We got smoked on Saturday, because of the Wal-Mart kid. The thing is, he promised to call his girlfriend here, which is when he went to call, but he didn’t get phone privileges here, so he had to sneak out. The drill sergeants wanted to make sure we never do anything like that again. So we did pushups, overhand claps, small circles with our arms, for about an hour. We had bayonet training yesterday, it was pretty cool but pretty tiresome. Today is Sunday, church time. Less and less people are coming now. It used to be standing room only for any Protestants in our 1200 men strong battalion, but now only about 300 people come, instead of 400 or 460 we had before. Nothing else really happened, just got in trouble for eating too slowly, not shining boots well enough, and this guy complained about our squad leader so he got an article 15. Then I got caught with my boot insoles hanging out and a wash cloth by my bed, because it was raining and the insoles were wet, and because I was sweating just sitting in my bed so I used a wash cloth to help me sleep. Later I got caught shining boots by the halls. DS Harris was complaining about it, even though I did not make the streaks and I wasn’t responsible for it anyway. My stuff gets mixed up with another KIM in our company, I’m missing 1 PT shorts and 1 brown shirt. Sometimes I find my bunk bed flipped cuz it’s not set to standard, actually only once, others got it flipped a lot more often. Some guy complained this buddy of mine named Kimball is not taking a shower. We got caught out of our bed couple times after lights out, so we had to get smoked a few times, today we’re getting smoked for talking in formation, then turn in some laundry like we do every other Sunday, Tuesday or Thursday. Letters take at least 3 days to get here from California, one thing bad about Sunday is there is no mail call. Gotta go, got land navigation tomorrow. Lights out on Sundays @ 2100 hours…. Just got smoked. You don’t wanna know what I had to do, we did exercises for like an hour. Lights out.
Land navigation was alright, the hard part was getting there, in formation, through rocks and sand, with 70 pounds of stuff on my back. All or most of us 240 people in our company made it. How to use maps, compass, coordinates, and stuff like that. We’re getting out of red phase Monday 23rd, when we have a phase testing on anything we learned so far. That’s how to salute an officer, indicating we know every rank, what to do on guard, our 3 general orders, our chain of command, first aid regarding chest wounds and bleedings, and land navigation as well as marching and facing movements with or without a rifle. Nothing else happened except the 3 mile road march, our first of 4, to land navigation area in the middle of nowhere. Next is 6 then 9, then 12 km marches. I’m tired and sick.