Some may view the military as just another job, but not many vocations involve living, eating, and sleeping around one’s coworkers. I remember many nights in my rack, with dozens of other men in their own bunks. Some snored. Others talked in their sleep. Soldiers get used to it, but it’s a strange phenomenon that doesn’t come up in many other careers.
Sleep is often a rare and precious commodity in the military. Training and war duty don’t always allow time to rest. Once in Afghanistan, my squad pulled an overnight guard shift, worked through the entire next day, and were nailed with guard duty the next night. There were three of us exhausted men on the post that second night. We kept up this shuffling walk, like zombies, to stay awake. Our conversation often devolved into nonsense gibberish, as we lost our train of thought mid-sentence.
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I was so tired that I hallucinated. In a momentary flash, I saw a plate of spaghetti on our post. “Who brought chow?” I asked. The guys had no idea what I was talking about.
From basic training on, the Army has a tradition of the fire guard. Each soldier is awake on guard or doing chores for an hourlong shift overnight. In the field, this was sometimes our “alarm clock.” The last man must wake the leadership, and thus the platoon. Every soldier hopes for the first or last shift, losing only one hour of sleep. Nobody wants the next-to-last shift. That guy might manage to get back to sleep sometime in the final hour, but not for long.
Waking the next fire guard soldier can be interesting. Usually, one shakes the soldier’s foot or nudges his arm. “Hey, man. You’re on fire guard.”
But once in basic training, I decided to pull a prank. I grabbed the next fire guard’s shoulder and violently shook him. “Rogers! Rogers!” I hissed. “Wake up! Right now!”
Rogers sprang up onto his hands and knees, eyes wide, breathing heavy, looking all around for the danger. “Wha… What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I whispered calmly. “You have fire guard.”
I thought this was very funny. Rogers was mad at me all day.
I served with my good friend Jake Pries for a long time. The fire alarm went off early on the first night in the basic training reception barracks. The shrieking thing was only a few feet above Pries’s head as he kept sleeping in the top bunk. We had to shake him hard to finally get him out of his rack.
On a basic training field exercise, I had to wake Pries for fire guard. In the dark woods, I whispered to my pal Qualls, the other private on duty with me: “Watch this. This f***er is hard to wake up.”
I went to Pries’s little two-man tent and shook his boot. Nothing. I shook him harder. He slept. I slapped his foot. Qualls laughed. Finally, Pries moved a little. I shook him more.
At last, Pries sat up, blinking, looking around with no idea where he was.
“Pries, get out of the f***ing tent,” I said quietly.
“What?” Pries said, bewildered. “Reedy? What are you doing?”
“You have fire guard, idiot. Get up.”
“The hell are you talking about?” Pries asked.
Qualls hit the ground laughing.
“Fire guard!” I said. “You know, when you have to wake up and walk around for an hour for no reason.”
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I lost a solid 15 minutes of sleep time trying to get Pries up and moving.
Despite frequent sleep limitations and wake-up hijinks, service members become very good at catching up on rest whenever and wherever they can, under the flimsy shelter of a poncho, on a supply pile in a truck, or sitting back to back in the rain. Because of their service and sacrifice, though, the rest of us can sleep a little safer at night.
Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan. *Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.
