the twenty minute observation period before taking the intoxilizer test. Well, we hid a bottle of it and got shitfaced that night.
There was even some good, old fashioned sexual harassment and borderline sexual assault that took place. One of the instructors- a man that looked like Brock lesner had a child with a pig, took a liking to our lone female in the class. We were saddled with a mostly unattractive female in our class, where most other classes had some really hot women in their class. Anyway, she began an affair with that instructor, and he would call her to his office almost nightly. She was hanging out with us one night when he got on the intercom and said “basic officer Gibson come to my office.” She said “well, here I go again-I will see if I can get us excused from the run tomorrow “ which she did. She came back with her shirt looking like something out of Monica lewinsky’s closet-a map of Hawaii all over the shoulders and neck of her shirt. She asked me for one of my shirts so she could keep hers as evidence. She changed right in front of me, and while she had nice boobs, she was a definite “butterface” and she stood there, half naked and asked me what I had planned for the next ten minutes. I told her I was planning on taking a shit.
He had significant power over her, which in my opinion, made this a sexual assault, as she really couldn’t say no. She failed the range-we all saw it, yet she passed, and unapologetically so, as she commented on taking one up the “ass to pass.” That disgusting man eventually became the captain before a scandal(surprising) led to his retirement. That makes law enforcement seem so corrupt, but that sticks out in my memory because it was one of the few occasions where something like that occurred.
Like I said, I had some fun, but I would never do that again.
