When someone joins the Army, they talk to a recruiter and pick a job that they want. The old days, of the Army randomly choosing one person to be a cook and one person to be a rifleman while another becomes a mechanic, hasn’t been the case for a long time. You pick a job you want and you go to Basic Training –frequently at one post– and then on to AIT, or Advanced Individual Training, which many times is at a completely different post.

Fort Huachuca is the place for Intelligence and Signals people. I’ve met people who attended Basic Training at a variety of posts who went on to Ft. Huachuca, in Arizona. Basic Training is done at Fort Jackson, in South Carolina, Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, and Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. Fort Moore (previously Fort Benning) frequently does Basic and AIT together at the same place for Infantry and some Armor recruits.

When I first joined the Army I trained entirely at Fort Benning (now Moore) for Infantry Basic and AIT. Since then, however, I’ve been to both Fort Jackson and Fort Huachuca, each time for different types of training. It is common for a lot of Army posts to have swathes of lush, green grass that is tempting to walk on, but don’t do it! Some Sergeant-Major or Drill Sergeant will pop a vein screaming at you for messing up the lawn, and you’ll spend what little free time you have for the next week carefully manicuring the lawn, trimming hedges, and arranging flowerbeds.

Ft. Huachuca, on the other hand, is very different. I’ve never been to a post like it before. It’s in the desert, so there is essentially no grass (although there are remnants of lawns that were once attempted). Plus, all the buildings are spread far apart from one another. Seriously, there’s at least 2-3 acres of space between each building, it seems, sometimes more. I saw AIT troops meandering across dusty trails, dirt, rocks, gravel, and through sage scrub brush and mesquite and kept waiting for a Drill Sergeant or Sergeant Major to materialize and go on a knife-handing rage.

I have been to Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) and while it, too, was in a desert there was some lawn at the headquarters area at the time (several years ago) but the buildings were arranged more closely, at least as I recall. I’ll be going there again in a few months so I’ll have a chance to check my memory.