Tale of 4th Platoon Cookie Monsters

Bit of a long one, but my favorite memory from Basic.No shit troops, there I was, knee deep in the frozen hells of Ft. Knox in February. We were told at reception that we were the last cycle for basic training at Hard Knox before they shipped it all to Benning, and that they were pulling out all the stops for us.Our SDS, SDS H, was about 6'2" 190, pushing 50 years old, and had some type of tic in his neck from being hit by an IED while on one of his 6 or 7 deployments. This tic made him whip his head to the right then forward, randomly while he was talking. He already talked like he was mentally unstable, but this tic put an image in your head of a demon trying to burst out of his face, and scared the shit out of most of us week 1.Come week 5, our platoon has lost every event we can lose, morale was as high as the temp(-10), and most of my platoon ran out of fucks to give in week 4. Every time we got field chow, there's a big ass tray of cookies or cakes that we weren't allowed to eat. The DS and SDS would eat their fill, and chuck pounds of the DFAC's finest sugar bombs into the trash, while we sit and watch.Apparently, this happened one too many times for my fellow joes to handle.One day, us and 3rd platoon, we're all sitting in a classroom, jamming down whatever mash we had to eat, when I look up to see a line of troops standing at the window, food hanging out of mouth at whatever they're looking at. I get up to go investigate, and see no less than 6 of my soldiers inside the dumpster outside the classroom, jamming their faces with cookies. They were shoving cookies in their faces, pockets, down their shirts, in their socks, cookies everywhere. It was as glorious as it was terrifying, and me being a former fatbody, I was a little jealous.As I'm watching this unfold, I see a brown round appear over my shoulder, SDS H, Satan himself, whispers "ho-lee fuck, private". I stood frozen in terror as he watches the dumpster crew for about 10 seconds, then starts twitching like 2 squirrels fucking in a sock as he turns and hauls ass out of the classroom, grabbing 2 other DS's on his way outside.A solid 5 hour smoke session ensues before the 6 soldiers involved finally confessed(including our Soldier of the Cycle candidate). We had to change our name from 4th Platoon wolf pack to 4th platoon cookie monsters, and had to make up new cadences appropriate for the chow line.Fast forward to the final week of Basic. Since they were shutting down basic training at Knox, we had to completely tear down our barracks prior to graduation. We found old moldy cookies under wall lockers, taped inside shelves, behind the washers and dryers, and inside the heat register, everywhere.I will never, for the rest of my life, forget the cookie monsters, and the bravado and stupidity it took for them to stand in that dumpster, in broad daylight, for a moment's worth of sweet, sugary bliss.Read more Basic Training Stories here.