Fort Jackson BCT 2020 Summary (Detailed)

Well I don’t know what to ask about Basic Training because I don’t know what y’all do. Can you give me a summary?
Sure, here's 22 pages and 12,500 words about my experiences at U.S Army Basic Combat Training from September to November 2020 at Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina.

ABOUT MEPS:

All the Military Entrance Processing Station stuff is before you sign your contract. They're just making sure you're fit for service and doing your ASVAB. That first time you go to MEPS you'll (usually) take your ASVAB around midday when you get there, then go to your hotel for the night, which is pretty sweet if you're from a poor family. North Carolina's is a Hilton. When you wake up you'll do all of your medical testing starting from like 5 in the morning and you'll be done before noon usually, hand in your papers to your recruiter then wait for your shuttle bus or recruiter to pick you up and take you back home. None of that is hard and none of that is BCT so I'll leave it at that. Once you're in DEP after signing your contract (National Guard has no DEP) you're just waiting to ship. Here's what the whole process is like.

Go to your state's MEPS (again) to ship to your basic training location
You'll stay at a hotel for that whole day and overnight, the day you leave home you'll get shuttled directly to the hotel, you don't have anything to do at MEPS until tomorrow, ship day.
Next morning go to MEPS for 5 am (again), sign some basic papers confirming you aren't a drug addict and don't have mental health issues, basic liability waivers and shit. That part's easy and done by 7 or 8 am. After that's the annoying part. You'll wait for many hours for your branch to do paperwork and the shuttles to get there. Sitting in the waiting room is pretty boring, but they're always playing NCIS or some shit on the TVs so it could definitely be worse. I personally just stared at the chicks the whole time. AF > Navy > Others in my experience. For some reason all the Hispanic girls join the Army. The 5' tall round ones, not the ones you're hoping for. Anyway, after about SIX HOURS in the waiting rooms your bus to ship you off to BCT will get there. I personally got party van shuttles, we were like 6 or 8 max per shuttle since we were going from North Carolina to Fort Jackson in Columbia SC. Not a long trip. If you're going further, you'll get a coach bus or a plane. The trips are generally all quite nice. I had a great trip there with a good driver and a couple nice passengers along with me. Two of the guys were in my MOS, were in my same BCT Company and went to AIT with me. Make friends early and often, no reason to be dead silent for hours on a road trip. You're going to learn how to talk to people in the next 10 weeks, there's nothing else to do. Speaking freely without a DS lurking around is also a luxury you should take advantage of. There was a cute (guess what, Hispanic) girl on my shuttle as well, she was flirting with me extremely hard but since there was literally zero chance of me doing anything with her I had to deflect just as hard. That interaction led me to develop the 'ol "I know" trick in response to the "You're cute" or "Your eyes are amazing" shit girls would throw at me until I finished BCT. There's no faster way to get girls off of you than using those two words.

Right before they take you into Fort Jackson, there's a Golden Corral like 5 minutes away. You eat dinner there. Eat up pal, it's a buffet and you've got like a fucking hour to eat. I personally ate like three bowls of spinach and some tacos. I'll get into the food later, but fresh greens like spinach are nonexistent in BCT so I packed myself full of fiber then. Didn't get constipated until a few weeks in, I credit my good diet before shipping for that.

ABOUT RECEPTION:

Once you get into the base you're immediately in the Reception Battalion. You're going to line up in front of a building six feet apart until a drill is ready to shove you into a giant room for what's effectively orientation. He's going to have you sign a couple papers, give you your BLUE BOOK and WARRIOR TASKS AND DRILLS manual. You also get some hand sanitizer, chapstick, and some other small bullshit. You're going to need most of it, especially that plastic bag. Plastic bags are absurdly valuable (guess what, they're waterproof).
After getting your new reading materials (you will be reading the blue book cover to cover) they'll file you over to get initial clothes issue. Yes, you'll be walking there carrying all your shit. It only mildly sucks. PT shirts, shorts, pants, jacket. You'll be wearing these until you ship to your training company/battalion. You'll tell some lady your sizes height and weight in this same building. There's a bathroom in this building as well, feel free to use that while people are filing through. About this time you realize they do everything in either alphabetical order or height order. A's go first, shorter people go first in virtually everything. If you're short with a last name starting with an A B or C you're going to go first for everything, which is actually a huge benefit. Waiting potentially hours to go last for shit is horrendously boring, you'll usually be able to goof off or fuck around a little bit more if you aren't actively standing in line to do something.
By now it's probably dark outside, so you're getting filed from clothing issue to the actual housing and HQ where the reception battalion is. At Jackson, this is the 120th Reception Battalion, and it's actually pretty nice. They have some trainee holdovers (people who have been at reception held over for whatever reason, covid, just didn't get a slot to ship, whatever) give you your first SHARP brief and give you linen and your best friend, your Camelbak. Guess what, you're going to struggle to get the packaging off and figure out where the hose goes and which side to put the bladder in, that's pretty normal. Just ask for help whenever, you're going to get used to not knowing what the fuck you're doing, it's not a big deal. Shout out to the holdovers that had to do menial shit like giving new arrivals Camelbaks, SHARP briefs, and blankets and pillows for week after week until finally being allowed to do BCT like everyone else. You want to avoid being a holdover at any cost. It sucks. One of those holdovers, the one that helped me set up my Camelbak, ended up in my BCT platoon. She was pretty cute. She got four weeks into BCT, got covid, and therefore got sent back to reception quarantine and stayed there for another month before she got her ship date. Don't get covid, kids.
Now you've got everything you need to go night-night. Someone will do their best to show you which bay you'll be sleeping in for as long as you're in reception. It's probably like 2300/11 PM by now and everyone is tired as fuck so people will be pushing to go to sleep ASAP. Those people are correct, go the fuck to sleep. If you aren't going to Fort Jackson for BCT, may you rest in peace. Ft Leonard Wood reception very often involves getting virtually no sleep for the entire three or four day stint you're there. At Fort Jackson, you keep your phones on you the entire time you're in reception and since there are only like 6 drills for all 1200 of your asses they send you back to your bays between whatever appointments you've got. Very often you have an hour, sometimes two to four hours, to just sit around or nap. I got assigned to a bay in C building where our drills were in B building, so there were exactly 0 checks the entire time I was in reception. I slept and napped as often as humanly possible. Disclaimer: Drills will just walk in whenever to most bays, so be at least moderately aware of that fact. The severe understaffing of Drills compared to the number of trainees makes shit very easy to get away with during reception. At least two or three girls got absolutely pounded while I was there. If that's your thing, go for it man, nobody's stopping you.

