As every active duty soldier knows, you must find your place at your duty station. A place within your company, a place within your platoon, and a place among the other soldiers. It wasn’t long before I was making friends and getting to know people. Fraternizing with NCO’s was bad, but it was not as bad being a specialist because at that rank you could literally get away with almost anything. At the end of my being at Ft. Hood, you will learn my art for being invisible and my quality of shamming (getting out of doing things).
In the very beginning the company I was in was working the road, we would continue to work the road (as military police officers, for almost my entire length at Ft. Hood). Rather than rotating out with the other MP companies, the battalion preferred our company to work the road because apparently we were the best at it. Anyway, a new person from basic training, such as myself and the other female from reception could not work the road until we had gone through classes that the post deemed essential for us to work the road. This course was only a few days long, it was not a full duty day and it did not even last an entire week. We took a course on mock traffic stops (which I didn’t participate in because so many people needed to get through them and I already had experience doing traffic stops), once again we filled out tickets and sworn statements, we took a couple of mornings to relearn mock drills (which is handcuffing and take down techniques). We took tests on the taser and OC spray and were both tased and OC sprayed. This would be my second time being tased and fourth time being OC sprayed because the instructors did not want to accept my prior certifications.
Anyway, the training received on post, much like training in AIT, was lacking and would provide nothing for those who had no background in police work. Which was the majority of everyone who attended the mandatory classes as well as who worked the road as an MP. There was also training called OJT, it was on the job training. For my on the job training my team leader took me for a ride along one night, we did absolutely nothing but bullshit with the other MP’s. The next night we did room checks at the reception barracks to make sure that people were keeping their doors and windows locked to prevent thefts. The following night I went out with another specialist, we had one loud noise/party complaint and then my partner for the night drove me to the wash station where he would repeatedly tase a frog. The most worthless 3 nights of training in my life.
Luckily I had been a civilian law enforcement officer prior to this piss poor training so I would be okay, right? There were definitely some situations I was thrown in that weren’t in my wheelhouse. Even worse is there was usually an NCO there telling me what to do rather than to just let me work. The Monday morning quarterbacking by the officers and higher ups would deem to be even worse. You were literally damned if you did and damned if you didn’t.
There were different sectors (areas) of patrol that one or two people would be assigned to. The company needed at least 13 soldiers to cover all of Ft. Hood, or at least what they considered coverage. Sometimes it was more than enough, other times it was too few for the calls we were responding too and how often we were responding to them. A lot of time I would be the only one in service and I would get called out of my sector to go to a call, other times they would need assistance in another sector and I would be told by dispatch to stay in my sector, just to be dispatched to an uncovered sector due to a larger call the other MP went to.
Nothing ever seemed organized and as soon as you thought you knew policy or what you were supposed to do, command would change it. There were days and nights we stayed late, days and nights we were called in hours early, days off where we were made to go do our tasks like dental cleaning because God forbid anyone be in the red for anything. We were still being forced to take PT tests, go in for UA’s either right after shift or be called in early depending what shift you worked. I was permanently tired, hot and sweaty because it was Texas, and pissed off because what I was doing was nothing like what I thought or felt I had signed up for. I’ll save the rest of this story for later.
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