KP Duty

I think it is the general opinion that KP Duty in the military is some sort of punishment. I have seen it in many movies where they use it as such. I can tell you that when I was in basic, while we were at the rifle range, those who were doing the best were put on KP. I guess the idea was that they needed less training. I was one of the few from our company who got selected for KP for the entire time we were at the rifle range. The downside was that I had to get up at 3am to go over to the chow hall to be there for the start of making breakfast and all that this duty required. We broke dozens of eggs by hand. Ran the line, served the food to the troops and didn't get to eat our breakfast until everyone was fed and back out. The upside was that we got to eat as much as we wanted of anything there so I got to eat like 10+ slices of bacon and all the eggs that I wanted and so forth. Another plus was that after lunch service at about 2pm we were all loaded into a truck and driven out to the range so we could get our time in and didn't have to march out there when the company did every morning. I considered this to be a huge perk and that along with actually having time to sit and enjoy a big breakfast made getting up so early for me. They wouldn't let us cut up the potatoes used to make the potato salad with sharp knives. They were not allowed to give us anything we might use to stab each other. We didn't have to peel the potatoes, they had a huge machine with what looked like sand paper inside it, you dumped a 50lb bag of potatoes in, turned on the water, closed the lid and let it run for a couple of minutes. When we opened the lid, they were all peeled. Cutting them up was different though. They gave us butter knives. It took forever.