The biggest tips I have for you in reception are as follows.
1. Steal the fuck out of anything not nailed down. PT shirts are liquid gold. Someone traded a medium PT shirt and $20 for a small PT shirt trade like six weeks into my cycle. Most people were down to 2 short sleeve PT shirts pretty quick. Guess what, half the laundry machines in your company will be broken, driers will be unplugged and need maintenance, and it's a crapshoot on which of them will work. You're going to want to do laundry as little as possible, since people steal shit all the time and you don't want to waste precious Sunday Sleep Time in the 140 degree laundry room sweating your ass off to make sure nobody steals one of your last two PT shirts. So yes, go ahead and purloin yourself six extra short sleeve PT shirts while you're in reception. Plenty of people will be assholes so you'll know exactly who to target when they go shower and leave their shit out up for grabs. PT shirts are really the only thing I'd grab, everything else you can get more of at the troop store when they let you go there, but they're always out of short sleeve PTs.
2. Do a little bit of exercise. Yes, it's only three or four days for most people (Wednesday to Monday) but you will do literally nothing in terms of exercise all day every day, so you're going to start losing fitness. Do a couple push ups and planks, don't kill yourself or anything just keep yourself fit. On the same note, take naps when you can. Take care of yourself. Rinse out your camelbak a couple times. Don't just jerk off on your phone the whole time, even if it is a huge temptation.
3. Read the fucking blue book. You will be required to memorize most of the shit in that book during reception, BCT, and AIT. Everything in that book is helpful. Depending on your specific drills, they might not care if you've memorized the Army Song, but guess what, you're going to have to learn it eventually. After reading the book, make sure you've at least memorized The Soldier's Creed and your general orders. It might seem hard, it isn't. You're going to be repeating them probably 1000 times throughout basic training. When you get to BCT proper, you'll have to memorize your chain of command as well. Ease your workload while you can. Reception is tons of free time to do this, at basic you get much less time to fuck around reading your blue book, so do it now.
4. Not as important, but talk to some people. Get some numbers in your phone. Learning how to make friends sooner rather than later will behoove you greatly. You need battle buddies to go anywhere, do anything, or talk to anyone. Having partners in crime when you want to get up to shit is basically required.

Reception is where you do all in-processing and get covid tested. You'll get OCPs and boots issued to you, do more medical screenings and tests and guess what, more paperwork. They did rapid covid tests when I got there, which were the brain pokey 8 inches down your mucosal passages tests. Honestly nothing in reception is difficult, you'll sweat a couple times lugging all your duffels and shit around up to your bays and down for gear inspections to make sure you've got everything, but at Fort Jackson especially, reception is extremely cake. Make sure you're eating everything in your meals except the cookies, give them to your homies for brownie points, but you need all the calories you can get. Yes, even eat the plain bread you get with every meal. At some point you'll realize how easy it is to smuggle food when there's exactly two drill Sergeants responsible for hundreds of trainees at chow time. I frequently took the fruit back to the bay to eat since I wanted to eat every bite of everything else on my plate and the fruit would've taken too long. Some reception drills give you 8 minutes to eat, some give you the full 15. Reception drills yell at you to hurry up at meal times an awful lot, it gets you used to the limited time for chow. By the book, you get 15 minutes. You don't have much recourse if they don't give you that unless you want to complain to IG (Inspector General's office), but the drills can make your life very miserable if you start reporting them for minor shit, so keep that in mind.
Anyone that needs glasses gets glasses in reception. You get boots, OCPs, PT clothes, socks, underwear, towels, duffel bags, the whole reception process taking like 3-4 days. Typically you ship from MEPS on Wednesday, get there late Wednesday, and you ship off Monday. Every Monday at Fort Jackson there's another Battalion shipped off to start a basic training cycle.
10 weeks, 10 active cycles at a time, with a two week break after a cycle finishes for the battalion staff to get vacation (and do paperwork) since all cadre (training staff) have very long hours basically the entire time during a cycle.
Each cycle lasts 10 weeks since basic is 10 weeks, starting on Monday and ending on the 10th Friday.
Each battalion is 1200 people, 65 per platoon, 4 platoons per company, 5 companies per battalion (on average).
At Ft Leonard Wood they do 80 x 3 which is the same shit, at Fort Sill they call companies Batteries (BTYs) because it's an artillery/indirect fire training base.
50% of all Army recruits, and 60% of the female recruits go through Fort Jackson for basic training
Average is 60 out of 65 in each platoon will graduate or graduate on time, about 93%
That bore out in my platoon and company as well
It was (as close as I can recall) 58 63 60 61 graduating from 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th Platoon respectively. Around half of the non-graduates were temporary recycles, mostly females that couldn't do the leg tuck on the week 7 ACFT so had to wash back a few weeks, do some more leg tucks, then graduated a few weeks after the rest of us did. The remainder non-graduating were medical discharges, one for low bone density, two or three females for hip fractures, one male for fraternization. The female in that case somehow got off and went on to graduate after being recycled. Remember those girls that got pounded in reception? She was one of those, and only later got caught fraternizing when the duty drill for the night found her snuggling in that guy's hasty fighting position (note: Don't call them foxholes) during the first FTX called The Hammer.
To be honest, there aren't a ton of opportunities to fraternize, but it's very possible to do so as long as others won't snitch you out. In general, not worth losing the sleep or getting discharged or recycled over. Most of the girls are ugly as sin anyway. But if you know someone wants to do something, tell them when you're on fireguard i.e 0100-0200 and get them to go into the stairwell during your shift, you'll be true homie status for that guy for the rest of basic and he'll owe you huge.

BCT INTRO:

Okay, on to BCT proper, on Monday morning you bring all your shit down and sit on it in nice orderly rows and wait for several hours while the drills do paperwork, sort shit out, and make sure everyone ships on time. We left at about noon, for reference. Pretty good frat opportunity here to be honest, except they make females use a completely different half of the building for the bathrooms so you'd need to be pretty slick or pre-arrange something. Ok, you shipped off in your school bus after loading your duffels onto the LATVs (big ass military transports). You'll get to your company around 1300, get introduced to everyone including your company commander, first sergeant, and senior drill sergeants. You'll learn your company motto and get told the ground rules. Everyone, including you, at this point will be cowed and scared and probably dead silent. This will pass as you get used to the place you'll be living in for the next 10 weeks. Shark Attacks, the thing that normally occurs now, were recently removed from Army BCT. Drills are also not allowed to scream in your face at all due to corona, so my first 72 hours were actually extremely tame. Signing paperwork, contact information, tagging our personal bags and putting them away, putting tape and beads on our camelbaks, really quite boring shit. It'll pick up soon, don't worry.
In the Corona cycles of modern Army BCT, it follows the following structure.
There are four phases, whereas normally there are three phases
A two week quarantine Yellow Phase
Red
White
Blue phases
There are five total phases to Army training, BCT stops at phase 3, blue phase. Once you ship to Advanced Individual Training, you'll be in phase 4, Black phase. Gold is phase 5, also in AIT. Once you're out of AIT, you're done with TRADOC and can now fuck and drink at your leisure. Still no weed though, that's an automatic chapter out of the army.

The Soldierization process is where they treat you like dirt in red phase, treated like a human in white phase, and treated well relatively speaking in blue phase. In Blue phase, you'll be able to talk to your drill sergeants like human beings, ask them what their favorite video games are and they'll tell you, shit like that. At some point, you'll come to respect instead of hate your Drill Sergeants, realize they're here 16 hours a day and get four hours of sleep a day to train you, and still manage to be awake and act professional and deal with dumb questions and even dumber kids all day without killing anyone. Hard not to respect that, especially since 90% of them didn't volunteer for this shit job in the first place.

