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.
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 army issued 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 the D-Fac.
It was actually pretty cool because the DS was doing cadence, (he would
shout out a line and the soldiers would shout 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
I'm 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.”
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