While in Basic Training you'll learn the phonetic alphabet, you can save yourself lots of time in Basic Training if you learn this now. Once again, trust me on this one! In the early years, it was quite common for radio transmissions to become garbled. This led to the loss or misunderstanding of important information. To prevent this, the military phonetic alphabet was created.

The concept is really very simple: Each letter of the alphabet has an assigned word. When sending an important message that simply must get through intact, the words that represent each letter are spoken in succession.

For example, if you wish to transmit the word south, you would say these words in succession:

Sierra - Oscar - Uniform - Tango - Hotel

Here is a chart showing the military phonetic alphabet:

The ten numeric digits also have a designated pronunciation:

Below is a video from my Youtube channel that allows you to hear what the phonetic alphabet sounds like.