27MAR05

It is now the 4th week of Basic Training, and my free time situation is starting to improve.  I still don't have enough free time to write to everyone, so you will all have to suffer a mass snail mail letter.  (Mom's note: Waylon had asked me to copy and mail this letter to everyone, but I created this website instead.)  It's rather strange having to rely on such a low tech means, but what are you going to do?

My regular day starts with me waking up at 4:30 am, and having to be dressed in uniform, have my bed made, face shaved, and get into formation at 4:50.  We then march to the Armory and draw our rifles.  With about 150 people in our Company, it takes about 20 minutes.  We then march back to the barracks, drop off our rifles, and march to the Physical Training (PT) area.  We have about an hour of PT, lots of push-ups and sit ups, or on alternate days, running.  Then we march to the DFac (Dining Facility) to eat breakfast.  For the first 2 weeks, we had to stand while eating.  The punishments they use can be strange, but they really do work.

After breakfast, we normally have a class of some sort.  Some of the classes we've taken are: money management, Army values, Army organization, field exercise, the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice), and map reading.  Depending on how long the class runs, we'd either head to lunch, or to a place to practice what we'd just learned.  Some of the places are a land navigation course, the parade grounds, and the woods to practice camouflage. Lunch is served around 11:30 am.  The food isn't horrible.  It's about on par with the food served in dining halls at colleges.  It's nothing special, but it fills you up.  After lunch, we have more classes.  Time really seems to fly at this point, and dinner is at 4:30.

After dinner, we usually turn in our rifles, head back to the barracks, and have personal instruction with our drill sergeants.  That goes on until they give us personal time, where we have to shower, shine our boots, clean the barracks, write letters, read letters, and do any other chores that need to get done.  Lights out is at 9:00 pm, and I'm usually so tired that I fall right asleep.

Interspersed throughout the day are CAPE sessions (Corrective Action, Physical Exercise) for the things we've done wrong.  Usually, this involves a Drill Sergeant blowing a whistle - 1 blow means run in place, 2 trills mean push ups, and 3 means sit ups.  They can be really mean and change the exercise every couple of seconds.  Going up and down really takes it out of you.  These sessions can last between 5 and 45 minutes.  There are other ways they punish us as well.  One is to hold our rifles over our heads.  It's only about 8 pounds, no problem -right?  They've had us hold them up for 30 minutes while marching once.  That was really hard!

Life here isn't all PT and classes though.  The hands on stuff is usually a lot of fun.  We've done several different obstacle courses, a repelling tower, a daytime and night time land navigation course, and a bayonet training course.  We had a team building course where we had to maneuver a whole team through an obstacle using less than the optimum amount of equipment.  We've also been put in a gas chamber with our gas masks on, and then were told to take them off to give us confidence in our masks.  Being gassed wasn't a pleasurable experience, but it also wasn't as bad as I had imagined it would be.

Last week, we went on our first of three FTX's (Field Training Exercise).  The weather was cold and rainy, but we had thermal underwear and rain clothes, so it wasn't horrible.  We took busses to the grounds, which was good, as we had a duffle bag and a ruck sack filled with all of our gear.  Hiking there would have been exceedingly difficult.  We arrived at the grounds and set up our tent.  It was large enough to hold all 25 males in my platoon.  There was supposed to be a wood fire stove in the tent, but they didn't bring one.  We were the odd platoon out.  After the tent was set up, we had to dig fox holes around the perimeter of the camp.

The rest of the FTX was spent doing guard duty or going out on patrol.  With both options, there were opportunities to get into mock fire fights using blanks in our rifles.  Those were the only moments of excitement in an otherwise boring 3 days/2 nights.  We did eat MRE's which were certainly edible, but are nothing to write home about.

Coming up next week, we have a 5 kilometer road march which will take us to Basic Rifle Marksmanship (BRM).  This is where we learn how to properly fire our M16A2 rifles.  In the far future, we'll have another 5K road march, an 8K,10K, and 15Kroad marches, 2 more FTXs, a few more obstacle courses, and the I'll be finished.  Time is really moving by quickly, and I've already completed 1/3 of Basic Training.  It seems like a blink of an eye.  I hope everything is going well in your neck of the woods.

From F Leonard Wood, MO

PFC Waylon D. Bader