BCT Day 15

These post are from letters that Jason has mailed to me. Sometimes his writing is hard for me to read so bare with me if some of the terms aren't right. I hope that you enjoy as much as I do.

BCT Day 15
September 27,2010

Today was a pretty cool day. We started out with a march to the Fit to Win (FTW) course. FTW is an obstacle course that you run as a team, but you complete the obstacles as individuals. I think the course is about 1/2 mile long. To make it even more fun, it rained all night so the course was wet and muddy. Most of the obstacles were either jumping over something like a wall or crawling under or through something. Four teams ran the course at a time, so it was an unofficial race. My team won, luckily. It was some of the most fun we've had so far. Everyone was filthy and so pumped up after FTW. We ate some breakfast (hot a's) and headed to our next stop, the gas chamber.
We marched from FTW to the chamber, in some light rain. We were already wet from FTW though. Plus, we had more to worry about than rain. Everyone was nervous about the gas chamber. We've all heard the horror stories about it.
They took us in by platoon, so there were about 35 of us in at one time. our mask were on when we walked in so everything seemed fine. Within a few seconds our shin was burning. We still were able to breath fine since we still had our mask on. Then, the fun started. The DS's went up to us one by one, made us break the seal on our mask, say our rank, name and SS#, and put our mask back on and clear the gas out of it so we could breath again. This did cause a little discomfort, but as long as we didn't open our eyes or breath in while our mask was off. Most people were fine, but a few panicked. One guy, everyone calls him Turkey since that's were he's from freaked out. He wanted to get out and almost started fighting the DS's. He didn't get out, though. After our masks were back on they split us up in groups of 10. Each group had to take our mask completely off our heads and say the Soldiers Creed.Once you breath in, it's over. It has to be the worst experience of my life. Your eyes, lungs, and skin are on fire. You can't breath. There's snot pouring out of your nose. You're going and want to puke. They may have made us stay in for 10 seconds or so like that, but it felt like forever. Once your outside, it still takes several minutes to catch your breath and get back to normal.
Even though it sucked while we were in there, I'm glad we did it. I'll definitely never forget it. It's something most people can't say they've done. Plus, it's just another graduation requirement checked off the list. Oh, by the way, this was all before lunch.
The rest of the day was more relaxed. I think they were letting us recover from our intense morning. That and we are ahead of the normal BCT schedule, so we don't have to rush. Our company only has about 75 people in it. The company would normally have almost 4 times that many soldiers in it. So, it doesn't take us as long to complete most things. Tonight really capped off the day as well. I got 5 pieces of mail some letters and pictures from Em and Izzy, one from my mom , and a card and picture from my civilian co-workers. It's hard to imagine letters making that much of a difference considering that they are rarely used anymore. But when it's the only thing that keeps you connected to the outside world, it's amazing to get a simple letter. To make it even better we didn't have to pay for our mail. We have a PT test in the morning, so they didn't want to wear us out. With that said I've got some reading to do...