Post date: Nov 18, 2011 8:52:22 AM
(Original Date: Saturday, May 15, 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.
Woke up this morning and did our morning PT as usual. After PT we had about a 45 minute break before we needed to board the bus. It was nice not having to rush, rush, rush.
We got to the range and it seemed a little better than all the other ranges, everything except the latrine. The place had the absolute worst latrine I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. Absolutely disgusting!!
Everyone got their lane and firing assignments. I had position 2 on lane 11. Everyone has to place their rifle on the left side of the firing position. The bolt has to be locked back and the chamber is open. After I placed mine there some knucklehead kicked some sand in rifle. There was actually a big pile of sand in my chamber. I was freakin’ pissed. I have to qualify in a matter of minutes and my rifle, which I cleaned the night before, was all messed up. I took my rifle and walked as quickly as I could back to my gear (no running on the range). I did the best I could clean it and rushed back just in time to shoot. It was already hot and humid out and now I was as well. I started shooting and after only a few targets my glasses fogged up and I couldn’t see anything. I quickly threw off my hat and glasses and tried to shoot without the aid of my glasses. (I could see the closer target fine, the 250m & 300m targets were pretty blurry but I just aimed at the center of the blur. I shot at 20 targets in the prone supported, 10 in the prone unsupported, and 10 in the kneeling position. During the kneeling position, my rifle finally jammed. I was able to fix it, but about 3 targets came and went. I ended up qualifying with a 27, which is marksmanship. So I even get a little pin. I know I could have done better, but I am very happy I qualified on the first try. There were a number of people who had to try multiple times, but eventually the entire company qualified. I think the DSs were stressing a little.
Lunch at the range was duty food. One good thing about duty food is that you have to take whatever they give you…even if it’s cake. LOL. (Normally we can’t eat cake at the DFAC). I had mine and two other people gave me theirs as well. Ha!
The day was hot and I was sweating like crazy. I was looking forward to our shower afterwards. When we got back, DS A-Hole had a wild hair up his butt and decided to only give us 1-minute showers. WTF?? When we were done, we had to all line up in our towels and then all together we had 90 seconds to get dress in our PTs. After that he was like “now clean your weapons”. He’s such an ass.
We found out since everyone qualified we could all order pizza and Gatorade. Pizza was $10 each and they could not comment on the quality. I said “count me in…Pizza is like sex…even bad pizza is still pretty good.” It came an hour and half late, but it was good. Nice to have some junk food. LOL.
I ended up having staff duty with Pvt. Cock from 20:00 – 22:00. We did a lot of cleaning, moving tables, taking out the trash, running errands, and I even fixed my first “technical problem” since leaving my last job. I unjammed our DS’s printer. LOL.
Random DS Quote: “I’m like your uncle, the other two are like your dad & step dad. Always competing to see who has the bigger dick. I already won, now I just hang out.” (Our cool DS talking about our other DSs)