Saturday. I’m losing track of time. It doesn’t matter what day of the week it is, we do rigorous training everyday. The drill sergeants find something wrong with everything, we always drop and do pushups. Kind of getting used to it though. They run 2 miles this morning in 13 minutes, Alpha group did. I kept up for a while but my legs hurt and I came in almost a minute late. I got so pissed at myself. I might fall back to Bravo group, they run the 2 miles in 18 minutes. But probably not, I’m gonna try to stick around as much as possible. By the end of training, they’re gonna run 6 minute miles. We still march a lot, if we execute every move right, we might be able to march in the graduation parade. Speaking of which is still 8 weeks away, actually 7 weeks and 2 days. We’re all counting down here. Every morning I wake up, I am less and less energetic than the morning before. I just wish we could have a whole day off and just sleep. We got our first mail yesterday. I didn’t receive any, only 4 or 5 people in our 60 man platoon got mail, one of them got 20 or so from her boyfriend alone. All of us were so jealous. Some people even cried because of it, people saying they’ll kill themselves or quit the army if they don’t get a letter soon. All of us are so desperate for some sort of news from the outside world, it’s so depressing here, same old things, physically and emotionally tough. One guy in our room named Lacerda suffered from heat stroke, this is his second time. So now he’s on profile for a few days, and wears a red tape on his boot lace. It wasn’t even that hot too. But if he passes out again, he’ll be out of basic training and the army. But for a few days he won’t be allowed to do pushups, situps, run, march, anything too physical. Last night, for maybe 5 minutes or so, about 30 of us from the 3rd platoon went to one room and prayed. We prayed about Lacerda when he went to the hospital, prayed for al of us passing the PT test, prayed for whatever we felt was necessary. And for that 5 minutes, I truly felt like I belonged here. Tomorrow is Sunday. And we expect it to be laid back. Same old things this past week or so, marching, running, eating, taking classes, being told how to do everything, cleaning our barracks and wall lockers. Next week is obstacle course. Maybe it’ll get more interesting then, it sure will when the week after that or 2 weeks after when we receive our M-16s and go to the ranges all day long.