Post date: Nov 17, 2011 3:40:57 AM
(Original Date: Thursday, April 22, 2010)
These entries are from the letters that Brandon has mailed to me. His writing at times can be a bit difficult to determine his words... bare with me, I do my best, especially with army terms.
I'm going to start talking a little about food. Every meal is extremely rushed. The food is pretty good, but we have no time to enjoy it. We are also not allowed to look anywhere except our trays while we are shoveling it in. Also there is absolutely no talking. Because of the danger for heat related injuries, we are all required to get three glasses of liquids with each meal. (2 powerade and 1 water). For breakfast before we were done the DS yelled out that we had to get an additional glass of OJ and a glass of milk when we finished out food. I almost threw up. 5 glasses of liquids in a short period of time is a little too much. Everyone wasn't feeling to well after that.
We finished the rest of our 1-1 assessment test. One minute each for push-ups (1 did 37) and sit-ups (I did 27). The real test has 2 minutes for each event. I just weighed myself and I am 190lbs. Thought I might have gained more since we didn't do anything in reception.
Later on in the day we were given a briefing by the brigade sergeant major. We then had a briefing from the Army's version of NCIS, they are called CID. They are actually active duty army, but they don't have to wear the ACUs or even have their hair cut to the same regulations as the normal army. Their message was basically – don't do drugs. After that we had a few more classes, those classes take all my concentration to stay awake in, people getting smoked left and right.
Now I'm going to tell you a little about some of the folks I'm with here. I've talked before about PVT Home School. Unfortunately, He's in another platoon now. I know he would have provided a lot of writing material. LOL. I did talk to someone in his platoon though and I see him here and there. I think he got the best platoon for him. I guess they don't get smoked as much and their drill sergeants don't even yell that much.
There are finally some nicknames that the DSs have started using. "Lurch" - a really skinny guy, so tall he changed the lights in our bay just standing on the floor. "Golden Gloves" - a guy who won the golden gloves boxing championship. (He's also the guy who jumped to the parade rest position when in the shower as the DS was talking to him.) "Boston" - a guy from Boston with an accent and all. Then there's this guy I'm going to call Pvt. Jacket. I've been going to write about him earlier, I've have actually written my wife about him. This guy messes up quite a bit and he's on the chubbier side. He reminds me a lot of the guy in "Full Metals Jacket" that kills his DS and then kills himself. All the DSs picked up on it right away and would attack anytime he messed up. We had, a few days ago, a class on heat injuries, because it get so hot here and we are doing a lot of physical activities. They went through all the symptoms and then later that day Pvt. Jacket started saying he was having these symptoms. The DS took his temp (98.6). Then had him just sit and drink water wherever we went and whatever we did all he would do is just sit and drink water. He went to sick call another day. Then we had a class on suicide and what to look to look for. Next thing I know Pvt. Jacket is now on suicide watch. His bed is in the middle of the bay and there has to be guards besides the fireguard to watch only him. He can't even take a poop with the stall door closed. A few guys had to go through his locker and remove anything he could hurt himself with. He'll be shipped off somewhere else tomorrow. So that is one down in our platoon. I wonder if anyone else will fall out.
Speaking of guard duty, we also have a "laundry guard". Our platoon has all the washers in the barracks on Mondays & Wednesdays. There isn't really enough time or machines for everyone to do their own, so for the whole night each hour we rotate a person to do everyones laundry. I was gong to do the first shift at 9pm tonight with the addition of a suicide guard everything got shuffled around. I now have fireguard from 22:00-23:00.
Random DS Quote: "Stop choking and start eating, hurry up" (heard during dinner at the DFAC)