BCT Day 37

The following information is a portion of “Marck’s Boot Camp Diary”. The information contains a straight-forward look at Basic Training Life on a daily basis. The information contained within this page is used with the express written permission of the author. For more information about the author view the “Author’s Information” at the bottom of the page. Some choice phrases have been censored.

August 30th, 2002

White phase PT test today. I did excellent. I rank #9 in the platoon for high score combining push-ups, sit-ups, and 2-mile run. I did 52 push-ups in 2 mins, 79 sit-ups in 2 mins, and 15:13 for the run. Damn, when I got here, I ran it in almost 20 mins.

The bad part about today was being singled out by D.S. Boston (the tough one) in front of the platoon because I ****** up a movement during practice for today’s march off competition. He told me to get the **** out of his formation. I’ll continue on the little notebook. I’m going to the range.

Like I was saying in the other notebook, I got singled out by the D.S. for some tiny **** up while maneuvering with my weapon. Other people were ******* up too. He just doesn’t like me. My goal of blending in for all of BCT failed.

Anyway, we got 2nd (out of 4) place in the march off again. We surprised the hell out of the DSs, ourselves, and the other platoons. We looked like **** during practice and everyone expected us to get last. The DSs are semi-happy again.

I have a long night ahead of me. We’re doing firing with our masks on, burst fire, and night fire. We won’t get back until 2200 and then we have to clean the barracks because they look like ****. I expect like 3 hours of sleep tonight. As long as Isabella keeps me company, I’ll be ok on this long day.

It’s 1830 and no dinner yet. Sooo hungry. We only got brunch today. What a long day. Hey, guess what tomorrow is? Blue phase! Three more weeks of training, a little over half a week of cleaning up and graduation prep and I’m out.

I did something bad today. We got dinner on the shooting range. Then they let the people with high PT scores get seconds. I got in line anyway even though my PT score wasn’t high enough. Two guys from my platoon who got higher scores than I did saw me get seconds before them. They’re going to tell everybody an they’re all gonna hate me.

I’m in the ****** now. When I go back out there, they’re all going to hate me. It might not seem like a big deal, but I broke one of the seven core army values: integrity. I feel really bad about it.

I just came back to my platoon. We’re sitting on the grass waiting for it to get dark for our night fire exercise. I sat sort of behind everybody. No one noticed me come in, or no one cares. I feel like they’ll lash out at me though. We’ll see. Maybe I’m paranoid, but my gut tells me a few people will be quite unhappy with me. One of them is a squad(14 people) leader, out of the four we have. He has the power to give me extra fireguard duty. At least I’m full. Only two meals today, and range dinners are such tiny portions. And I’ll probably be up most of the night.

I hate being so paranoid. I asked someone in a subtle way what happened while I was in the shitter. Nothing was said. I have paranoia. I always think people are talking **** behind my back. Enough of my mental issues.

I just shot about 20 bullets with tracers on them for night fire. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve done here. I see red flash of light leaving the barrel of my weapon and ping! It bounces off the target and changes directions. Hmm, writing as stuff happens is a lot better. Writing takes too much time away from my daily hour of personal time. All this **** is written in the moment, as it crosses my mind. Sometimes I read over it and go, “Damn, I’m one crazy son of a *****. Why did I just put that intimate part of my psyche for the world to see?” Now everyone knows about my paranoia. Well, I’m going back to watching fireworks and smelling gun powder. Don’t YOU wish you were here now doing this cool ****?