What’s up, guys? Welcome back to my channel. In today’s video, I’m here with my friend Ben.
What’s up, Aaron?
And we’re going to be talking about what jobs you might get assigned and can get assigned at Air Force basic military training. Usually during your first week of training at BMT, you are assigned a job and a duty that you will be doing for the remainder of training until you graduate. And at BMT, we were both assigned latrine crew. So that’s going to be the first job we go over today. So, Ben, tell us a little bit about your experience through crew shifts within the latrine crew.
I was assigned the showers, and basically my job was to make sure that the showers look good, that nothing was in the drains, and that the overall appearance of the showers was clean. So that was assigned to me by the latrine chief.
And the latrine chief is pretty much your supervisor of the latrine crew. He chooses your roles and everything you’re going to do. I also was a part of the showers detailing, and I had to make sure there was no smudges in the showers, nothing in the drains, nothing like that. There’s also sinks, mirrors, toilets, and all of the other types of the jobs you could get assigned while you are on latrine crew, if you are assigned on the mares, you just have to make sure there’s no smudges or smears on the mirrors. You have to constantly clean all of the mirrors in the entire latrine. And also we had to do the sinks, and somebody was assigned cleaning all of the toilets. That was probably the worst part of latrine crew because they had to deal with cleaning all of the toilets.
So the job, I would say, that has the most contact with the MTIs is without a doubt the dorm chief, because they’re the person that the MTIs are going to go to when something isn’t functioning right within the flight.
Yeah. So pretty much the most stressful job at BMT that you could get assigned is the dorm chief. The dorm chief is usually chosen by the MTI, and it is usually the oldest person in the flight. They are given the leadership position. And most flights, honestly start with one dorm chief, but then he ends up getting fired and moving on to a second dorm chief. So the dorm chief’s major role is pretty much to keep the flight under control. And if anything is going on in the flight, anyone’s being stupid and acting off, then the dorm chief is going to get all of the attention from the MTI and more than likely screamed at or fired.
In my opinion, the best job you can have at the MT is without a doubt the bed aligner or shoe aligner because their job is very straightforward. They just have to keep the beds and the shoes looking great for when the MTI comes.
Yeah, so they have to keep the beds exactly in line. So when the MTI walks through the door and looks down the aisles, they can’t see a bed sticking out into the aisle or else they will get a strike and pretty much get marked off and fail for the day. Also underneath the bed are all your shoes on your shoes, they have to be perfectly aligned with the bed. You’ll have your boots under there, your running shoes and your shower shoes under there. And they have to be in a specific order, tied in a certain way and lined up directly underneath the bed. So the next job we are going to talk about is the laundry crew.
The laundry crew consists of four or five members, including the laundry chief. And their job is to make sure that the laundry is clean and that everyone gets their laundry in a reasonable time. When they are most slammed with laundry is without a doubt during shower time because that is when the dirty bin is pulled out and that is where you throw your clothes while you’re running to the showers.
Yeah. So pretty much the laundry crew isn’t too bad of a job. It’s just packed with a bunch of clothes and they have to make sure they take out all of the stains, make sure that all of the clothes get cleaned and hand out for the next day because usually the next morning we will have PT. And if we are out of PT clothes, we can’t go to PT. And then that will all be looked at on the laundry crew. So when the laundry crew is officially done cleaning our clothes, we do something called a laundry train. A laundry train is when we all get together to distribute all of the clothes to every flight member. It would take forever if just the laundry crew handed it out. So we all get together and we read the inside laundry mark in each shirt or pants because we marked all of our shirts and pants with our each individual laundry mark. So then we just go around in a train formation, one behind the other, and we hand it out and put it on everybody’s bed. And that is how we put away our clothes. The laundry crew isn’t in charge of putting away each individual flight member’s clothes.
So the next job we are going to be talking about is chow runners. Honestly, in my own opinion, chow runner is the most stressful and the worst job you could get assigned at BMT, but some people actually like it. So the chow runner is the person that goes into the dining facility and goes up to this thing called a snake pit. At the snake pit, about five MTIs will be sitting and even an officer, sometimes they have to tell the MTIs and the officer a specific word by word phrase to actually get their flight to come in and eat. So they’re going to have to do this job for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is the funniest thing to witness because a lot of people end up messing up at chowrunner and getting yelled at and smoked by the mtIs. I even got in trouble by the MTIs and the snake pit and I wasn’t even a chow runner. I was just eating my food in there. So that should tell you a little bit about what they actually do to the people that go up to the snake pit.
You want put the paper down. What do you want? Shut up. I don’t hear you. Oh, now I get called a sir. Now I’m a sir. Are you talking to grace or are you talking to me?
You have to march up in a certain way and you have to say this word by word phrase to them that if you mess up one word or say it out of place, you have to restart and they’ll scream at you and do all of this. So Ben, he was a chow runner, and he’s going to tell us a little bit about his experience.
I was a chow runner for a brief period. I had a good experience and a bad experience with the position. The first few times I did it, I was pretty good at it. I knew what I was doing, I knew what to say. There was one time where I did kind of mess up and they really let you know when you do mess up, it is a job that is going to require an insane amount of attention to the little details within your marching and just the way that you’re speaking to an MTI.
So what did they exactly tell you and how did you mess up during runner?
The first few times I went up there and did it, I was pretty good at it. But I would say the third time I went up there, I definitely made some mistakes in my marching and in addressing the individuals at the snake pit. And I was told, good luck finding another job. And I was basically fired from the chow runner position.
