The base is like a prison for the first two months: You sit there studying for as long as you can, then march back to the barracks, shower, sleep, and do it again. Imagine 10 hours per day learning different components of alloys and engines, followed by exercise (if you're lucky) and then ... surprise, more studying. They cram four to six years of college-level information into a six-month period. It's an impressive system, in the same way watching a car get compacted in a junkyard is impressive.

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The instructors only use nouns to save time.

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People would stand up during class and post themselves at podiums in the rear, just so they could stay awake. Every now and then one of them would literally fall over. Many times I'd be watching a lecture and hear a boom as the person standing behind me collapsed and took his podium with him. On the plus side, the rest of us would be quite awake after that ... for maybe five minutes.

While I was in "A" school, we had one girl take a bunch of pills and try to off herself. In power school there was a guy who took a swan dive off of a third-story balcony. Last we heard, he was a vegetable. Yet another girl took the pill route; a dude started cutting himself and got kicked out. You probably have similar stories about your time at college, except in this case, those casualties are out of a class of about 20 people. It doesn't help that the Navy already has the highest rate of attempted suicide in the armed forces. There's a reason the mothers of Nukes have their own support group.