Stubrie, as you have never been to the MSP academy ; I will take your comments with a grain of salt. The alienation that occurs is not obvious, or maybe even at a conscious level, its the natural resentment someone feels when you have to do twice as much as your classmate. Imagine your roommate hurts his ankle; even if his injury is legitimate, let me tell you what you have to go through. You have to clean up the room when the DI's trash it, and they do frequently, by yourself. You have to make his rack. Fold his clothes and do innumerable other tasks while he goes to sickbay. You also just completed a 5 mile run in the morning while he rode an exercise bike. You're all for helping a fellow recruit but after about 3 weeks of this, you feel pretty resentful of him, even if its not his fault. The rest of the platoon can help out, but then again they have their own stuff to worry about. When I said that injured recruits "did the right thing" I meant that with the high level of physical activity at the academy it is not the place to heal from an injury. If, after weeks of not participating in morning runs (which become a real espirit-de-corps morale raisers), not participating in defensive tactics, drill and many other aspects of training, one should face the facts that you are not going to graduate. Give it another shot when you get healed. And, many of the recruits on medical status (in the early weeks of the academy) are not legitimately injured and are sandbagging it. Graduating the MSP academy was and is one of the proudest days in my life; my graduation from boot camp and college pale in comparison. I shed blood, sweat, and tears for 26 weeks, but, and I know this sounds harsh, if you get injured and cannot keep up with the pack and participate, you should be left behind. I know I didn't want anyone standing next to me on graduation day who didn't go through the exact same thing I did. To do less is to cheapen the accomplishment for everyone.