The most embarrassing drop from my OCS class, many moons ago

I commissioned before a lot of y’all were born, but I know kids love stories about officers/candidates behaving badly, so here’s one.

My OCS class had a ton of drops, being that the War on Terror had just begun and changed everyone’s decision calculus. And compared to what I see on Reddit, rather than DOR, the majority of our drops just ghosted OCS over the weekend or snuck out to their cars and drove away in the dead of night. I was a current enlisted LCpl as a candidate, so not an option for me even if I wanted to.

The most embarrassing drop: we had this big athletic kid fresh out of college, was performing really well, but clearly internally he was having major misgivings. One morning we woke up and he was gone, and the firewatch log showed he left the squad bay at 3am, just bailed.

The next day our Platoon Sergeant (like a Senior DI) came in with a huge grin and made an accouncement:

If anyone was worried about Candidate Gustafson, I have good news for you. His mother called OCS HQ today and let us all know he arrived home safely!