Aug. 21st and Aug. 23rd

I’m sorry I haven’t written in a few days, but I’ve been crazy busy, and quite a bit has happened. I’ll start with my PT test I took on Wednesday morning. I’m getting tired of these by the way, but I’ve been doing pretty damn good on them. So I won’t complain. I forget my overall score out of 300 but it was between 235 and 247. I did 53 push ups (more than last time), 62 sit ups (same as last time), and I ran my two mile in 14:00 flat (six seconds better than last time). So overall I did better than our previous test, too
easy- too easy!

After our PT test, we had to get ready to head out to the field for our three day, two night FTX (Field training exercise). We packed up our heavy ass backpacks, aka ruck sacks, and headed out to Hell on Earth. I hate Georgia, its weather, its land, and everything in between…We were only allowed to bring one extra set of ACU’s, so besides the ones I was wearing, I only had one back up set of clean clothes. FML.

We spent three days doing ARM (Advanced Rifle Marksmanship) which is where we go through houses and clear them out, so we are literally out on the range in the heat sweating our asses off all day. After day one I was already filthy and extremely tired, but an hour before bedtime one of the drill sergeants thought we needed to do some late night PT. During the course, one of our guys farted which made everyone laugh. This pissed the drill sergeant off and we got smoked for almost two and a half hours. We had to low crawl in the dirt for an hour enough times to make a “race track” impression in the ground. We then had to stand at attention for the remainder of time getting threatened with being sent back to Red Phase, and Article 15’s. By the time we got done, and finished setting up our patrol base in the woods, it was near 2:30 am. We had to wake up at 4:00 am…FML.
We had a long three days out in the woods lol. We have sleeping bags and items that “could” make us comfortable laying in the dirt but nooooooo.. we can’t risk unpacking that stuff because at any given time we have to get up and react to indirect fire. That means we grab our shit and run away as fast as we can to another designation which is previous set in case of a situation like that. It sucks because it means generally we sleep with everything on and nothing unpacked. I can’t tell you how much I love running through the woods, pitch black, 2:00am with a 70lb ruck sack on my back. I am so graceful as I jump joyfully over logs and creeks… I never fall….FML!

I am really tired of even talking about being out there, that’s how miserable it is. Our last day was slightly fun though at the last shooting range. We got to shoot at moving targets and it was almost like sitting on a hill picking off civilians….or enemies. I don’t want you to think I’m crazy lol. But it really was like a sweet video game.

We had a memorial today for Private “H”, he was the guy in our platoon who died from a heat stroke two weeks ago. I cant tell you how sad it was to see Sergeant Majors, Colonels, First Sergeants, and Lt. Colonels salute his picture, touch his dog tags, and leave him his cross rifles and blue chord. I can usually keep it together pretty well, but even I had a hard time. Final Roll call was pretty weird as well. They literally call out a few names of soldiers present, and lastly they call out the deceast’s name which of course will not get a response. I don’t like military funerals, but I have a feeling that I will have to attend many of them unfortunately throughout my military career.

This paragraph is being written on Aug. 23, 2009. We thankfully have had a few days of down time since our return on Friday, and I feel somewhat rested again. Yesterday, Saturday, we sat through a nine hour class on personal finances. It was all mostly things I already knew, but I enjoyed it. I found out that I can get all credit card/car payment interest rates down to 6% because I am active duty. Sweet! The entire time we were in class, aka: all day long, our drill sergeants trashed our bay just because they were bored. We had all of our bunks turned over, all of our laundry thrown into the middle mixed with one another, and pepto bismol thrown all over our bathroom. Wed had the pleasure of cleaning all that up too, lucky us.

Afterwards, the drill sergeants were going to make all four platoons take apart their beds and move them all downstairs (We hate doing that) but instead they had a competition. We had to pick a few guys from our platoon to do their best impressions of drill sergeants, as did each platoon. The two losers had to take their beds downstairs, and we were not one of them thankfully. Some of the impressions were funny as hell too, and its funny to watch guys do impressions when the drill sergeant they are doing is standing in front of them.

Today is another lazy Sunday, I love Sundays lol. It is also August 23rd which means that we have 11 more days of basic training left. We will start AIT on September 4th which will also be the start of Black phase. Family day will start Saturday September 12th which his 19 days from today. I’ve made my own elaborate calendar which is very detailed, and I mark off each day. I have a total of 47 more days until I graduate as well, I cant wait! I’m excited as Hell too see my friends and family.

Alright, I think I’m about done with this one. I want to leave you with a quote that I enjoy, and often keep close to my heart. From the great words of Colonel Sanders, “I’m too drunk to taste this chicken”.

-PFC Zaleuke