Wake up today 30 minutes earlier than usual, 30 less minutes of sleep never meant so much before. I was so tired. Then we went through the obstacle course in the break of dawn. We did everything from low crawl, high crawl, jumping, climbing, whatever. The worst part was that it rained. Hard. So there we were, crawling and rolling in the mud, and saw dust, getting ourselves dirty. We were pumped up so that was cool. For a while. Then we realized we weren’t going to be given time to change into our other set of BDUs. That killed us, for the next 5, 6 hours. We felt sand in our clothes, and every part of our body was dirty and wet. And it was freezing, too. Many people’s lips turned blue. But there wasn’t anything we could do about that, just stand there and take it. meanwhile, we got briefed on the gas chamber. It took a while for them to teach us all the stuff about the gas mask and all, what to do once we’re inside of it. If there is one thing I do not ever want to do again is the gas chamber. That thing burned my skin and all my snot and the gross inside stuff just came piling out, the eyes got so teary I couldn’t open them for minutes. Jun and Martinez went in with me, Jun took his sweet time, so we were waiting with our mask off for a few seconds and breathed in some. It’s almost 2300 as I’m writing this, and few strange things happened in our barracked. there’s Shteynberg, he talks Russian while he’s sleeping and admitted he’s more loyal to Russians than Americans. There’s Carson, who always repeats every night exactly what he says right before he goes to sleep, in his dreams. Then there’s Shalabi, who actually stayed in step as we were marching today, who just shouted ‘What? so why did you get that haircut?!’ really loud while sleeping. Then there’s Martinez who stays awake every night for 2 hours longer cuz he got article 15 for supposedly disobeying first sergeant’s order and is on 14 day extra duty, even though his knee is swelling up and is waiting patiently for his medical records to be faxed to be medically discharged. Then there’s McKissick, a black dude in love with some white girl pissed on himself twice cuz he couldn’t hold it in. But that’s a different story…