Today is Sunday. Yesterday we spent the whole day doing almost nothing, doing laundry and cleaning barracks. Just now I came down to do laundry, and I got lucky and found one washer open. It’s really rare to see a washer or dryer open. Usually, it’s a warzone down here. There’s 5 washers and 5 dryers for all 120 males in this company, same for females on the other side of the barracks. People push and pull just to get their laundry done. So whenever we’re on fireguard or CQ (security guard) for 2 hours at a time, switching off 4 times throughout the night, that’s when we all usually try to get our laundry done. But people go around requesting people on fireguard to do their laundry for them. So usually even throughout the night, the laundry is full. I couldn’t wash anything for the past week so my load has been getting bigger and bigger. I’ve never done laundry before in my life. I just learned how much detergent to put in, and I probably need some help with the dryer too. A lot of things got stolen here, our camouflage uniforms (BDUs) which are expensive, and come in two pairs only, and everything else including PT (physical training) uniforms and brown shirts, even our underwear and socks get stolen. So here I am waiting as I wait for my laundry to finish. Sundays are always nice because we actually have time to do that, organize, our wall lockers, do laundry, shine boots, scrub/mop/sweep the floor, and actually write, too. And I’m not the only one here. There’s 3 other people just waiting and guarding their stuff. Every Monday and Wednesday there are laundry calls, where the entire 240-man strong company puts laundry in their laundry bay to be washed together. We fill out how much of each item we have, and get exactly the same amount of everything back, down to the last pair of socks. But there’s a strong sticker-type of numbers stuck to every article of clothing that we remove when we get it back. Sometimes it’s amazing how the army manages to do these things. Doing massive laundry, feeding a whole battalion of 1,200 men, getting each and every one of us M-16s to fire, stuff like that. Today is Sunday, so we woke up late at 0630 hours. We sure needed the break. The church service was good, the same old stuff, but I really felt blessed sitting there with about 3 or 4 hundred people, in the same battle uniform, worshipping the same God, singing the same hymns, listening to the same words, probably all thinking the same thing. We later broke off into groups, and the chaplain gave the people that remained about 50 of us, a bible, a cross to go with our dog tags, and some handouts for us to read to help us grow and remain spiritually intact with God while we’re here. It was over in about 30 minutes. I attended choir practice an hour before the service, too, but next week I’ll probably head on to Sunday School instead, because there’s about 200 people wanting to be part of that choir, and all of us are in it if you go to the practice. I just didn’t like the atmosphere at the practice. So every Sunday, I devote 8-9AM to either choir or Sunday School, which by the way has only about 30 people going, and then a Protestant service from 9-10AM. After that, we do what I said previously we do. We relax and do things we normally don’t have time to do, but get pushups for anyway.