One of the nice bennies of this was that we went to basic as slick sleeve privates, but returned as PV2s or PFCs.
Now those of us with Army backgrounds know that cadre wore stipped pistol belts to mark themselves from the trainees. We decided to combine our "senior" ranks as PFCs/PV2s with the pistol belts we brought from home station and then mess with the real newbies while we were at the reception battalion.
We took PV2 "mosquito wing" pins and placed them on top of PFC rank (a stripe and a rocker). We then grabbed stripped pistol belts and waited for the time in the evening when most of the cadre had gone home.
Dressed now as "staff corporals" (a take on the SSG rank), we went upstairs to create havoc on the guys who'd been in the Army for all of a week.
We went upstairs, started yelling "I'm Staff Corporal ___ ."
We got away with this for about 20 minutes, got a bunch of guys to stand at parade rest and dropped several for pushups.
And then we got caught.
I spent the next hours "pushing up Fort Dix."
At my officer's basic course at Fort McClellan, we "mustangs" messed with the heads of the straight USMA/ROTC commissioned guys with some old Army tricks.
Most of this consisted of sending guys out on fool's errands like:
-Getting a roll of contour line
-Finding a box of grid squares
-Telling guys that, before they fired an M203, they had to do a "boom check" on the launcher
-Convincing guys that they were supposed to wear the patch of their last unit on their right sleeve. We got a few of the straight ROTC guys to wear their "Leadership Excellence" patch -- you're only supposed to wear combat patches on your right sleeve.