Here’s the next letter from Sharpie.
25 March 2007
Well, I have time to write another letter so I think I’ll fill you in on some more reception stories. Reception is like purgatory. It’s painful, it’s damning, and it feels like eternity. The last two days have been a very strange combination of civilian and soldier life. We are basically “pacified� most of they day by being stuck in a big “day room� full of school desks watching movies on a big screen TV. And we’re not talking about a few movies, I must have seen at least seven in the last two days. And about 90% have been rated R – sigh.
Well let’s see here what can I tell you? We all got our haircuts our first full day here. Now we all look like proper soldiers and it’s a lot easier to be friends with people when they all wear the same clothes and have the same haircut.
The ACUs are awesome – I love wearing these things. I feel like a real high speed soldier when I am in these things. It was really interesting to see how guys changed as soon as they put on these uniforms. Not so much in our group but when other soldiers go their uniforms all of a sudden they turned in to drill privates (i.e. royally arrogant pricks (you can edit that if you want Ben?) Nah -Ben)
So I’m the official time keeper in my group. I think out of 45 privates only two of us brought watches. I really don’t understand it. So technically we’re not supposed to be sleeping in reception but that’s only technically. I’ll tell you about a little experience we had on Saturday. So we’re sitting in the day room watching movies when suddenly Sgt. Soto bursts through the door and turned off the TV. He had two Pvts in tow; apparently they were caught sleeping upstairs in the bays (the room with the rows of lockers). We were all supposed to be in the day room so those privates were in big trouble. But the army in their superior discipline techniques (and I’m not being sarcastic) doesn’t punish the offenders directly – instead Sgt. Soto ordered the rest of us to hold our full canteens out in front of us with both hands at eye level. The offending privates stood at the front of the room but didn’t hold out their canteens. We held these canteens up for easily 8 minutes probably 10. Try doing that yourself – not easy. And we had to keep them up straight the entire time. While we were doing this we shouted things to the privates in the front of the room (what ever Sgt. told us to) like, “thank you privates� and “Why did you sleep privates?� and “you are stupid privates.� The Sgt told us to stare at them while we did this. Man those two privates really got the tongue lashing from all of us. Gotta love army disciplinary strategy.
This letter actually has been written over the course of two days so some more interesting stuff happened today. For one, we go tour dog tags and military I.D. card. I tell you what; I.D. tags (dog tags) increase the cool/sexy factor exponentially. And the picture on my I.D. card makes me look like I am bout to kill something. I think I finally have all the gear I need to be a proper soldier, minus my M16. But I’ll be getting that in about 3 weeks and I’ll have it for the rest of basic.
I guess I have some more stories to tell but I’ll leave it for some later letters. Take care everyone!
PFC Nathan