ABOUT AIT:

In AIT, in black phase, phase 4, you have more privileges. A lot of it depends on your specific MOS and AIT location. 42A (human resources) AIT? You're getting marched everywhere by a Drill Sergeant, hour long DFAC lines just like basic, get smoked like dogshit, but you're out of there in 9 weeks.
35N (Military Intelligence) AIT? You're there for 32 weeks, more than half a year, you can spend longer as a holdover than a 42A spends in AIT, but it's a PCS Permanent Change of Station where you can move all your shit including a vehicle and have the army pay for it. You march yourselves everywhere, show up to PT for an hour, then have the rest of your day to yourself basically. Once you phase up you can have any electronics you want at any time, use civilian linen, rare formations, eat when you want in your room, four hours of class a day in nice air conditioned rooms. You'll be in TRADOC for six months, but besides the no fucking and drinking you'll feel more like you're on a very long vacation. Not many duty stations in the army (read: None) give you four hour workdays and one hour of light PT in the late morning. If you volunteer for additional schooling after that, you can spend ANOTHER six months minimum just jerking off in classrooms and not working a day in your life. The schooling potentially taking up half your contract is a huge plus for many people. I personally didn't get smoked the entire time I was there. The drills are there to help you learn, not make you do push ups while they're wasting their time watching you. Drills there are more busy with paperwork and shit they have to do than nightly toe the line/room inspections like most AIT locations. You'll only be supervised by student squad leaders and PGs, you really don't see drill sergeants much at all unless you go into HQ and where the DS offices are.

ABOUT BCT:

ABOUT YELLOW AND RED PHASE:
Red phase is drill and ceremony, marching, customs and courtesies, teaching the basic drills that will be formation PT for the rest of your army career.
Preparation Drill, Conditioning Drill 1, Conditioning Drill 2, Climbing Drills, Movement and Mobility Drill 1, Recovery Drill. Those along with running in the form of 30/60s, 60/120s, ability group runs and maybe a few company runs if you're lucky will be all you do during BCT for PT. Running is usually twice a week, it can be three times depending on your cadre and how they write the training schedule. A lot of it is discretionary. They'll put a Corrective Physical Training element that has you running around a field or to a specific point and back to integrate running into your training that way rather than give you a third run day most of the time. It's fairly well known foot/feet/leg/ankle/hip injuries are the ones that fuck people up far more than anything else, so protip; don't fucking kill yourself when you're getting smoked. Jog, don't walk, but don't sprint to fuck your feet up anymore than they're already going to be from the required training events and PT.
You'll be smoked worst during the first two or three weeks of basic training, part of the red phase garbage where they have to break you down to build you back up. You'll get used to their tactics for smoking pretty quick, and learn to just zone out so it ends quicker. Some people actually enjoy the challenge.
To lighten things up let me tell you a quick story. Our DS gave us 10 minutes as a latrine break, all of us were back down five minutes early and a couple people came running out a minute after the rest of us were formed up. The drill thought they were late because everyone else made the informal hit time we set for ourselves (like retards, who gives up their 10 minute breaks on purpose?) so she started smoking the shit out of us because two guys were four minutes early to her hit time. She stopped smoking us in like 15 minutes because someone told her we were all actually early and her hit time was [10 minutes later not 5]. She kind of didn't believe it but when other people told her she kind of lost her steam.
The most interesting scuffing we got was when she did some timed drills on us.
"Go upstairs and grab your left boot, you have one minute, go."
"That took you 1 minute 37 seconds. Alright, go upstairs and grab a pair of green socks, you have one minute. Go."
"One minute 17 seconds. Go upstairs and grab one hangar, you have three minutes, go."
*one guy brings down every single hangar in his locker, like 16 of them* (we were giving battle buddies hangars that got up there late or would've taken too long to open their lockers or didn't have any extras without clothes on 'em)
"Damn trainee you brought your whole ass closet down here? I told your ass to bring down ONE hangar, didn't I?"
"Yes Drill Sergeant."
"So why do you got 15 hangars in your hand trainee?"
*Mumbles some incoherent nonsense about not knowing or rushing or some shit*
Good times.

ABOUT YELLOW PHASE:

Besides being taught how to walk and march and learning your PT drills, you can't do much in four first two weeks of BCT in yellow phase, you're all potentially covid-positive until they test you another several times. Some guys got tested twice at reception, and twice again at BCT. Pretty sure they just lost their tests or something like that so they had to redo them all.
You're going to get a lot of briefs, EO, SHARP, Chaplain, signing paperwork of all kinds. Mailing your first letters so people know where to reach you (do this as soon as possible). I also recommend signing up for Sandbox, the letters get to you within a day or two instead of potentially two weeks after mailing normally.
Gear issue happens here as well, helmets rucksacks etools canteens and more esoteric shit people don't think about like wet weather bottoms which we never wore nor took anywhere the entire time. This bundle of gear is called your TA-50. You may or may not get to keep some of the stuff you're issued, so don't treat it too badly. I personally got to keep my ruck and another $300 worth of shit at least on top of that, it's just luck of the draw and whether or not your company/battalion is getting new stuff after your cycle.

Yellow phase is just red phase but you can't leave your company training area, so you're going to be wearing PTs, inside of your bays, basically the whole time. It's actually EXTREMELY chill, so don't get smoked for dumb shit if you can help it. Namely; Don't fucking sleep on a bed right in front of the door the drills use, don't disrespect anybody, call At Ease and Bay Attention when an NCO or Officer walks in or leaves. You're definitely going to get smoked but every day you can avoid it is a blessing because after the first couple weeks you'll be too busy with training to truly get smoked all that often. We probably spent four hours a day after the first few days just sitting around in our bays while Drills looked for things to do, briefs to give, regulations to read off to us, or while they just told us to do Rifle Marksmanship drills while they sat in their office doing paperwork because there was nothing else to do. Normally red phase is the first two weeks of training, but yellow phase eats it up and traps everyone in the bay for two weeks, effectively. PT if you want.
If in yellow phase a drill ever asks you what you guys want to do, or if you have any goals as a platoon, 100% speak up and say you all want to shoot expert during Rifle qualification. I pulled this because I'm not a moron, and realized there's nothing to do in yellow phase. So our free time was spent doing "RM drills" i.e penny/washer drills (stable firing position and smooth trigger pull practice), shadowboxing (zeroing practice), and manipulation drills, mag drills or weapons function check practice. In reality, you  just screwed around for most of that time with no repercussions. Volunteering for this kind of training probably saved our DS from having to come up with actual training for us so we got tons of free time in yellow phase because of it.

ABOUT RED PHASE:

After your two weeks in yellow phase, you've got Red phase. It's one week, and when all the graduation requirements get done so you can get into white phase. These require you leaving the Company Training Area (CTA) so you couldn't do them in yellow phase. This is one of the hardest weeks of BCT just because you're doing shit every single day, and graduation requirement shit not dumb bullshit you can skip and be fine. It's not very physically demanding besides the first ruck you'll ever do in your life (welcome to the Army) but you're definitely busy.

