Post date: Nov 18, 2011 8:47:00 AM
(Original Date: Wednesday, May 12, 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 had fire guard shift again from 2am-3am this morning. It seems I have some sort guard duty 2 to 3 nights in a row, then a night off and then it starts all over again. 15 minutes before the end of our shift we wake up our relief so they have time to get up and ready. Normally it isn’t a big deal except for having to do it more than once because the people fall back asleep. This morning I woke up Pvt. Skeletor (some call him skeleton) and he looked scared and tried to hit me. He ended up grazing me with a lazy right hook. It was pretty funny. Evidently he was dreaming about zombies.
We went to the range again today. I was able to pass each time I went up, but as the day progressed I kept getting slightly worse each time. All in all I am happy because I don’t think I’ll have any problems qualifying for real. The “Gut Truck” came again today and we were allowed to by powerade and power bars! Everyone freaked out and ran up there. I still haven’t been paid yet, so I just kept eating my MRE. Probably one of the best MRE’s I’ve had. Sloppy Joes – the main course was good, but the dessert was a chocolate fudge brownie (non-contraband because it was in a generic army wrapping.) Yummy! Whenever we have MREs it is like a lottery. They just start tossing them out at random and there are no trading meals.
PFC Metal was promoted to assistant squad leader, he wasn’t too happy. Evidently our old one got fired, but I haven’t heard why. At least he may get the inside scoop on any platoon news.
Good news! Our 8k ruckmarch has been changed to an 8k march with just our assault pack. (a much much smaller and lighter backpack.) They moved it from Saturday to tomorrow, but that’s ok since it’s just the assault pack. The DS aren’t too happy… our senior DS is always saying “Privates it’s a whole new army”. I guess too many people were getting stress fractures.
One of our foreign guys, a lot people call “Pvt. One-way” , got a negative counseling statement today – he is always screwing up. He is also stubborn as hell, that’s how he got his nickname. He only does things his way and doesn’t like to be corrected. Sometimes I think he doesn’t understand what people are saying (lost in translation), other times I think he pretends not to understand. Either way the DSs are really tired of it. I heard them say they wanted to start a paper trail, so if he continues to screw up they will kick him out.
Random DS Quote: “You following me? You’re looking at me like I have a dick growing out of my forehead.” (in one of our classes the DS wanted to make sure everyone understood what he was saying, but I guess everyone had a funny look on their face.)