The Longest Week Of My Life

So it’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated this. Mainly because I spent the last weekend with my girlfriend and I didn’t want to take any time away from her. It was a crazy week of training that led up to an amazing weekend in San Diego.

The week started with classes on Monday and our 1st written examination on infantry skills. Tuesday began with our first combat conditioning hike. The test wasn’t bad at all if you paid attention in class and spent an hour or two reviewing the handbooks that we were given. The hike wasn’t as relaxed as the test was. I did manage to secure a spot in the beginning of the formation of the hike so I wouldn’t have to fight through kids and spent most of time running to stay with the main body. It was only supposed to be a 5k but I’m pretty damn sure it was a little longer than that. The entire hike we spent alternating going up and downhill. None of them were too severe, but they did do a good job of breaking you off. By the end of the hike both of my calves were numb from the pain.

Once we got done with the hike we got training on field radios, detainee handling, and how to perform buddy rushes. A buddy rush is when you come into contact with the enemy and one buddy rushes forward to close the distance with the enemy while his teammate covers him by firing on the enemy’s position. We ran a few dry fire drills before we began doing them with live fire. It was a little nuts having someone firing a few yards to your left or right and behind you. They said the distance they are firing gets a lot narrower in combat because you may be contained in an alley way in Iraq or a narrow trail on a mountain in Afghanistan. There are definitely a lot of idiots in my platoon but the event was completed without anyone shooting anybody in the back.

After all the training on we were pretty excited to find out that we would be taking a bus back to the squad bays and wouldn’t have to hike back. That evening we were given a little speech on fire watch. Well the past weekend a lot of kids sold their fire watch to other kids in their platoon. You can do this but you have to do two things: not air out the fact that you bought/sold fire watch and come up with some bullshit story to tell the duty NCO so he approves the change and its official, i.e. my family is coming into town so PFC Smukatelli has agreed to take over my fire watch. Problem was that several of the kids failed on one of the two steps and the instructors found out. Punishment is generally pretty creative in the Marine Corps and this time wasn’t any different. Normally there are only two people on fire watch at a time and it’s only a one hour shift during the week. Well as punishment they increased the number of people on fire watch from two to eight for each platoon. Not only that but we would have to wear all of our protective gear and helmet instead of just our cammies. It was actually pretty humorous because it was such overkill as there were people guarding individual stalls in the bathroom and people guarding every single door into the building. After a few days of putting up with this and no more incidents the instructors let us go back to the normal fire watch procedures.

Wednesday was a day full of classes and sitting around in the squad bay while a few people had administrative matters to take care of. Thursday was a blast though. We got some classes on land navigation and then were broken up into teams. Each team was given a map, compass, and 3 grid coordinates for the day and 3 for the night. We then spent an hour plotting the points on our maps before all the groups were split up and went to the field. We had to use our map, terrain association, and compass to move to each of the three grid coordinates. They were spread out over probably a 4-5 mile square area which contained some ridiculous hills and mountains. You actually had to get down on hands and knees and crawl up some because the incline was so steep. I took some pictures with a disposable camera which I’m hoping to get developed soon. Once you got to the locations you had to look for a box which contained a stencil with a code on it that you would use to mark on our maps/answer sheet to prove that we did indeed make it to the points. We did pretty good during the day portion. Not so much during the night portion. But it was fun and doing this kind of stuff was the reason I joined the Marine Corps and specifically the infantry.

Friday was quite possibly the longest day of my life. I knew Amy was on her way to California and that was all I could think about and getting cut loose on liberty. Sometimes it seems like we just screw around during the morning and don’t make good use of time and then all of a sudden they try to cram everything in during the afternoon and evening. So the instructors finally got everything together and we did a short little hike up one of the mountains maybe a half a mile from base. We then split up into groups of 13 that the instructors would rotate among to teach us immediate action drills. Immediate action drills are used to practice and enforce what you’re squad is supposed to do immediately if you come under attack from the front, flanks, air, or spot the enemy and want to set an ambush. We were all taught the different drills and went through them in slow motion. Once we learned all of the drills we then lined up in our squads to go on mock patrols and do the drills on cues from our instructors at full pace. Our platoon was the last one lined up to do this. It was taking forever for each squad to get through the events and it was getting darker by the minute and all I could think about was getting off and seeing my girlfriend. We could see the parking lot from the mountain when we used our scopes and I kept thinking that Amy was waiting down there for me. I used the opportunity to get to know some of the other guys in my platoon.

It’s interesting getting to know the guys around you and looking at the breakdown of the platoon. The Marine Corps draws a lot of interesting personalities and the infantry draws that much more interesting characters. Within infantry you have the smartest guys in the Marines that want to do infantry because it’s prestigious and challenging and is a good base for a career in the Marines. Then you’ve always got kids that chose it because they didn’t qualify for any other jobs in the Marines based on their aptitude tests. You’ve got kids that were former thugs and gangbangers that want to clean up and do something honorable with their life. Then there’s the nerds that somehow slipped through the cracks and boot camp and definitely never played any sports or have ever set foot in a weight room. My guess is that they are trying to compensate or redeem themselves from their high school lives. Then there’s a small group that graduated college and worked an office job and decided they still had some adventuring to do before they settled down. Including myself there are two other guys that have degrees that worked in a corporate environment for about a year before deciding to enlist. One of the guys actually worked at Met Life Insurance so I and he have a lot of similar stories. After standing up for four hours with our flaks and packs on the instructors finally decided to call it quits for the night since the sun was about to go down. We then fired off the blanks we had and hiked back to the squad bays and turned in our weapons before being cut loose to go hygiene and go on liberty. I had to do some smooth talking and a little business propositioning to get rid of the fire watch that I was assigned for the weekend before running to the parking lot to meet Amy. After a long week of training the weekend had finally begun.