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Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't you just fail basic training?

From what I saw in basic training (94-96, Army: Cavalry Scout), the people trying to fail made it 10x worse for them.

Yep. Honestly the only sure-fire way of getting kicked out of army basic it seems is to either repeatedly fail rifle qual, or to repeatedly fail the final PT test. And by the time you get to either, its clear that the easiest way out is to just do your thing and graduate.

When my father went through US Army basic training during the Cold War era the recruit next to him couldn't pass rifle qualification. So the drill sergeant just took that guy's ammo away, gave half to my dad and half to the recruit on the other side, and told them to shoot his target. Presumably standards are a little stricter now.

I dunno. What could be easier than failing a marksmanship test or a PT? What are they going to do, charge you with sandbagging? How do they prove that you really can shoot accurately or do X # of pullups?

For that matter, you could always go full Munchausen, and make yourself genuinely sick or weak.

I think the idea is that you get recycled a couple of times into a new platoon, until you fail enough times that they cut their losses.

But being stuck in BCT for endless cycle after cycle seems like a special kind of hell.

Why would you purposefully try to fail at a proficiency test? This is like wondering why a toddler doesn't continue to throw a fit when it doesn't get it's way. You don't do it it because it makes everyone around you think you're an incompetent fool, and they will actively get in your way at every step. It's social suicide.

Why would you purposefully try to fail at a proficiency test?

E.g., you change your mind about joining the military. You can't resign or run away, so your best option might be to convince them that you're more trouble than you're worth.

In other words, if you actively want everyone around you to think you're an incompetent fool, then deliberately washing out of boot camp is the sort of thing you might try. I don't see why it wouldn't work. Refusing to accept the training would get you court-martialed, but you can't charge someone with just being a lousy shot, can you?

It would work. But you're going to be treated like scum for months, and that's enough of a deterrent for most people.

Basic is designed around two guiding principles; instilling fundamental military skills, and social coercion to instill compliance. I don't mean the latter in a derogatory way at all. Think about it; who in their right mind wants to expose themselves to small arms fire, etc etc? Basic training has a lot of experience dealing with people "who don't want to be there." Now it's become a lot softer compared to during the Cold War; we have to treat everyone as a special snowflake, and a lot of the old methodologies have become proscribed. But if the military let out everyone who decided (during basic) that signing on the dotted line was a mistake, the system wouldn't work.

You could do that, but no one would care. Feel sick? Too bad. If you have actual physical symptoms like a fever, then they'll give you some meds and back to work. I saw a guy complain of a migraine, given two bags of iv because he must have been dehydrated. If you're sick you don't see a dr, you see the medics, and they have to refer you to the dr, which they won't.

You really are trapped, and the only way out is even more painful or results in a criminal record. That was my experience, us army 98 to 02

The point is repeatedly failing a test - and every failure means that you get sent back to a few weeks of hard and unpleasant stuff before getting another chance to try again.

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