What Happens When Desk Jockeys Go to Military Boot Camp

Any of you cube-dwelling desk jockeys out there who think you could handle a day of bootcamp might want to check out Brittany Greeson’s photos of bankers giving it a try. She spent a day with office drones who thought they had the right stuff, but a few hours scaling walls, flipping tires, and schlepping “misery logs” disavowed them of that idea.

The pencil-pushers work for USAA’s San Antonio, Texas branch, the big bank that serves a lot of active soldiers and veterans. To get a sense of what their clients endure, and to show support for men and women in uniform, the bank periodically invites its tellers, loan officers and financial analysts to experience Zero Day PT Bootcamp. A surprising number of them sign up, and some spend weeks preparing. “They want to relate to them, to put themselves through what the military goes through,” Greeson says.

Greeson didn’t get the memo when she arrived well before dawn one day last July to cover the event for the San Antonio Express-News. She misread the assignment and mistook the 450 “recruits” for the real deal. Why wouldn’t she? They all wore the same black clothes, they all carried the same camouflage packs, and they all shouted “Yes, sir!” in unison. Never mind that most of them didn’t look like the sort of people you’d find in bootcamp, or that some of them seemed a bit clueless. “I would ask people, ‘What branch are you in?’” she says. “And they’d be like, ‘I guess navy?’”

Yellow school buses carried the recruits to a soccer field, where they glimpsed, however briefly, what a real recruit experiences. About 30 instructors—some still on active duty—harangued them with endless shouting, a “welcome to the military” ritual often called a shark attack. Then came three hours of brutal physical training that included 500 push-ups, 250 jumping jacks and just as many mountain climbers. Recruits also flipped truck tires, carried logs, and took all manner of abuse before taking a celebratory 1.5-mile run to end the day.

Greeson snapped photos while running alongside the “recruits,” feeling pretty good about herself as she kept up. It wasn’t until the end, when an announcer congratulated everyone on a job well done, that she realized she’d gone through basic training lite. “I thought, ‘Ooooooh. OK. I’m not as cool as I thought I was,’” she says. Still, she made it. Could you?