Post date: Nov 24, 2011 1:37:53 PM
(Original Date: Friday, September 3, 2010)
There were a lot of rumors today that PT would be another run day, because Sgt. Kent wouldn’t want to lose a run day because of the holiday weekend. This was not the case however as we did the normal warm up exercises and then a number of push-up and sit-up drills.
Today at school we only had a half day which was nice. After lunch we didn’t have to return, but the Russian instructor was sure to remind us of all that we had to get done over the extended weekend.
After lunch we had safety training scheduled. This was not the ordinary weekend safety briefing, but a full blown session with a number of speakers and the entire battalion. Because of the 4 day weekend coming up I guess they thought they needed to remind everyone to be safe.We were broken up into males and femails. Males headed to the gym and the females headed to the chapel. Sitting in the gym bleachers with no air conditioning and a few hundred other hot and sweaty dudes was not a very comfortable experience. We ended up getting briefs from several different sergeants, each going over a certain topic. The battalion commander started things off letting us know how important this information is and ended his speech with having the entire battalion repeat after him...”Wrap That Rascal”. The topics included: Going AWOL, Suicide Prevention, Sexual Assault, STDs (complete with the graphic photos of STD covered penis and vaginas), drugs and alcohol, and finally Traffic Safety. This last segment was done by our own Sgt. Kent who during his brief said the word “doggon” 50 times (a guy behind me was counting). 3 hours later we were dismissed to our company areas.
One more note on STDs...we were all informed that the 15th signal brigade is in first place in the entire army with the number of STDs! I’m glad I’m married and monogamous.
We had about an hour break then had to have our normal safety briefing from our 1st sergeant and our commander. The commander said a person in our battalion committed suicide this last week. Our lone girl sergeant took the stand after that and asked if anyone wanted to talk to the commander about this suicide (they stated the name because there were some that knew this person). The girl sergeant is just a total bitch and I’ve hated her from my first impression of her. She stood on the stand in front of everyone and after asking if anyone needed to talk to the commander about this suicide she just stared at the formation...anyone...anyone...ok moving on and started to do mail call. She is pretty heartless and from what I’ve seen treats all the privates like crap and doesn’t care about any of them.
After what seemed like an eternity of standing in formation in the hot sun we were finally released. It turned out only to be an hour, but when you’re in direct sun in full ACUs with sweat rolling down your belly and legs...it seems like forever. Those of us in RBK then marched over to our barracks. Everyone was fully expecting some sort of cleaning marathon because of the 4 day coming up, but to our surprise we were released for the night. The sergeant on desk also said he’s treating this like a weekend night so we don’t have to be back until 1AM (Phase V) or not at all (Phase V+). We later found out that the folks in Charlie had a 21:00 bed check (a half hour earlier than normal). Sucks to be them!
Me and the young hawaiian went over to the bowling alley. We met up with my old assistant bay leader (back from reception days), Pvt. Diesel from my platoon in basic, and a few others. We had a few beers and talked about the times in basic and how AIT has been treating all of them. PFC Metal and his wife joined us later on, it was a pretty good night. Nice to unwind and relax.