Sunday... Day of rest - Day 5

Post date: Nov 13, 2011 10:29:08 PM

It seemed like any down time we had people would use to catch a cat nap. We are never allowed on the beds (unless it’s time to sleep for the night) so people just went down anywhere

(Original Date: Monday, April 12, 2010)

These entries are from the letters that Brandon has mailed to me.

It’s Sunday and we were told to report to formation at 6:00am in our winter PT uniforms. These are some comfortable clothes! Long sweat pants with active wear type jacket. One of the things everyone likes is that we can wear our tennis shoes with it. So much more comfortable then the boots we have to wear.

We were told that while in reception, Sundays are pretty laid back. We woke up at 5:00am and then after formation went to chow After chow we can either go to a church service or just chill in the barracks. Right now I’m doing laundry. It’s too early to call my wife which is a real bummer, it’s only 4:47am there, so I’ll have to wait a least 4 hours or so. I did get to talk to her for a while last night which was awesome. There has been a few times when I was talking to her and had to hang-up and jump to attention because the DS came in.

We’re doing absolutely nothing today. After breakfast I took the other bay leader with me to the DS to ask a few questions, like are we allowed to sit on our bunks, lay, what shouldn’t we be doing? The DS said do anything you want, you can even sleep. (Usually during the day we can’t sit or lay on the bunks.) This was good news for everyone. A number of people took a nap and just chilled. All of a sudden at 10:45 the DS came, swung open the door and screamed “Get your asses outta bed!” It was pretty crazy. People trying to jump out of bed straight outta dreamland. Once everyone was up he just started laughing, then just talked about cooking & fishing and stuff. After that he said to get in formation at 10:45 for chow (it was already past that time). Once everyone got down there he had us all line up and we marched to D-Fac. It was actually pretty cool because the DS was doing cadence, (he would shout out a line and the soldiers would shot it back) I was in the back, so I couldn't hear what he was saying, but it sounded cool when everyone would shout it back.

Now back in barracks, doing nothing again. It’s funny how everything has changed since I was appointed Bay Leader. One minute I’m a private, the next I’m “bay leader”. The second I became bay leader everyone just assumes I know everything. People have been coming up to me asking all kinds of stuff. I’m thinking I was just next to you and knew the same stuff you know a minute ago, how am I supposed to know everything? Me and the other bay leader have tried to scrounge up as much info as possible. We talk with the other bay leader and try and spread the word. A lot of it is just common sense though. I was woke up from a nap today and the kid asked “what do I do when I plug up the toilet bay leader?” I said, “you go plunge it.” Lots of stuff like that.

DS came up and I had to quietly hang-up on my wife and jump to parade rest. We had 5 minutes to get ready and get in formation. We found out that we were going to do question and answer with some soldiers from “down range” (that’s what they call the real basic training). They evidently weren’t able to come the other day so lots of people asked questions and we got answers from guys who are in it now. The one I found interesting was a question “what’s the food like up there?” Their answer was that there is not a lot of selection and chicken seems to be the staple. We have a lot of selection each day and it’s all good here in reception. I’ll be missing this. The meeting was cool just for the fact that it broke up the monotony of the day. Before the meeting and after, we just hung out at our barracks.

I thought there would be more nicknames but the only one right now is “Midnight”. That’s what everyone calls a dude who’s obviously black. We were looking at graffiti under the top bunks wasn’t much until we checked Pvt. Home Schools bunk it read “Don’t kill yourself.”