Gear Turn in Day (Basic Training) Day 69

This entry was a little delayed...the letter took a while to reach it’s destination, but it did finally arrive

This morning I almost had to get up at 4:40am… oh what a bummer. I've grown to love the days we get to sleep in until 6:00am. They wanted the 4 tallest people in our platoon and had me down as one of them. I made sure or PG knew that I was like the 6th or 7th tallest and named everyone that was taller. So I was able to sleep in after all...LOL.

After breakfast the company had to all go to the classroom and we were given our orders for AIT and copies of all our paperwork that has been done. We verified the info on it and when we got back to our bay we had to turn it in to our DS so it got filed away with all my other paperwork. 

We then listened to the radio and cleaned our rifles until lunch, a little while after lunch our company went and turned in all the gear we were issued when we arrived here so long ago. It was a long hot process. The weather was hot and humid… the norm at Ft. Benning in the summer. We had a big duffel bag full of crap and the rucksack full or crap. We had to wait in line outside the big warehouse (in the hot sun) and slowly, but surely make our way through the return process. The horror stories the DS kept telling us about everything being thoroughly checked and sent back were a little over blown. The people there have so much to process, they could only give everything a quick "once over". Our platoon had nothing sent back.

We then came back to the bay and cleaned our rifles some more. We also pinned on our rank and stuff to our class B uniforms. Then we got dressed from the top up in our Class A uniforms. So we had on the shirt & jacket with tie along with PT shorts and tennis shoes it looked pretty funny. I ended up having to help out a lot of guys with their ties. I guess being the older guy they all came to me. LOL.  We did this because we had to get our pictures taken (from the waste up). Unfortunately, they didn't give us much time before the pictures, so I didn't have a chance to shave. I had the complete 6:00 shadow. We'll see how the pics turn out.

Later on in the night, PVT Lurch started screaming at our PG. Lots of words were exchanged and PVT Lurch's face was all red… our APG had to take him outside to cool him off. Turns out it was about fireguard shifts and sleep.

Speaking of sleep, I'm gonna get some now… we had to stay up late cleaning tonight. 

Random DS Quote: "Oh My God… Did you put butt juice in there?" ( Our cool DS talking to a guy after inspecting his rifle).