Here's the list of shit you have to do in your one week of Red Phase (week 3 of BCT), which would normally happen in your first two weeks of BCT.
1. Victory Tower, a 40ft rappel and some other rope course stuff. Actually a fun day, even if you're mostly waiting in line like you're at an amusement park. ONLY the 40ft rappel is a required training event to graduate BCT. You can hide in the latrines or sneak off into the woods for the rest of the day and nobody would know or care. Have fun, shoot the shit with your buddies.
2. CBRN Gas Chamber; Pretty self explanatory. They give you a class on CBRN which introduces you to your gas mask, how to use it, put it on, how to survive CBRN attacks, all that shit. You'll forget most of it pretty quick, but you'll need to put that mask on about 50 times in drills so be ready to hate it like everybody else. The gas chamber is very tame during Corona at Fort Jackson, you don't breathe or open your eyes or sing or any of that shit these days, they're just ticking a box and building confidence in your gas mask.
3. Confidence Obstacle Course and Fit To Win (easy obstacle courses). They're again, there to build your confidence. Everybody, even 4 foot tall Hispanic female fatbodies, can complete 70% of the obstacles on the Confidence course to tick the box to pass. Even if you can't, it doesn't matter they'll tick it off anyway. Nobody cares if you can't do a rope swing over a fucking log.
4. The Hammer; field training exercise 1, sleep overnight in a forest after rucking with 35 pounds on your back five miles to get there. Besides IMTs (individual movement techniques) the hammer was VERY easy, although you get virtually no sleep because of 10 man fireguard shifts and the fact you dug a shitty hole that's horrifically uncomfortable to sleep in and you have zero clue how this sleeping bag works because no one told you or showed you how it worked so you're freezing all night. Your first ruck is an experience to remember. You'll pack it loose and shitty so the weight load is terrible and have a sore back and hips for the next week or two. Ask your Drills to give you a class on how to pack and readjust your rucks in yellow phase, if they do it'll help. Otherwise get with the prior enlisted in your bay and ask them. Besides that, my tip is just cheat the packing list. After you do layouts and PCMS and all the various gear checks, take out the shit you won't need like your extra pair of boots and multiple pairs of shirts and OCPs and socks. They'll make you pack like three pairs of everything to hit the weight requirements but you won't use any of the extra clothes besides a pair of socks for the Hammer. It's one fucking day and staying overnight and leaving in the morning, you don't need a goddamn wardrobe. Yes, you need your Etool you're going to be digging your hasty fighting positions. The 'requirements' for the Hammer are your 5 mile ruck, an IMT class, hasty fighting position class, face-painting class, radio class, and medical class. That's it.
So yeah, 4 graduation requirements in a week, it's probably the hardest part of training, normally you have two or three weeks to space that stuff out.
Instead week 1 and 2 is briefs and sitting up in your bays for hours all day doing weapons drills you slack off on and sit on beds and eventually get smoked for slacking off or sleeping.
My platoon and company really only got corrective PT done the first few weeks and then only when we really fucked up after that.
After week 3 we didn't have 90 minute smoke sessions where everyone was dying anymore. Note: Many people have harder BCT experiences than I did, my drills had low morale and were pretty lazy about whipping us into shape. We called the Inspector General (IG) on any DS for any reason so most of them were unwilling to fuck with us at risk of their own careers. Several DS were counseled, one was re-assigned, another taken off DS duty completely due to the pussy IG complaints my company made about them.
One drill got suspended because he was throwing ACH's (helmets) around and hit a trainee in the leg and some OTHER trainee reported it. Every bay has a phone with a connection to staff duty, chaplain, and IG. IG is button 4. The Senior Drill Sergeant that got reported was suspended for a month and had to do paperwork in the HQ that whole time. Eventually they moved him to another company in the battalion. ANOTHER SDS was reported for EO hazing/bullying shit because he swore a decent amount and 'was mean' to his platoon. That drill was a gem, too, he always practiced as he preached and spoke to his platoon like human beings. His platoon was the most disciplined and loudest in my company, and any time he made them run he ran with 'em, and made his expectations very clear. Enough complaints though and poof, didn't see him again until graduation. He was actually pretty happy about getting 'fired' from being a DS. My experience is far from the norm though, it's not often you see 3/4 platoons switch Senior Drill Sergeants over the course of a 10 week cycle. You're probably going to get smoked worse and more often than we did. Probably less than 10 smoke sessions the entirety of BCT after Yellow and Red phases ended.

ABOUT WHITE PHASE:

Cool, you finished your first three weeks and aren't getting smoked every day anymore. What now?
White phase! White phase is almost all Rifle Marksmanship. It's 3 full weeks of going to ranges, shooting for 10 minutes or an hour and then waiting the entire rest of the day standing somewhere while you wish you could sit down because you've been standing for the last 8 hours and marched two miles to get there and will march two miles back. However, it is better than red phase in a number of ways. You start going to the DFAC during this phase because you're not considered contagious anymore. Drills will be more lenient about you not wearing your masks, especially during PT. I personally never wore that shit over my face during PT and I'm glad I didn't. The last week of White phase they let us sit on the benches while waiting for people to shoot instead of standing which was great. I wrote some poetry and got to know my neighbors pretty well, you've got a lot of time to bullshit.
But we were horribly undisciplined and talked constantly even when told not to so we got in trouble for that an awful lot.
I shot a couple hundred rounds, it's not anywhere difficult, maybe 2% of the entire 260 people we had really struggled.
Duckett was the only guy, him and like 3 girls who were tiny and had trouble dealing with the recoil knocking off their sight picture between shots. Duckett was a fuckup anyway though, one of the worst and least disciplined people there, straight up disrespectful to cadre.
Rifle Marksmanship works as follows. There are 14 RM periods, aka days where you do RM shit. You have to group and zero at the video game simulation range with airgun rifle M16 replicas (fun, but your results won't be indicative of how well you do with your real weapon), group and zero at the real range, then do LOMA at the video game simulation range, LOMA at a real range, then Iron Sight qualifications. You repeat all of these steps again for CCOs, your red dot optics. Each of these steps takes a full day and is the only thing you do that day. Grouping and zeroing at the range usually takes two days for both irons and CCO.

