Recruit Training Command Great Lakes — Local services in North Chicago

1996 DIV 226 SHIP 13 Served 1996-2006 Left as an E-6 Honorably. 100% P&T

Best resort I have been to hands down! 6am wake up calls are guaranteed Mon thru Sun. Group showers and saving water by the carwash method. Total break from family and friends for over 9 weeks. Who needs to communicate with them when you have 60-80 other strangers to talk to that you eat, sleep, and bathe with. The Green eggs are delicious. Your vegetables will be cooked to ensure there is no need to chew them. Education services are hours of endless fun where you can fight off that lack of sleep by watching never ending power points. Take a break at the free pool where you swim with all the other guests.

By the end of your vacation at Great Mistakes. You will have learned the warning signs of depression, withdrawal from society, and how to cope with it all on less sleep than you ever have in your life.

(Obviously, I made this to be humorous and to ensure if you are thinking about going; what you're getting yourself into. Trust me, any path in life you take can be the wrong one. This wasn't and never will be for me. I am so thankful for being able to serve. We didn't have some of the problems I have read others had. Each experience will be slightly different. Though, I can agree with the Army about allowing calls on Sundays for an hour. It's really good for moral, helps a recruit get a refresh, something to look forward to or work towards. My son is in Army BC as of 3/4/25 and it was such a pleasure to hear from him the first week. Of course they could have had 1.5 hrs but, someone decided to talk at chow to ask someone else a question. (that guy apologized profusely my...

Eleven weeks of marching and classes. Should have been more like six. Company 457 Hall of Fame Company, 1964. Big deal. Mail P.O. and third squad leader. Two extra liberties in Chicago. That was a big deal. I still can't believe the the Navy housed hundreds of recruits in WWII wooden firetrap shcks in Camp Moffett. Then they send me to Philadelphia for a year of shore duty followed by three years in VR-24 Det., a small air transport squadron in Naples, Italy. It was considered "sea duty" because VR-24 Det was a mobile unit even though it had not moved since it its inception in 1951. All that seamanship training in boot camp and I never even saw a ship except on joy rides (I was a black-shoe) on our planes out to the carriers in the Med. Our mission was carrying an occasional all-Nav officer and mail out to the fleet. The enlisted sailors were smart enough to wait in Naples for the fleet to come calling.

It was a great way to avoid playing cowboys & Indians with the Vietcong and North Vietnam regulars and a cheap way to see a lot of...

Div. 22 Co. 114 in May of ‘92. Garbage cans flying down the middle of the barracks every morning to wake us up, cycling if we screwed up with the windows closed almost to the point of making the sprinkler heads activate because it was so dang hot, singing “Anchors Aweigh” when marching under the tunnel…Petty Officer Bell and Petty Officer Barnett were my Company Commanders and they were fair when they needed to be yet brutal when we let them down. I earned two nicknames while in boot camp…”Bull” because Petty Officer Barnett told me I look like the original character on “Night Court” and Petty Officer Bell called me “New York” because I had the attitude from the moment I got off the bus and it never changed and he loved that about me. They messed with me the most, I didn’t care and they knew it. I hope they knew how much they mattered to me…even...