Clearing Rooms (Basic Training) Day 51

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.

Today started off with a pretty good PT session.  Now that we are further along in basic, they said it will pick up. We did a number of push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups along with a number of other stretches and minor exercises. Worked up a good sweat and our senior DS even said we did a great job! We did more and we did it faster then all the other platoons. 

After breakfast, we marched to “Cashetown”. This is a training area for urban combat. We practiced clearing rooms with a four-man team. We got to kick down doors and basically swarm a room. Each member has and assigned area to cover. I guess we did a good job because our senior DS said we were doing great…much better than most at this stage of basic. Two compliments in one day by our senior DS, that is a major accomplishment. 

We went to Cashetown with 2^nd platoon and about half their platoon was at sick call. Our DS said to stay away from them. LOL. 

We marched back to the DFAC for lunch and back to Cashetown after. We then learned some “non-lethal” techniques to use. One is a “muzzle thump” or “barrel pinch”. This is where you basically thrust your barrel of the rifle into the chest of someone. When this happens, they go down quickly. We did practice a few times on each other (while wearing body armor). After that we moved to judo throws and practiced them on each other. All in all, it was a fun day.

Laundry lately has been crazy. It’s hot here of course, but we have also been wearing “full battle rattle” everyday since NIC at Night. Full Battle Rattle consists of our normal ACUs, body armor (a big heavy vest with plates in the front and back that can stop multiple bullets), helmet, our Flick, and our camel back. When we have all this on it just seems to trap all the heat inside. Everyone sweats like a pig. When we got back to the bay I think I could have squeezed my ACUs and had a puddle of water. To combat the heat our DS encourages (and sometimes forces) everyone to hydrate a lot. 

After training we came back to the CTA and ended up having duty food with the rest of the company. 3^rd & 4^th platoon did live fire buddy team movement, we will do that tomorrow & they’ll do what we did today. The rest of the night was pretty chill, just cleaning and hanging out.

Random DS Quote: “Privates… do not hump in front of me and not expect to get kicked in the ass… You’re not even in the bay!” (During our judo throws one of the privates took down another and started dry humping him. The DS then put his foot on his ass and pushed him off).