Protip: Do your best to rig your spot in line so you get a partner you like. I matched up with one of the Hispanic girls that liked me and she was playing with my hand and arm and chatting with me the whole time, basically hugging me and shit. After a month or two of not touching or looking at women I was having a very pleasant time. Managed to not get caught for frat somehow, probably because I was basically not reacting at all besides talking to her. Fraternization is a thin line you walk, lads. It's never worth it but in the moment it always seems like it is. If you have any candy or cough drops white phase is where you do most of your sales - make sure to carry around your wallet in your camelbak and have change on you, i.e $5 and $10 bills. You're waiting around for literally 8 hours a day with nothing to do. You can sell cough drops for a couple bucks a piece people are so bored. I chatted up my battle buddies a bunch, found people into Warhammer, anime, video games like Total War, Smash, lots of good conversations. One of the guys was a top 100 Smash Ultimate player before joining, I got him to write me literally 20 pages of notes on how to be good at Smash. Great guy. Another one wrote down like 150 anime titles I had never heard of. Chat up whatever girls you want, but my advice is picking the plain, humble ones. Any even halfway attractive ones are SHARP bait or absolute bitches. Out of the three average looking girls in my platoon (aka BCT 10/10s) two were married and one had such a foul personality every single person hated her. The one I liked best, the one that got recycled due to covid in reception and had been at Jackson for like two months already, got "SHARP'd" in quotes because someone else reported it for her because they didn't like the guy that was too friendly. Caused a huge fucking mess, she was called out of formation to talk to the SHARP reps like 10 times, and had to go do mental health counseling appointments and shit another dozen times, so the second half of BCT she was gone as often as she was there. Don't fucking report people for SHARP or EO offenses, it fucks everything up. You're going to get another SHARP/EO brief every time it happens, too. By your sixth one even the Drill Sergeants are just phoning it in and having "conversations" about it where they just waste time until they can tell the higher ups they talked to you about it again. Quick note about how pissed off I was the two cute girls in my company, Redding and Hansen, weren't in my platoon.

White phase lasts until you complete your graduation requirements in that phase, which include
5. Qualification with Iron sights
6. Qualification with Close Combat Optics (CCOs) which are just red dot sights, and
7. The Anvil, a two day field training exercise including a 7-8 mile ruck.
A qualifying score for irons or CCO is 23 out of 40 (easy). 30 and 35 are the cutoffs for the other, higher qualification standards (sharpshooter and expert). Makes no real difference besides bragging rights, same with your ACFT scores.
Anvil sleeping the first night was uncomfortable. I made my hasty fighting position like 3-6 inches too short so my knees were incredibly uncomfortable but also stretched out and twisted so if I moved in certain ways I'd get shoot pains up my lower body. The best way to do it is to just scrape the ground a couple inches and basically just lay on slightly sloped ground. Also, make your hasty right next to a (same-sex) battle you like so you can talk while pulling security and the time flies by. Just don't be loud enough to attract DS attention since you're supposed to be dead silent the entire time, which of course at 1900-2300 pulling security in pitch black night when you can't see shit is a recipe for you falling asleep, which is pretty much the only thing you're not supposed to do at that point. Save your Military Energy Gum/any caffeine for that and the ruck marches, you'll be glad you did.

ABOUT LAND NAV:
Land Navigation in some books is still considered a graduation requirement, but they're phasing it out as far as I can tell. You'll probably still do it, but it's not a graduation requirement anymore. You'll do it on day 2 of the Anvil usually. It's pretty fun in my opinion, if you just use the map to follow landmarks you're probably going to be fine. You get five points on the map you're supposed to find, and when you do you write down the alphanumeric code on the signpost that signifies where you're at is a point of interest. Some are dead easy, some are within a mile of the start point, and some are in the middle of the woods 500 meters away from any roads or trails and 5 miles away from the start point. I got kinda lucky, only one of ours was off a trail, and the furthest was probably only a mile and a half away - further because we just followed the roads and landmarks to make it super easy on us. If you want to pass, just take the hit and lead the way, it's a lot easier than following a retard and having to tell everyone you failed Land Nav. My platoon completely didn't get taught shit about Land Nav, we had a class we listened in on where another platoon's DS taught them how to plot points, but we had literally never seen a compass or got told was an azimuth was before we started the Land Nav course. I had two black guys that had never been outside of a city before, and fucking Bailey Atwood. No, not Atwood Bailey, his first name was Bailey. His mother started his letters with "My Dearest Bailey". This guy couldn't form a sentence without stuttering and couldn't tie his shoes. I still carried the group to 5/5 in like an hour, with two left over to take a nap behind some ditches. Being completely honest, if you rigged the teams a little to pair up with a girl you liked you could totally fuck behind some of the fire breaks/sand berms all over the place. If you went off the road like 10 meters there were some good spots to hide. Note; Drills were riding around in golf carts and shit to make sure nobody was super lost or ran into the minefields, but if you were quiet you'd get away with anything no problem. I ate like seven snacks out of the MORE, including like 3 or 4 drink packets just to waste time. When we went back with like half an hour left there were like ten teams that had failed and just given up, waiting for the time to end.

BLUE PHASE:

After the Anvil your flags change to blue, and only the final couple graduation requirements stand before you and leaving BCT. This is usually called "Hell Week". It's not that bad, actually. You're waking up sore every day but you're really not getting smoked at all by this point.

8. Remagen; throw 2 live grenades after throwing two dummy grenades to prove you can throw a real one without killing yourself or others.
9. Buddy Team Live Fire: Battle March and Shoot, basically taking turns shooting so the other guy is covered while he moves, very easy, takes like 10 minutes, but they have you do Buddy Team Live fire Dry, with Blanks, and then Live to make sure you don't kill anyone when you do it with the rounds that can kill people. Because of this it takes two days and you standing in lines with your heavy ass ill-fitting plate carrier on waiting for your turn to go for the entire company to go through the lanes three times. This was the most annoying part of hell week, just having your plate carrier on a bunch, standing around for no real reason. Welcome to the U.S Army.
God forbid they do concurrent training where some grumpy drill sergeant has the horrible task of forcing unenthusiastic trainees through some lane or drill they've done 12 times already and are only going through the motions in the case a high ranking officer walks by they don't see a bunch of trainees sitting around doing nothing or acting like riffraff.
Whatever cadre got put on chow detail when we were in the field on range days or whatever, or the concurrent training detail, they were almost always unhappy about it. Being a Drill is being a babysitter, but man getting assigned chow detail on range days is like six times worse. If I had to tell people to stop talking in the chow line 15 times while my buddies got to oversee rifle LOMA and group and zero and quals I'd be pissed too.

THE FORGE:

