Time goes by differently
here. Days are so long one counts
duration between meals not days
as time units. Sometimes I
forget things happened early in
morning. Example: yesterday
before PT I was standing at
attention in the dark outside
when I noticed that my PT
shorts were on inside out.
I quickly pulled them off and
reversed them before sergeants noticed.
Platoon guide freaked. Instructions
on 2 phones and PRC 77 radio.
Interesting. Sergeant tried to
nail me for something today. I
think. Not sure if he was calling
me--in any case I didn't turn
back. I moved smartly towards
door, sprinted to formation to
hide in crowd (despite shin splints),
put my glasses on and began
studiously studying. Either sergeant
didn't want me or didn't find it
worth it to chase me down.
Probably wasn't even me he was
calling.
Ran between 1-2 miles today.
My feet really hurt.
Expect 4-1/2 hours sleep tonight.
2 letters from [fiance]. 10 Push ups
for each. Very glad to get them.
Morale really affected by mail call.
Haircut today--shorter than ever.
Shots today. Dropped for fucking
up D & C [drill & ceremony]. [Charlie] collapsed,
saved many more from same fate.
Time was weird. Like I said, you just went meal to meal, surviving each increment on its own.
Not that the meals were fun. You had to rush and be quiet. But there were chances for a little fun. Like when I tried a green pepper thinking it was no worse than a banana pepper. I popped the whole thing in my mouth to eat and nearly exploded. Quietly, mind you. I grabbed bread from every trainee near me as everyone near tried to stifle laughter just bursting to escape into the open. One trainee, a Mexican-American just smiled and ate one like it was a piece of Wonder Bread. Foxtrot was a good guy. He disliked me at first for some reason but eventually we got along great. I'm not sure what annoyed him or stopped annoying him since I didn't do anything different.
The shorts incident was kind of amusing. In the dark, I had the prospect of leaving my running shorts on the way they were and attracting attention once the sun came up; or dealing with the problem quickly, in the dark, but risking attention immediately. Our platoon guide, a prior service Specialists (E-4) who was the trainee assigned to watch over us when the drill sergeants were away, just about passed out when I chose the latter. "Dunn, what are you doing?!" he whispered as loud as he dared. "I'm fixing my shorts! Shhh!" I replied with an equally urgent whisper. I got away with it.
You can get away with stuff if you aren't so paranoid about being caught that you confess when the drill sergeants look at you funny. Like when I was walking out of the mess hall and someone behind me somewhere loudly commanded, "You there, stop!" My name tag said "Dunn" and not "Youthere" so I didn't even look back. If he'd said, "PFC, stop!" or "You with the unit patch, stop!" I'd have had no excuse. But I kept going and got lost in the growing formation outside of troops who'd left the mess hall already. Nobody came outside to look for me.
Mail was a lifesaver. Today, with email even in combat zones, that issue isn't as critical for morale. But contact from home was very important.
Lord knows what the Army kept injecting us with. It seemed like it happened fairly often.
Collective punishment continued for individual screw ups. By now, few were doing things like forgetting to button a button somewhere or wearing knotted laces on a no-knot day. But we still got dropped a lot as a platoon or company.
And only two weeks in, our hair was apparently hippie-like enough to make us go buy haircuts. One thing I absolutely hated about basic training was trying to pull a sweat-soaked t-shirt over my head only to find it stuck--velcro-like--on the 2 millimeter tall "hair" I was graciously allowed to retain. Somehow, that seemed very wrong.
We had a heat casualty that I think interrupted our exertions in the heat before anyone else went down. The trainee recovered, I'll add.
