Day17

May 11th
This morning’s PT was a lot of fun! We were told to form up with our rucksacks but then the Lieutenant told us to put them back in the shacks!! We took our rifles out to the track field and did a bunch of ninja crawling moves across the field. Other than the fact that we had bare hands in the frosty grass holding our cold iron rifles with numb hands, I actually had a lot of fun! As for lectures, I slept through most of the morning and then stood for most of the afternoon. The lecture topic had potential to be interesting but it was soooo redundant and unnecessarily stretched out that I just couldn’t pay attention. The only reason I took some notes was because we had a work booklet to fill in and a test on the material the next morning. The day was great until someone was caught with their cell phone in class. We got yelled at for that and then the Lieutenant made us hold our rifles up with one arm at a time in various uncomfortable positions. I really struggled with holding my arm out horizontally, but the others were pretty good. Then we had to maintain the push up position while we tried to figure out what the marksmanship principals were. Since only 3 people had them written down, we were in that position for a long time. I didn’t find it all that difficult and I was able to write the principals into my book while maintaining that position without any problem, but some people were really struggling. Since we were so pathetic and didn’t know anything, we had to write the 4 Marksmanship Principals out 50 times and hand it in the next morning! The only thing is that after supper we had to go back to the bleachers for mid-term interviews/reports. The Sgt. Said I was doing really well for fitness and morale and all around everything else. The only thing is that I have to be sharper with my drill movements. That will be pretty easy to fix since I like drill. So while everyone was having their interviews, the rest of us were out on the bleachers trying to study and stay warm out of the wind. At 8:30 we were hoarded into the classroom to start writing our lines. We wrote for about an hour and I got up to #22 but I think I was one of the fastest ones. Then the Sgt. told us to go back to the shacks and prep for inspection, prep our rucksacks with a ton of kit and study for tomorrow’s test. I personally didn’t study but prepped my rucksack and did the lines first. I figured I would do the lines first so that I could do them while I was still awake and the chance of making mistakes was less. So I did make it up to 50 and got all ready for the next day, but at 11pm the Sgt. came by again and told ppl to forget about the lines. Poopers! I totally could have been in bed like 2 hours earlier! Oh well. I wound up sleeping in my combats so I wouldn’t be late for the next morning…