10. The Forge, a 3 day field training exercise where you march 30 miles with either your plate carrier or your 30 pound rucksacks on with some training events scattered in, but really it's just the marching, there's nothing hard in there, Night Infiltration Course is night one and is very annoying because sand gets everywhere.
Not really hard though, just crawl with machine gun fire way overhead the obstacle course which is the second part of NIC is way harder in my opinion because you smoke yourself trying to get through it too fast and injure yourself.
All kinds of shit got fucked through NIC, I pulled either a right thigh tendon or muscle or hip flexor something at the very end of the live fire NIC, so that killed during the obstacle course having to get over tall barriers and shit and stretch that part of my leg. That thigh pulled and my shoulder also got pulled somehow, I didn't PT for weeks after basic because of all my Forge related dings and feet blisters and shit. Forge is easier than the Anvil, you aren't pulling security for four hours straight in the middle of the night and you aren't digging hasties, you're just walking at a pretty slow pace and sleeping a bunch. With some saved up candy, caffeine gum and/or pills, and whatever you've got in your MOREs (Mission Oriented Ration Enhancement) you're going to be snacking basically the entire time. You walk for 45 minutes or an hour and stop for 10 or 15, and the weight is less than the Hammer or the Anvil because you didn't pack unnecessary shit like you did last time. Drills also have some creative ways of reducing weight, or having you ruck with assault packs instead of your full rucks after you complete your initial 10 mile ruck which requires you to use the actual rucksack with a stated amount of weight as the check-box for graduation. After that you can technically do the rest of the marching with nothing, so your drills can be creative in how they use company transports and stuff and loading and unloading to make sure as many people pass as humanly possible. There was only one difficult stretch of the march on day 2 where it was nothing but hills at a 15 minute mile pace, people were dying and falling out like crazy on that stretch because the one in charge of pace-setting was the company's most incompetent drill, a female African about 5' tall with terrible English. The rest of the Female African-American drills were pretty great to be honest, but she was full African and didn't know her shit on virtually anything. She actively taught people incorrect information the entire company had to ignore the entire time she was there. It happens. Most of our drills were knowledgeable though. Ironically some of the best, most well-liked were brand new first cycles who didn't know how BCT worked yet but knew about actual Army shit with their deployments so taught you that stuff while learning the BCT bullshit alongside you guys. Our last day of the Forge, the march back after our final RM period (it's fun, I won't spoil it for you) the heavens literally split open and the last couple hours and several miles back we got absolutely fucking drenched by the cleansing rains of heaven. It felt like a fucking righteous baptism after being covered in sand and marching for 30 miles and being done with BCT. Spirits were high despite being in the middle of a hurricane's monsoon level wind and rain.
Once we got back the showers we took were magnificent, it's probably going to be the best shower you've ever taken in your life despite how much getting hot water in those cuts stings. You're going to have microscopic cuts all over your body from crawling through several hundred meters of sand. You're going to be chafed beyond belief for weeks, and you won't care because you're done.

10.2. End of Cycle Testing; AKA 'Technically a graduation requirement'
The only thing I haven't mentioned is End of Cycle testing which is really easy (everyone passes on day 2) and includes putting your gasmask on in 9 seconds, medical care, Individual movement techniques, weapon disassembly, assembly, loading, unloading, functions check, and Land Navigation (really just plotting points and shooting an azimuth). No point putting more detail here, every grader is completely different and they change the standards every cycle so just look at what people are doing in front of you in line, ask people why they failed, and try to get the same grader they got so you can try not to fail. There's no repercussions for failing, you'll just go out and do the same lanes with your drills the next day to pass. I first time Go'd everything during basic so I had a little bit more free time than most people, didn't need to spend free time practicing leg tucks or anything like that.
You could really cut out half the time of basic training if you had to, there's a lot of waiting and filler that if things were structured more efficiently things would take half the time.
But your cadre (training staff) changes every cycle, people coming in and out, getting transferred, their two or three year stints ending, and then all trying to work together to get shit done. On that note...

ABOUT DUTY WEEKS AND TRAINING SCHEDULES:

Every week duty week changes
So 1st platoon will have duty week, then 2nd, etc.
So by week the training is set up and planned by different Drill Sergeants from different platoons (usually the Senior Drill of the platoon who's duty week it is) who are varying levels of competent or might have different ideas from each other.
Some DS might not like the ideas of others, do their own thing, and end up wasting everyone's time because of it, or get assigned the shit duty like chow detail and be grumpy about it. Several of our Drills hated each other and were pretty open about it. The short white 11b blue ring Drill Sergeant hated the 42A fatbody mulatto DS that was way way too open about how much she hated being a Drill and basically didn't give a fuck about anything and was constantly grumpy and unprofessional. Lots of QUESTIONABLE instagram pictures too. The four white, male Senior Drill Sergeants were (almost) all different MOS Combat Arms, infantry, artillery, and one with every single combat MOS, he changed every contract and that was after branch transferring after seven years in the Marines. All three of those either got suspended, fired, reassigned, or in mine's case was gone for most of the cycle in First Sergeant Academy prepping for his E-8 Master Sergeant promotion.
It'd be easy to have a standard method of efficient training but the training standards change every single cycle too, so you can't do the same thing over and over, you have to fit whatever new standards or changes are implemented.
Inevitably someone at the Battalion level will tell you to change something and that screws everything up and ruins morale.

ABOUT FOOD:

Food is better than I expected, it's very edible.
We had the worst possible food, the bare minimum they're legally required to give you. Hot As twice a day and MREs for dinner, every single day. After week 5 at Jackson you can start going to the DFAC, but depending on your company and battalion and how lazy they are you might go like twice a week, at some point on Friday Saturday Sunday was when we went. Sometimes our two DFACs a week were both breakfast and lunch on Sunday then MREs for dinner which was kind of annoying, we'd rather have spaced out our DFAC meals so we could eat more.
Hot As are catering food served in aluminum trays basically except instead of those trays they're plastic or metal and reusable. Food is almost always hot.

Breakfast:
Grits or Oatmeal, Scrambled Eggs, sausage patty or two sausage links, two pancakes or waffles or one French toast, two pieces of whole wheat Sara Lee bread. Scrambled eggs were powdered but I'm used to it and they didn't taste bad.
We eventually started getting syrup consistently, so the breakfasts were always pretty good, waffles were probably the worst followed by pancakes and everyone liked the French toast best.
This is every single Hot A breakfast for 10 weeks. You will get flavored water/juice with every Hot A meal.
The 42A HR Drill Sergeant liked to fuck with us and throw our napkins or all the syrup on the ground so we couldn't have any. Yeah, everyone hated her. Thankfully she didn't have breakfast detail but like once a week. Even at the end of the cycle she would stand behind the servers and make sure nobody gave out more than a drop of syrup (yes, a literal drop). Yeah, everyone really, really hated her.

Lunch and Dinner:
Lunch/Dinner is a lot more varied. They have pork, ham, chicken of like six varieties, spaghetti, chili mac, a couple other pasta entrees but they ALL include meat or meatsauce. You don't get to pick so it's not like it matters. You'll always get an apple/banana, two slices of Sara Lee whole wheat bread, a pinch of salad, rice with gravy, and colored juicewater. The only thing that changes is that main meal which again, you don't get to choose. The pork chops are actually really good and juicy most of the time. It doesn't get too boring since they rotate very frequently and you only get repeats a max of, say, five times in your BCT stay. Sometimes you get vegetable oil butter, sometimes you don't. The meals you get it feels awesome. Feel free to scoop up some pepper packets when you can, keep them in your PTs or range OCPs and use 'em on your unseasoned eggs in the morning. Makes them taste twice as good when you're eating them every day.

