Boot Camp Part 11

August 18, 2009
Camp Lejeune
20:20

T6 - Upper Strikes

The beginning of my second week of actually training begins like any other. We wake up to "LIGHTS LIGHTS LIGHTS LIGHTS! GET OUTTA THE RACK! GET UP! LET'S GO! WELL, YOU HAVE 300299298297296295..." as Sgt. Virto runs up and down the Drill Instructor Highway (middle of the squadbay). Sgt. Saldana is behind him screaming as well. We are tired, annoyed, pissed, we have to piss, we're nervous because we don't know what's in store for us today.

"LEFT BOOT SOCK, GET IT ON YOUR BODY NOW! WELL, YOU HAVE [counts down]" yells Sgt. Virto and I scramble to pull a brown sock onto my left foot. "Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one, you are..."

"DONE, SIR!" we answer in unison. We stand at attention but of course someone doesn't have their sock on all the way. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get a sock on when someone's screaming at you. And of course we all have to take our socks off in a time limit and start over. Eventually we're totally dressed.

"PORT SIDE GET IN THE HEAD, STARBOARD SIDE MAKE YOUR RACKS. READY..." we take a breath. "MOVE!"

We yell "KILL!" in response. The port side of the squad bay scrambles to get into the head to piss and brush their teeth. We, on the starboard side, scramble to make our racks as one of the DIs counts us down. Miranda, my half brain dead rackmate, will hardly respond to me when I make a suggestion. It's either "huh?" or "what?" which is more frustrating than it sounds.

Either way we survive without wetting our pants.

After eating breakfast and whatnot we change over into green cammies for MCMAP training, which I come to hate eventually. We march over to a "pit" filled with rubber chunks and get covered and aligned in a mass formation with the rest of follow series. There's an instructor with a green shirt in front of us (the DIs wear a shirt of the color of their battalion, in our case red).

We begin by doing warm up excersises. We start with "BENDSANDTHRUSTS!" as the instructormakes it sound. This is dropping down, shooting your legs out, doing a pushup, and jumping back up. These are sometimes called burpees.

After this we learn about setting up the dojo. The Mexican instructor we have (who's talking on a bullhorn periodically so we can all hear) says it like this: "set up the doJO!" People who went through Boot Camp in San Diego within the past year or two know exactly who I'm talking about. It's a well quoted phrase to say the least. I can't recall his name, but it was one of those long, Hispanic compound names.

We begin with "body hardening" which I'm not exactly comfortable with at first. This involves essentially hitting your partner while he hits you to deaden your nerves a little bit. We hit the insides of our elbows together, the insides of our wrists, we punch eachother in the stomach, we kick the outside of eachother's thighs, and we kick the inside of eachother's thighs. The first couple times I did this was with a guy named Moulard. Physically, he's a beast. As we do it he keeps muttering "harder to me" as we beat each other in tandem. I'm wincing pretty much every hit, and the worst is getting kicked inside the groin. Ouch.

Either way we finish it and learn basic "Upper Strikes" such as punching and uppercuts. It's all worthless talk and just a time waster if you ask me. MCMAP is through in my opinion, especially the initial training one must suffer.

Everytime we execute a strike we have to do it twice and say "KILL! KILL!" which sort of makes me grin now. If I were watching recruits do this I'd probably break out laughing.

After this nonsense the training finishes...we eat...we hygiene...we hydrate...we sleep.

T7 - Pugil Sticks I

It seems like when I tell people about Boot Camp they always ask me about this part. "Did you get to do that thing with the sticks and the football helmets?"

"Yes...I did that. They're called Pugil Sticks. It's overrated."

After beginning the day like we normally do, we go to a large PT area. We've all picked up a rubber M16. Some people have really shitty ones that are bent or rusted. Parts of them are rubber, but most of them are metal. You could still do some serious damage with them. We take a rubber bayonet and click it onto the end of the barrel.

We all "set of the doJO" once again with our rifles and learn various butt strokes and bayonet stabbing moves. This all translates over to the pugil sticks, which have a red end (the front) and a black end (the back) to simulate an M16. There are some people I definitely would have rather used a rubber rifle on.

We organize by weight class (I was 150 at the time if I'm not mistaken) and line up in order of heaviest to lightest. Once at the end there are recruits that dress us with a flack jacket, large gloves, a groin protector, and a hockey/football helmet. The whole time we're watching other people in the large circle next to us fight (there are about three or four fights going on at a time if I'm not mistaken). The photographer that was taking pictures of us during pick up is walking around snapping shots of peoples faces. I didn't get photographed during this time, unless I missed it when I examined the CD back in April.

Finally, it's my turn. Many of the fights have been called by an instructor based not on how many times a person hits the other guy, but how accurately they execute one of the moves we were just taught.

I get into the ring with someone from another platoon, who stares me down through the mask on his helmet. The whistle is blown and we rush at eachother. He throws his stick around a couple times and I block him, and I execute one butt stroke, hitting him in the head with the black end of the stick. The whistle blows again. The green shirt comes over and hits me in the head. "Winner," he says. "Horizontal butt stroke," he says, which is the move I won with. Well, that was my ego booster for the week. I run out and take my stuff off and go back to where all of our canteens are staged. I stand in formation with other recruits from my platoon and drink water, waiting for everyone to finish.