That was the end of his Chow runner career right there. I remember sitting in the DFAC one day and witnessing a chow runner from another flight go up and he messed up terribly, like three or four different times in a row. And then they started screaming at him, saying, why did you even join the air force? He told them and replied, because I want to make my father proud. And they all teamed up on him saying, your father is not proud right now. He’s actually disappointed. And that kid left crying and never was chowrunner again. So chow Runner is not a very good job to have at BMT unless you are good at this specific stuff. If you’re a great marcher and good at remembering word by word and can address these MTIs and officers properly, you’ll do just fine. But for the most part, Chowrunner is a job that switches on and off to everybody in the flight.
Another job that I would like to bring up in BMT is the fire monitor position. Basically, the fire monitor had the responsibility of making sure that the emergency exits, which are located typically in the back of the dormitory, had no obstructions and were available to be used in case of an emergency. They would also go through the trash bins and everything and just make sure that they weren’t piling up and everything, because that could also be a fire hazard if the trash bins were overflowing.
Yeah, so typically they would just bring out the trash and do all that. Fire monitor is not a hard job at BMT. The next job I’m going to talk about is the hallway crew. So the hallway crew is pretty much just assigned to one specific hallway. Once you enter the dormitory, they have the water canister refillers that are on the wall. So everybody at BMT has a canister and you have to bring around your water bottle all day long. So they’re in charge of making sure that doesn’t have any smudges on it and looks really nice, but they have to polish that. And then they have one rug, and this one rug is what they have the people in the hallway crew really doing. So they’re on their knees pretty much. They don’t get a vacuum or anything like that. They get something that looks like a brush the size of a toothbrush. And they’re on their knees trying to get every piece of dust, lint, anything you see on this carpet out. They’re on their knees scrubbing this with a toothbrush for about 20 minutes. And then MTI will usually go over there and say, I see one speckle right here, you fail.
So this is typically, they told us to teach us discipline, and one kid asked, why can’t we use a vacuum? And he had it from there. He just started getting screamed at. So tell us a little bit about the day room crew, Ben.
The day room crew was in charge of maintaining the cleanliness of the day room itself, making sure that all the chairs were pushed in, and they made sure that the day room floors once again had no lint on them, had no trash anywhere, no crumbs or anything else on the floor itself. They made sure that when you would go in there for your meetings, the room would look spectacular.
So the day room pretty much is where we meet up and get briefed by our mtis and talk at the end of the day about what we did right, what we did wrong, and what we’re going to do the next day. So the day room is always supposed to be shiny and polished and looking nice. Nothing on the whiteboard. The desks are supposed to look good. And then there’s a bunch of chairs in there that we’re honestly not even allowed to sit on. They’re for a show and they make us sit on the ground. So they’re in charge of making sure no one bumped into a chair and it’s not out of place. So the day room crew is not a terrible job at all.
The next job at BMT is the EC monitor position, and the EC monitor was in charge of setting out a schedule for the EC duty ships.
So pretty much EC duty is you’re standing at the front door of the dormitory not allowing anybody in if they don’t have proper authorization. You’re standing there with your water bottle and your m 16 rifle on your back doing an EC duty shift. Everybody in the entire flight will have EC duty shifts and has to know exactly what to say, who could come and go. And it’s for 2 hours every single day. You could have night shift, 02:00 a.m. To 04:00 a.m. You could have it four to six or twelve to 02:00 a.m. Anything like that. And that’s pretty much EC duty. You’re pretty much the security guard of the dormitory. And then there’s the EC monitor, which he was explaining about how their main job is just to make the schedule. And if there’s any mess ups in the schedule, you usually get fired or if you do anything bad. Did anything bad ever happen to your EC monitor or any mess ups during EC duty?
Yeah. So my EC monitor, he told this airman in our flight how to let someone into the dormitory, but the person who was trying to get into the dormitory didn’t have the right authorization. So the airman got in trouble, and the EC monitor did as well, because the EC monitor is supposed to explain to this person the protocol, which he did not fully explain. So, unfortunately, he lost the job.
So he lost his job. Did he get yelled at, by any chance by the MPIs? What happened?
Yeah. So he got yelled at quite a bit. He was told you’re going to be latrine crew. He said he’s going to make him a stallman, which is basically the worst job in the latrine crew. So, yeah, it definitely wasn’t a good day for him.
So he was stuck, apparently, washing toilets until he graduated from BMT. So don’t get fired from EC Monitor.
So the next position I would like to talk about is the element leader. The element leader was the person you would go to if you had a problem and you necessarily didn’t want to bring it up to the dorm chief. He would also be in charge of a specific group of people within the flight itself.
Yeah. So pretty much the element leader is the vice president of the president, who is your dorm chief. If there’s any problems going on in the flight, they are also held responsible. They are in charge of a certain group of trainees in their specific element. If their element acts out of place or gets in trouble, it’s usually taken out on your element leader. The element leader also will help you put your clothes away, make sure everything is in the exact same order, make sure all of your stuff’s clipped and looking professional. And one day we came back from Chow hall, and one trainee’s entire locker was thrown out. All of his clothes were all over the bed, floor, everything. And that’s because all of his strings and uniforms was out of place and nothing was right. And then it was taken out on the element later, and he was held responsible for this one trainee in his element being out of place.
Well, thank you guys for watching. I’m happy I could help out on the BMT jobs and roles.
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