Some people in your platoon will refuse to eat parts of their meal. Vegetarians (usually stop being vegetarian by the halfway mark), people who hate the 'watery eggs', people who don't want their bread, people who think the juice has dick limpifier chemicals in it so your dick won't work. Find them quick, rig it so you sit next to them every single day. Ask the girls early on if any are vegetarians, promise to trade cough drops or something for their sausage or some shit, whatever you gotta do man.
I personally ate the two pieces of bread with the grits to make it go down faster since you're always on a 15 minute time limit for meals, whether they be Hot As, MREs, or DFAC. DFAC is better and more food, but the time crunch is even worse. Sometimes you get literally 2 minutes to just shove whatever you've got in your mouth and get out of there. If you're tactical though you'll always eat more at the DFAC than you get at your other meals.
My Protips are to get double or triple scoops of the mixed nuts, mixed fruit, spinach and a handful of peanut butter packets every DFAC trip. The nuts and spinach have tons of nutrition you can get in quick, and the mixed fruit helps it slide down much easier. You can eat a couple of the peanut butter packets at the table but I always shoved two of them into the little Credit Card pockets inside your PT shorts (you'll understand eventually). Nobody has literally ever checked those for contraband in any cycle I've ever talked to anyone about. If it's winter and you're in pants and jacket, shove them in your pants pockets while you're in the DFAC and when you get outside slide them in the credit card pocket then.

ABOUT SLEEP:

The most common, average sleep schedule was 2000 to 0500. Yes, 9 whole hours.

1900 to 0400 if we needed to be somewhere a little early or buses came at like 0700 to take us to a range or something and the drills wanted leeway to do their hour of PT, an hour for chow, and latrine breaks.
However, your drill sergeant expects you to have everything clean and your beds made and be shaved and toes on the line by 0500, so then you actually have to wake up at 0400 so the 9 hours becomes 8. If your entire bay is squared away, you can make the lights on time for your bay 415 or even 430, but there's always some fuckup who takes another 15 minutes to get up and can't make his bed in 10 minutes so you're going to be waking up 45 minutes before "wake up" every single morning.

If you have to pull a fireguard shift, then you could get shafted pretty hard.
WHAT'S FIREGUARD?
A One hour shift any time during that 2000 to 0500 you have to be dressed in OCPs, awake doing fireguard shit like counting people and weapons or cleaning or sitting at the desk - This is the only time and place you are allowed to sit during BCT, highly prized. People will want to sit at the desk instead of clean. At minimum, a battle buddy team (two people) will be on shift at a time.

If you get a 0100 to 0200 fireguard shift, you're sleeping from like 2030 to 0045 then 0220 to 0400
and that's pretty ideal, people talk like fuck after lights out so being asleep 30 minutes into it is pretty generous unless your bay is tight and respects everyone's sleep (yeah right).
So you've got like 4 hours then another rem cycle in the last hour and a half, meaning 5.5 hours is pretty typical on a fireguard night.
If your bay is a fuck up bay and you're on 6 man fireguard that's 6 people per shift per 9 hours so almost everyone is pulling a shift every night.
But if you're on 2 man fireguard (the minimum) like we were the last several weeks, then you're going to get like 7.5 hours every night.
I really wasn't tired all that often, I was eating a good amount of food, 3 meals a day, cleaning my plate, which helped a lot. The girls complaining of being tired were the ones not eating their shit.

EXAMPLE/ABOUT DAILY SCHEDULE:

Put to bed at 1940, sleep at 2030, we agree to turn our lights on at 0400 every morning, eventually became 0415.
Wake up, immediately go to the bathroom and shave until 0430 (only three sinks had warm water, I wanted one every morning), put tiger balm on my knees and feet until 0440 or 0445, make my bed, put my Camelbak and mask on and toe the line by 0500 and wait for a drill to come in and tell you "yeah, the same as the last 40 days the hit time downstairs is 515, or 520, whatever."
I was usually one of the last people on the line because I was always fixing some shit.
I utilized all the time given to me and didn't really rush much, time management is an important skill.

0530 formation, report accountability, recite soldier's creed, march to PT pad, PT.
Morning PT really isn't hard at all, especially if you sandbag it.
By the book FM 7-22 Holistic Health and Fitness is pretty easy, even if you max out recommended reps. Climbing drills were my favorite, running is suffering for a while especially if you have feet issues but it becomes pretty easy to be honest, the pace is always a mild jog, never faster than 8 minute miles unless it's an ability group run and you're in the fastest group because you run fast, in which case you'll run fast because you can run fast.

After PT you get a latrine and clean up break, since depending on your PT field it can be grass, sand, straw, shredded tires, mud. We got sand. Sand is one of the worst, but at least it brushes off and doesn't get you wet like grass does.

Then breakfast, which includes waiting in formation for your turn to eat while you watch people get served. You spend probably 75% of your time waiting, you get used to it. Not really.

After breakky is whatever the training is for the day, I went over a lot of it above so it's any of that stuff, or briefs, or classroom powerpoints on something or other, or teaching you some random shit like the weapons function check, or going to a field to do RM practice without rounds. There will be days you're not doing much, days you just do bay/area/CTA maintenance and beautification aka cleaning and picking up trash with your hands, usually on Saturdays and Sundays. Sunday mornings until lunch at 1100 or 1200 are 'reflection time' where you should 100% just sleep. Most drills won't bother you on Sundays unless you bother them, so take advantage and sleep. Write a letter or two, read your bible, go to service, whatever, it's your time. Laundry room is full on Sundays, sorry.

ABOUT DEALING WITH PEOPLE:

(Dumb) people harped on me a lot for not rushing more, or being 10 minutes early for a hit time when we were given 15 minutes to go utilize the latrine or whatever, but they're morons and I ignored them gracefully. Just be early enough in the right uniform to not get singled out and you'll be invisible to Drill Sergeants.
I kept my mouth shut about virtually all the dumb shit I saw that annoyed me, while most people got into pointless arguments every day.
Some people were just grumpy motherfuckers, others didn't care if they caused conflict, others had poor impulse control.

In like the last week some hick yelled at me because he was super stressed out and I basically invited him to blow up at me so he could relieve that stress.
You know how you're not supposed to tell a woman to calm down or whatever? I told him he was stressed out.
I was brushing my teeth and refused to rush brushing my teeth for this moron - they give you a calcium vitamin D protein chocolate bar every night after final formation so you basically have to brush your teeth afterwards if you aren't a gross ass.
He was on fireguard and stressed out because the Hard Ass drill sergeant was on duty and threatened to take us all down to the drill pad and smoke us for two hours if we fucked up or weren't in bed or whatever when he came to do his check.
Brushing your teeth is a valid thing to do, I wasn't screwing around which is what his comments were intended to address etc. etc.
Petty bullshit, really. So the guy screams at me (yeah, good job not drawing attention to our bay) that I'm lazy and he runs out of ammo immediately so just repeats that like four or five times, screaming some other shit incoherently because like I said, he was just stressed out and not actually mad at me. I finished brushing my teeth and went to bed, the guy felt a lot better after blowing off some steam. He actually kind of liked me, too, I was probably in his top 10 guys just because I never fucked up and never drew DS ire to our bay or our platoon.

