Defenders of Freedom: Story 4404

When I was in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, I was assigned to a combat engineer unit. No one in my unit however, was becoming a combat engineer. The Army simply placed us within that unit because the brigade had an open company for basic training. So here was a bunch of commo guys being trained by Sappers. Each one of these Sappers felt that having to train commo guys was greatly beneath them.Anyways, between Delta and Echo company barracks there was this large field that we would conduct training exercises in. Generally, these would consist of combat roles, belly crawls, drill and movement, etc.. One day, during I believe week 6 or 7 of Basic Training my squad was out performing combat movement drills in this field with two of our DS. We'd been out there for a few hours, naturally we were tired and sweating and because of the mud we also looked like sh*t. The mud kept causing us to slip and fall as we were trying to move around.Well.. one of the DS standing behind us said something like "if you privates don't make me happy, then we will stay out here all damn night long."So he kept pushing us and pushing us to try harder and do better but the mud made it impossible. Finally the DS lost his temper and yelled "I don't know what the f*ck you idiots are doing you look like your trying to make a f*cking sandwich out of f*cking soup and that just can't be f*cking done."I heard this and turned around with a huge grin on my mud covered face and looked him dead in the eye and said... "what about a bread bowl drill sergeant."He looked me right back and I saw the corner of his mouth begin to form a smile and when he realized it too he started to move towards me. However, remember that mud? Well he slipped and fell flat on his ass. We ran over and helped him up and he said "god dammit private [my name] if you hadn't had some stupid ass remark to my comment I wouldn't look like this."I said well we could stay out here all night and I'll still have my witty come backs or we can go get some bread bowls?"Needless to say we went in for the night.