Cool story

I'm trying to break up these posts so they're more bite sized. Maybe if they're smaller, the few people who know about my blog will actually take the time to read them.
I wanted to tell you a cool story that happened while I was gone at WOCS (Warrant Officer Candidate School). Incidentally, did you know that WOCS is one of 4 Officer producing schools in the Military? There's West Point, OCS (Officer Commissioning School), ROTC (the college route) and WOCS. I'd just thought I'd point that out.
But yeah. One night during the first week, my class, all 84 of us (soon to be 83) were sitting in the classroom when our instructor came in to talk to us. He called out two of my classmates, and they left the room. He then told us that one of our classmates who had just left the room, her brother died unexpectedly, and she was going to have to go home and was going to try to make it back before she missed too much training. If she missed more than 72 hours, she's have to start all over, and that was something nobody wanted anyone to ever have to go through. We were still in "Hell Week" where they basically just beat you down from when you wake up till you go to sleep.
It was one of those things that you couldn't have anticipated or predicted. Almost simultaneously everyone in the room reached for their wallets, pulled out money and started passing it forward. In less than 5 minutes we raised almost $1400 for her plane ticket and some flowers for the family. That might seem like a lot of money, and yeah, it is, but when you consider that my plane ticket to there was about $1500, and I flew out of a rather large hub, and she wasn't, well it covered most of her ticket. Seeing that though, it made me almost cry. We barely knew her, but we all were more than willing to make a small sacrifice, without being asked, to help her out.
At the beginning of our training the instructors have one goal. To make us a team. They beat you till you come together, they harp on any perceived division in the group, because joining with each other as one is about the only way you'll make it through the training. After they saw us do that, they tried to question if we were united a few more times, but each time they did, they knew that they were grasping for things to ding us on. We watched the classes behind us struggle greatly with the concept of coming together. The one right behind us were together for 4 weeks when I left and they were still have troubles with it. It's understandable though. At WOCS they're taking a bunch of people who used to be senior NCOs and used to running their own show, and being the hot shot in charge, and placing us all together (I was the exception to the hot shot in charge thing), it normally takes us a while to swallow our pride and learn how to be followers again (I got the following thing down pretty quickly though).
While we were out in the field for a week, something similar happened. A guy's mom was about to pass away from brain cancer. It was expected, but he had hoped that she would be able to live to see him graduate from this training. It really is a big deal, for those of you who don't know. 2% of the US population are in the Military. 2% of that 2% are Warrant Officers. We're a very close group, pretty danged select. No pressure, right? But anyway, since we were in the field, most of us didn't have a whole lot of money, but we still raised over $1000 to help him out. He didn't make it back to us in time to continue training with us, and had to be set back to the class right behind us.
But knowing that there are still people out there who would do just about anything for each other at the drop of a hat is pretty cool. In the Army world, as I'm sure it is in the civilian job world, things can be different. As Enlisted or NCOs, we'd tell our compatriots about something cool they could do to advance their careers, but only after we advanced our own (granted this isn't everybody, just the prevailing attitude). We'd do things to make us look better than everyone else, so we would get promoted and selected for the cool, cushy jobs. Officers, once again, not every last one, will step on everything and anything to get promoted. What feeds these mentalities is the promotion system. They're based off of points, and time in service/ time in rank. Not so much merit. Well the Officers is based more off of merit, so if their yearly reports say they walk on water, then they're more likely to get promoted. The Warrant Officers are also based on merit, but also on open positions and the needs of the Army. We want to get promoted, and quickly if we can, but we're not going to screw over our buddies to get there. I'm just glad that I'm in a position now where I'm hopefully above the more menial and stupid politics.