Your first BMT interaction awaits you as you exit the terminal at the San Antonio airport. You will give your paperwork to the airman sitting at a table and the nearby military training instructor, or MTI, will order you to stand in a nearby formation with the other arrivals. Once enough people arrive, you'll file onto a nearby bus. This is a good time to get some final text messages sent out or do some last minute goofing off on your phone because this bus ride is your last moment of freedom for a few months.
The bus stops outside one of the many basic training dorm buildings and then the head games begin. Another MTI will step on the bus and give specific instructions about how to get off. Despite being tired and confused, you'll be given specific, detailed instructions and be expected to execute them flawlessly. This is the central theme of basic training. Starting at this moment and continuing for two months, your flight will be given detailed instructions set against a seemingly impossible timetable, and your delightful MTI's will do their best to make you feel like the world is ending if you don't succeed.
Communicating with the MTI's is the most daunting part of basic training for most people. If you've never been yelled at before or dealt with difficult people, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Keeping a few simple ground rules in mind will help you communicate effectively. First, they cannot hurt you. No matter how loud they yell or how far they twist their face, they are not allowed to lay a finger on you. Second, their harshness is designed to teach you how to keep calm under pressure, so even if you do everything right, they will find a reason to be irritated with you. The sooner you can dissociate from your immediate emotional response, the easier you will find it to communicate with them. Third, and this is most important, know how to listen and how to ask for clarification. You may be belittled for not hearing right the first time, but you'll make the entire flight suffer if you consistently get things wrong.
The next thing people struggle with at the beginning of BMT is realizing that your training flight is a team. All fifty or so of you have a common purpose: to learn and survive training together. Throughout your Air Force career, you'll hear the motto One Team, One Fight over and over and over again. The central idea behind this is that one's success is everyone's success, and one's failure is everyone's failure. There is no you, there is no him or her in basic training. There is only the mission and the team. One of the most difficult tasks in Basic Training involves the strict tidiness standards for the dormitory. Initially, people want to focus only on their own space to ensure they personally do not get in trouble, but this thinking is flawed for two reasons.
One, the standards are designed around the idea that you will all need to work as a team to maintain them. Take the time early on to identify who among you is best at each task, and specialize. If you are best at rolling up socks, be a sock roller for the flight and let someone else dust your locker. Two, even if you have an impeccable wall locker, the MTI's will hold all of you responsible if one of you is below standards. Focusing entirely on yourself is counterproductive in addition to being selfish.
You'll notice as you observe older flights that they have a solid handle on the two main concepts I've outlined here. As individuals, they've learned how to tune out their emotional response to stress and focus entirely on the instruction being given to them. Their calm demeanor allows them to communicate effectively with their MTI's and as such they are treated with more respect. As teams, they've embraced the reality that they are all in this together and need to help one another out.
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