After I assured him that I wouldn't be yelling or dropping him for pushups, he explained that he was fresh out of basic and on his way home for a couple weeks.
Poor kid, I hadn't thought about how he'd react, or the trauma I could cause. I was probably the first senior NCO who'd treated him as a fellow soldier.
At the end of basic at Ft.Polk, a friend and I pulled off our usual avoidance of joining our fellow trainee mob, and were hanging out with some of the drill sergeants while everyone else was doing the graduation ceremony stuff in the heat.
When it was over one of the trainees passed by and when running into the drill sergeants went into his trainee panic, one of the sergeants had to tell him to relax, that basic is over now, you are one of us, a part of the Army, you aren’t a trainee anymore.