The Dorm

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning after our initial arrival at Lackland AFB we were finally led up to our dorm on the 3rd (top) floor of one of the new buildings.

Aside: After a bit of back and forth I've decided to go ahead and call it a dorm (vs barracks). It was a huge steel and cinder block building with 10 wings, so "dorm" seems more appropriate.  Note that there were still wooden barracks in use at Lackland in 1973 and I'm glad I didn't end up in one. They were reportedly cold, drafty and impossible to keep clean.

Here's a picture I found online showing the old barracks in the foregrourd with one of newer dorm buildings behind it... I was never quite sure why there were ledges jutting out from each floor of the new buildings (we were instructed not to crawl out on them). You can also see that the windows are relatively small and pretty high above the floor so you couldn't easily look out:

Each floor of each wing was a self-contained unit that housed one "flight" (roughly 50 airmen). The unit had a single door with a small "mesh reinforced" window, a latrine (with showers), a day room (which was locked for the first few weeks of basic), the TIs office, and two large rooms, each with two rows of beds (separated by a center aisle) and lockers against the walls.

I only have one significant memory from that first night: Sergeant Wilkerson was going down the list of names assigning us beds, and at some point he called out "Mister Oz!". There was no response, so he hollered it again - and again... Finally, he spelled out "M..R..O..Z" and someone replied "It's Mroz, sir!"... And Wilkerson was like "Why didn't you respond earlier, airman? Haven't you ever been called Mister Oz before?"... He indicated that he hadn't. (Apparently the small rural town he came from did not have one single clever resident)... So - the poor guy had to endure 6 weeks of "Wizard of Oz" jokes, and people kept  running up to him, clicking their heels and asking to be sent home... He was really irritated by it. That's what made it so funny :-)

Another aside: Although we were responsible for all the cleaning in the the dorm unit itself, I was somewhat surprised to learn that we didn't have to do any laundry.We just stashed it into a bag tied to the foot of our bed and occasionally it would disappear and come back clean.

That first night was also when the drill sergeant chose the "dorm chief" and the squad leaders. Each row of beds formed a squad, hence there were 4 squads in a flight (apparently they now call them "elements" rather than squads). My squad leader was Airman Little - he'd been chosen because he was in the Civil Air Patrol.
As I recall, the dorm chief (who marched next to the formation) was extraordinarily incompetent and was only chosen because he was 6'6" and would have made the formation look "unbalanced". (At least that's what Airman Little told me - the squad leaders were privy to things the rest of us weren't.)

And one final remark to wrap up this post:
During basic training (and subsequent technical training) TIs will continually try to convince you that volunteering for leadership positions will look good on your record and earn you the respect and admiration of your future supervisors...
Yeah - don't believe it... When you get to your first assignment you will likely discover that members of the "real" Air Force have the same attitude about "brown-nosers" as members of society in general. So if you (for example) disclose that you were a "green rope" in tech school you will likely be subject to much taunting and derision... Trust me - there is nothing to be gained from volunteering for anything in the military :-)