I ended up befriending a lot of the black bloc because I sold them all candy.
We had a shitty bay, shitty platoon, shitty company.
The whites and blacks couldn't talk to each other or resolve their issues ever, so they reported each other for dumb shit and got us all in trouble for it about 15 times.
Like Cunningham, a white guy, reporting like 8 black guys for saying the n word because they were all loud in formation and getting us in trouble for it and generally being disrespectful assholes.
The black guys reported two or three white guys for not wearing towels when getting into the shower, and another black guy punched a weirdo white guy in the dick because that guy straight up refused to ever wear a towel.
I personally don't give a shit but wearing underwear into and out of the shower is pretty easy and not a hard concession to make.

Basic definitely sucks but if you live meal to meal you're really just waiting for time to expire so you can leave... like prison.
After the first few weeks and red phase ends it's no longer hard, just boring.
So you take a couple little notebooks with you and jot down poetry or wish lists for stuff you want when you get out, and get contact info of the couple of cool guys you meet in there.

ABOUT SICK CALL:

Tons of people's knees were hurting in basic, but once I stopped doing the squats correctly in PT (sandbagging hard) it helped a lot.
My secret to passing everything is just not trying very hard and conserving your body, strength and mind. If you try your hardest basically ever you're going to get injured somehow and make everything way harder on yourself.
Go to sick call whenever you want, it's free and nobody can stop you. You also get 2 MREs which you can eat before lunch, come back, then eat lunch and dinner so you get a lot of extra calories. People will just give you pieces of their MRE they don't like so trade at your leisure. I ate four MREs at sick call once before 1000, got back in time for 1100 lunch, and ate that too. Just don't miss required training events.
Two no-nos at sick call. Don't say you have covid symptoms, and don't complain of hip problems. Hip problems = MRI, crutches, immediate recycle. If anyone wants to leave or get out of there, that's the 'fastest' way. Easier to graduate though. You can be a sick call ranger and still fly under the radar pretty well. The doctors there are pretty nice and will write you a profile for whatever you want, really. Want to ruck in soft shoes? Tell them that your boots don't fit and are fucking up your feet but it's too late in the cycle to break in new ones. They'll give you whatever you want, guy, just learn how to work the system. Complain of pain on the scale of 2 or 3 and you'll get pain meds you can sell for $10 a pill to people sore from the ruck marches (every single person in your platoon).

ABOUT CONTRABAND:

Important disclaimer:
There will be one Health and Wellness check towards the end of your BCT cycle, meaning a shakedown where they check everything for contraband, but mostly the big shit like drugs alcohol and phones. If you admit to having something, you can get off scot-free so go ahead and have some integrity and admit it. I had a bunch of shit, but admitted to "Having not thrown away my MORE stuff because I didn't know what to do with it" and because of that got off without another word. Being in that special line is great because you get to clear all your contraband before they do a sweep and hide whatever you want to keep in your pockets (which they've already checked, and therefore won't check again). It's pretty easy to just have shit in your OCP pockets zipped or buttoned up and nothing's coming out of them even if they get tossed around. Like I said, they're looking for phones and drugs and alcohol, they don't care about your three pain pills you have in your OCP ankle pocket. They're not finding that shit anyway, they only have a couple hours at most to search every single locker and bunk in the entire company. Sometimes there's scheduled training that day and they only get an hour or two and have to rush so miss all kinds of shit. Nothing really happened to anyone caught with stuff anyway, I think they missed out on one phone call or some dumb shit like that.
You'll be fine, just never hide shit in your Camelbak. OCP pockets (any) or your PT short's credit card pockets are the premium hiding spots.

I had contraband virtually the entire time during BCT, whether it be MRE drink packets or peanut butter packets or first strike bars or other MRE snacks, MRE candy, etc.
People WILL BUY your shit. Find the impulsive, dumb black guys, they'll be itching for some candy. I sold every packet of skittles and M&Ms I had for, at minimum, $10 a pack. Usually it was 15, and a couple times I got 20. I had five or six different people buying from me.
Use your canteen to mix lemonade or other MRE drink mixes in and drink that at your leisure, usually at night but eventually I just took swigs of it during latrine breaks. Shit's tasty. People usually throw those away, too, so you can ask people for them and they'll just give them to you, people don't really value 'em. Similar with the MRE gum, although some people like it.
Trade as much as you can, find out and memorize what everybody likes to the best of your ability to maximize your own trade value. Ask what people's favorite MREs are. Someone in my platoon really liked Spaghetti, so I could trade a low tier MRE like any of the sausage/maple/pork patties for Spaghetti, then trade the Spaghetti MRE for a Menu 8 Meatballs in Marinara Sauce.
The best MREs are Menu 6, Beef Taco, and Menu 8, Meatballs. Beef Taco is easiest and fastest to eat, so at the beginning of basic is top tier. Meatball has double desserts which are the premium items, you can trade the cobbler or oatmeal cookie for a pack of skittles virtually every single night (which is what I did, that's another $10 every night). Since there's not much else to do you learn what people's preferences are and get good at learning where people sit in formation and who trades for what.

MORE's are pretty interesting. You get a MORE, a ration enhancement, for every ruck. You want MORE Type 1, with the Military Energy (Caffeine) Gum. That shit is a cup of coffee, and after detoxing for a month or two you're going to get high as fuck off that shit. I saved my 5 piece pack from The Hammer and traded or bought some more packs off other people and was able to be high on caffeine for the Anvil and the Forge, it made my time infinitely, incredibly better. I basically didn't struggle at all because of it, that's how powerful caffeine can be after not having any stimulants in your body for months. Every pack of that MRE gum has 5 pieces, each piece is 100mg of caffeine (three cans of coke/pepsi, or one coffee). Half-life of caffeine is 7 hours, so you chew a piece after dinner chow and your four hours of pulling security in your hasty are suddenly way more fun.

HOW TO SNEAK IN CONTRABAND:

Contraband is extremely easy to slip in. Drills will tell you to open your packages and you will do so in front of them. Once they see what you have and there's no candy or menthol shit you'll be told "you're good" and you go back into formation. Hygiene and cleaning products are allowed. What I recommend is cutting a slit in the back of a tidepod bag, emptying out the tidepods, and putting in whatever contraband you'd like to sneak in. From experience, the most valuable candy you can bring in are mini twix and snickers bars. I sold each mini twix for $5 each, and a big bag of skittles for $20. Loose Reese's Cups (not individually packaged) I sold like five for $20 or thereabouts. Nobody was interested in my caffeine pills for some reason, despite those being amazing. I would've shipped tylenol but there was no point since I had a bunch from sick call people were still buying for $10/pill. My mom slid in some 'Performance Jelly beans' in there and those were actually delicious.
There are certain bags and different brands of tide pods with a little flap at the back so it completely hides the cut you made to remove and refill the bag with what you want inside, so you don't even have to tape it back up if you don't want to. If you sent yourself a bag like this every week you'd probably make like $2000 by the end of basic training. I sold out basically the same night I got my package in, I had 17 Twix in the minis bag. If you're making 2 or 300 per package and send yourself one a week, that's a couple grand. Congratulations. If you're caught, it's literally just fucking candy, you'll get smoked the dogshit out of once and you get to keep your thousand dollars anyway, who gives a fuck. I'll trade one smoke session for a thousand bucks any day.