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United States Army Intelligence School, Fort Devens, was the first Army schoolhouse to implement civilian KPs, and they did it in 1971. The Electronic Warfare Repairer (MOS 33S) instructors went to the school commander with a proposal for an experiment in lowering the academic drop rate. At the time, the drop rate (the percentage of soldiers who flunked out) for the full 54-week 33S course was 98 percent. You read correctly: the recruiting command had to come up with 50 troops to get one 33S all the way through the school. In order to get enough 33S to fulfill the mission, recruiters went after electrical engineering students from places like Caltech and MIT. (The 33s were assigned to Company A, 1st Battalion, USAISD. Alpha Company had a scrapbook with class photos of every graduating class since the opening of the Intel School at Devens. They used to bring it to inprocessing so we could learn to appreciate our heritage. Most of these "class photos" were 8x10 glossies of one guy in his dress uniform standing in front of the boot tree* in the middle of the quad.)
At the time, the easiest course there was dropping 85 percent, so naturally the colonel was really interested in solving the problem. I guess it's hell to go to the TRADOC commander's conference and have to admit that you graduate seven percent of your intake when sitting next to you, the commander of the Field Artillery School is talking about how he's trying to solve his five-percent academic drop problem.
The experiment was real simple: they took one incoming class of forty future vehicle mechanics...uhh, prospective 33s...and split it in half. One half did KP. The other half didn't. Six weeks later, the half who did KP was half there; the half who didn't do KP was still intact. Three days later, the civilian KPs were in place; six months later, the drop rate for 33s was down to 65 percent and USAISD's aggregate drop rate was 49 percent. Which naturally screwed up the whole personnel system.
That's why soldiers don't do KP anymore.
* One of the great pieces of MI history are the two historic trees at Fort Devens. One is the Spy Tree. During World War II, the Counter Intelligence Corps made a ten-foot-tall hollowed-out tree trunk out of concrete. It was colored to look like a real tree trunk, and it had a hole low so someone could crawl in and out of it and one high so the someone in the Spy Tree could see out of it. They never used the Spy Tree because they finally realized no one would be so dumb as to not think, "hey, that rotten two-foot-wide tree trunk wasn't there last week, and where the hell is the rest of the tree?" The other tree is the Boot Tree. When a soldier received his orders to go to his first permanent duty station, he was tradition-bound to spray paint a pair of his boots, tie them together and throw them up into the boot tree, which was a huge maple that lived right in the middle of the battalion parade ground. Most of us put the unit we were going to on the boots. You got three throws; if you couldn't get your boots to stay in the tree after three attempts, that meant you were coming back to Devens. There were as many stories about the tree as there were boots in it. There was one pair of boots at the very top of the boot tree; turns out that they were a colonel's boots. He was going to Augsburg, wanted never to return to Devens, and so called one of his friends who worked for the engineers. They brought over one of those bucket trucks they use to fix streetlights and let him use it to put his boots in the tree. One of my classmates was scheduled to go to Seoul, Korea. He went to clothing sales, bought an Intelligence and Security Command patch, glued it on his boots and pitched 'em up there. A week later he was diverted to the Second D; he was out there one night, drunk off his ass, with a sixteen-foot 2x4 he bought at a lumberyard trying to get his boots to fall out of the tree. "I don't wanna go to the Second D!" (And then the bastard extended his tour in the Second D three times before his initial enlistment was up, reenlisted to stay in the Second D three times, and ultimately retired with 21 years in the Second D because he loved the 2nd Infantry Division so much.)
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