Sand, Sun and no sleep

Many of you here in the states have had frequent contact with me since I have been stationed here at Camp Pendleton. I have had a cell phone which I use frequently and internet access which I use even more. So, talking to Peter has not been hard.

However, all good things come to an end and the last ten days Peter has been "indisposed". I had my cell phone with me mind you but, it didn't work out in the middle of bum fuck nowhere (please excuse the language, I've been hanging out with Marines and it's kind of gone downhill). I have spent the last ten days "training" which really just means going with out sleep, food and water for extended periods of time while running and firing a weapon. It was fun and also made me realize that I REALLY don't like guns but, that's a different subject. Let me tell you about my week shall I?

Day one: wake up before the sun. Bring gear to staging area. Bring gear to different staging area and load on trucks. Wait three hours. Load on bus. Drive north three to three and half hours with crazy lady bus driver. Get lost on Fort Irwin. Drive to same spot three times and finally on third time realize it is correct spot. Offload bus. Move from hot ass sun into hot ass tent with Battalion (a Battalion is roughly 500-600 guys). Procede to sweat off balls in hot ass tent from 1300 to 1700. Load on 7-ton truck and await movement to real camp. Midnight- get woken up to be told we are spending the night in hot ass tent.

Day two: wake up with sun. Load on 7-ton. Drive on dusty road for about an hour to Forward Operating Base (FOB). Horray FOB tents have A/C (will cover this more later). Unload gear, set up sleeping area.

Day two night: 2100, all others are going to bed. My platoon (whiskey 3 or simply W3) gets called on to go retrieve some vehicles that have broken down. 2330, find vehicles as they are towing each other up dusty road. Drive ten miles an hour back to FOB. 0130 Get back to FOB. Sleep. 0330 (or about there I'm not really sure) wake up shivering due to A/C in tent being EXTREMELY cold.

Day three: wake up with sun. Eat. Hydrate. Attend BS class on something stupid (I honestly don't remember what they tried to teach us). Sleep. 0330 (or somewhere) wake up shivering again despite sleeping in fleece, pants and socks.

Day four: wake up and load humvees for overnight training, and I quote "we're only going to be out one night". Pack two pairs of socks and two shirts just in case. Around 1500 get told that we're not going back to the FOB and will be out on the range for the remainder of the week. Training site has no AC tents I might add.

Day Five: Shoot machine gun. Don't remember much else from that day.

Pretty much Days four through eight are the same. Wake up before the sun. Eat. Train. Get stopped in middle of training due to "black flag" conditions meaning it's too hot to train. It got to be thirty degrees hotter where we were than downtown Baghdad. During black flag we move to the shade usually, underneath a humvee. Yes, UNDERNEATH the humvee. We also take off our flak jackets and kevlar which are our protective elements that weigh a lot and keep body heat in. Enjoy coolness of not having flak and kevlar on. Get told to put flak and kevlar back on due to "hellfire" status. Meaning helicopter pilots are such bad shots that even though we're miles away they might still hit us. So there were are in heat deemed to hot to train or wear flak and kevlar... with our flak and kevlar on because some stupid Army pilot might miss his target. Army, they'll take anybody.,

As if this isn't enough to make you mad. We were waking up before the sun and training until mid afternoon. Then stopping due to the heat. Then we would train some more in the evening. Then we would sleep until about midnight and wake up to train at night. The back to sleep around two or maybe three. Then wake up before the sun again. So there we are. Weapons Company, tired, hungry, stinky, all of us have athletes foot (most people brought one pair of socks for the "one night" training that turned into five or six days, hotter than Baghdad and pissed off because we're sitting around not training. God I love the military sometimes.