Walt's Corner

Task & Purpose, the military-centric news site has a nice little article about the fabled stress card and proceeds to debunk it.

Like all quality myths and rumors it is based on a small grain of truth. I attended boot camp in the 80s. It was designed to put you through a lot of stress; maybe even break you if you could not handle that stress. This weeded out the ones not up to the task before they actually became a weak link later and became danger/risk to themselves or their unit.

Blanket parties. Getting smoked. Fire guard. Four hours of sleep a night if you were lucky. Bed tossing. Hell, even bay tossing – where the drills would throw all your bunk frames, mattresses, blankets, and anything else not physically secured to the building structure out the window into the quad below. Then give the platoon 8 minutes to get everything back up, in place, and back down in formation. Some Drill yelling as loud as they could 2 inches from your face spraying you with spittle. This usually resulted in shark attacks – other Drills hearing the commotion and making a beeline to where the action was, joining in on the frenzied verbal assault.

It was all a mind-fuck designed to weed out the weak and test your stress. Enter the Stress Card. Legend has it, a new recruit could whip out this magical stress card and whatever the current humiliation that recruit was experiencing would come to a sweet, blissful end.

I would gladly pay money to see a video where some weak-minded fool would try that shit with my Drill Sergeants. Bottom line, that never happened.

So how did we get here? Were there stress cards? There absolutely were. Could the troops whip one out when being verbally assaulted and it would all end? Fuck no. There has not been one single confirmed first hand eyewitness report. Never. More like Reo Speedwagon’s “Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend, who heard it from another” you been really stressed owwwwwut. And if you sang along with that, you’re an old motherfucker. We all heard it from someone-A who knew someone-B who gave a first hand account. And that someone trusted that someone who gave the first hand account. In other words they trusted a fart. Never trust a fart. You will eventually shit your pants.

What really happened was someone-B heard it from someone-C who gave the first hand account, and someone-B trusted someone-C, so when someone-B passes along this knowledge, he tweaks the story just a hair. Someone-B relays the story as if they were the actual first hand account. Because they know a truth seeking someone-A will not just accept a word of mouth story as the gods’ honest truth unless they hear it from that certain point of view.

So what were these stress cards? Just that. Stress cards came in various shapes and sizes. The most common ones I have touched came in the size of a credit card and a 6-inch ruler. Most were given out by agencies that fell within the realm of Army Community Services. These agencies go to cheap promotional stores where they get pens, pencils, stress balls, and yes, stress cards engraved or pictured with their individual logo and numbers. It’s their business cards.

The Army has long struggled with suicide. Of course depression/stress played a large part in the root cause of these suicides. These cards would list agencies and phone numbers one could call if one were to be feeling depressed or stressed. Most of these cards even contained a strip of material that when you place your thumb on them for 30 seconds, it would change color. You then matched the resulting color to a scale off to the side to determine your stress level. Sound like a mood ring? Same concept. I’ve been on the receiving end of these cards during various briefings throughout my career in government service and I’ve handed them out to members of my various briefings.

So yes. Stress cards existed. No, they were never pulled out to stop a Drill from berating you.