MEPS-Hurry up and Wait

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.

Day (0)
September 8, 2010

Spent the night in the Marriott for MEPS. My day started early, about4:30 am. I got up, showered got dressed and headed for breakfast. We ate and were bused to MEPS for begin processing at 6:00. All I did there was sit in a room full of other shippers in my underwear. We sat there for an hour just to be weighted to make sure we all still met the height and weight requirements. Then I signed a few more forms in the National Guard office. This is "Hurry up and Wait" began. I sat around doing nothing really until lunch. I did get to know some of my future battle buddies though so it wasn't all that bad. One of them , is in a similar situation as me. He is also an officer candidate in the NG, almost as old as me, married, and going to Fort Jackson for BCT.
After lunch we were given a travel briefing. They told us about our flights and gave us paperwork to take with us. There were six of us going to Fort Jackson. Since I had the highest rank, I was named group leader. I was responsible for making sure we all got to Fort Jackson and for delivering some extra packets of paperwork. They told us during the briefing that we were running behind and needed to get to the airport soon. We left MEPS at 11:30 and arrived at the airport a few minutes later. When we checked in for our flight, we got some good news our flight didn't leave until 4:45, another 5 hours of "hurry and wait". Eventually we flew out and headed to Atlanta to catch our flight to Columbia, SC. We had just enough time to grab some food in the ALT airport between flights. I had pizza since I figured it would be a while before I got to eat it again. Our final flight left out at 8:15 eastern time(We lost an hour changing time zones). Our flight was mostly made up of other recruits. Once off the plane, we headed for the military check-in desk, along with over 100 others. They only had two buses to take us to Fort Jackson in. Of course this meant more waiting. My group was on the second bus all except one that somehow ended up on the first bus. It was about midnight when we finally arrived at Ft Jackson, but that didn't mean my day was over. We had some in-processing to do.