Boot Camp Part 17

October 12, 2009
Camp Lejeune
14:52

Sunday

Church goes the same as it always does. I get really sad and get pissed off at people who go who probably aren't Lutherans. Actually, nevermind. The behavior displayed by those who didn't really give a rat's ass about being in church is pretty close to actual Lutherans, so I'll take that back.

Every Sunday I fight to do laundry. Cammies and other clothes must be washed and dried, but there's hardly any opportunity to wash clothes because the washers and driers are swamped by people trying to do laundry. If I didn't go to church and just did laundry as early as possible than it wouldn't be an issue, but I don't want to sacrifice that time of the week. It helps to keep me somewhat sane.

I end up getting a washer, but I dont' have enough time to dry my clothes. I take my wet cammies back up to the whiskey locker and put them on a shelf to dry later during free time, because I have a certain time to be back in the squadbay by.

I NEVER saw those cammies again. Someone took my wet cammies. Guess what? The next time I wore clean cammies wasn't or another four weeks at least. I was left with one set of deserts for Swim Week and all of second phase. But that's just how Boot Camp works. It distinguishes the scum bags from the good people. The people who only care about themselves and have no real reason to be in the Marine Corps.

There were times on firewatch where I'd take my moon beam (flashlight) and check everyone's cammies hanging up on their rack to find the ones with my name marked in them. I never ended up finding them that way. By the end of 3rd phase I ended up having to buy a whole set of deserts, along with another woodland blouse and possibly even ANOTHER desert one.

Needless to say, that Sunday put me in a pretty bad mood, but the flip side was that I felt great. I didn't even take my bed rest because I didn't need it. I'd pretty much beaten pneumonia in a week, but I think I may have had it for a week before I realized I'd had it.

T18 - Swim Qual(ification) Begins

Swim week is probably the easiest and most laid back week in all of Boot Camp. It's when you first start getting treated a little better. Sgt. Virto told us we were only 1st Phase recruits in name only and he felt that we were 2nd Phase as soon as we finished Initial Drill.

The day works like this:
We make our swim rolls (which is a bunch of crap rolled up in a towel) and march to the swim tank. That's the pool if you can't figure it out.

We strip down in a big room with a bunch of cubby holes in the wall until all we're wearing is our green PT shorts. Then we all file through this hallway which is spraying freezing water on us to clean us off before we go in the pool.

Once through the halls we end up in a room with a bunch of boots and cammies. They are the worst boots and cammies the Marine Corps has to offer. They're worn every day by different people, missung buttons, boots missing laces, torn, you name it. My boots were different sizes, my heel was sticking out the back of one of them. Then we sit on these bleachers and wait our turn to jump off a diving board. After that we line up and put on a helmet and flack jacket and walk through the water.

I don't remember how the rest of 4th Class worked. It was pathetically easy. This information is probably available in the internet, but I'm not too concerned with finding it.

After we're done with 4th Class (which takes about 300x longer to accomplish than the time it took you to read my description) we go back into the cubby hole room to get our war bags with our uniforms in them. For some reason every DI is doing the same thing. They act like we're not sounding off enough and when we try and get our stuff out of our bags they say:

"Let me help you with that!" and they throw everything out of the bag all over the place. They didn't get me too bad, but I realized it was some kind of routine that must have been scheduled for today because they all did it and they were all saying the same thing.

T19 - Swim Qual Part 2

Now that I had finished Fourth Class, it was onto Third.

Did I mention swim qual is a joke? Basically, once Initial Drill is done, all the stress is over until rifle qualification. It's almost like a break from REAL training and is just kind of something to fill the schedule. Marines are amphibious, so I guess they really need to learn how to swim, but proving it is one of the easiest things I had to do at MCRD.

There were actually people who couldn't swim and had to spend the first two days of the week learning how so that they could qualify as fourth class on Wednesday. Sucks for them, I qualified as 2nd class and don't have to re-qualify until 2011.

Anyway, 3rd class. We do the same thing again: march over to the swim tank, take our clothes off, and put on the terrible boots and cammies. 3rd class involves jumping off the five foot diving board in full gear and then using the emergency releases to remove the large pack you're wearing, all the while not losing your M16. That's an automatic UNQ.

After that, we swim a certain length using the pack as a flotation device and then get out of the water. I don't think there was much after that. Of course for everyone in the series to do this takes about 500,000 hours.

The DIs send us back to the squadbay in groups of ten and then literally just sit around and do nothing until everyone else returns.

That concludes T19. On swim qual days I don't even think we had classes. On most T days, there's some kind of class that takes place in the morning before whatever the matrix has for that day is completed.