Day 13

Day 7 of BCT

      Today was very wet and cold. We had PT at 0530, starting off with warm up drills before our first ability group run. I'm one of the slowest 20 people in our company, so I was in "D" group. We ran 1 mile in 12 min., which is slower for me, so it wasn't too bad. My body is very tired and sore though. They said we will only have "D" group once or twice more and then move on to "C" group. To graduate, I have to make all ability group runs, and not fall out more than 5 times. Hopefully, my body hangs in there, and it won't be a problem.
      After PT, we quickly changed and grabbed our assault bags for the Team Discovery Course. It's a series of scenerios you have to complete as a team, and the goal is to learn more about working well together. We had breakfast at the company before marching to the course. It was at the same place as we went yesterday. We "turtled" our gear (covered it with a poncho), and formed teams. We were about 30 min into our first task when it started raining. Our goal was to get our team and a casualty across a gorge with limited supplies. We were on track to make it, but ran out of time. We started to move to our next task, but they decided it was just too wet to continue. We marched back to the company area and had lunch.
      We moved to our platoon bay to learn how to clean our rifles. We should have had a personal time afterwards, but since our platoon couldn't stay quiet, we lost having any extra time.
     Surprisingly, there are quite a few people in our platoon that are older than me. We have 6 E-4's (specialists) in our platoon. We also have a handful of people in our platoon refuse to listen to directions or pay attention to detail. Right now our DS's are telling us we are the worst platoon and they continue to threaten us with Article 15's and being shipped out. We are expected to pass our PT test by week 5, or go home. That worries me some, as it's only a month away. Hopefully, with some extra work, I'll make it.
      I think our platoon has potential to do well, we just need to do better at listening to instruction and paying attention to detail. I hope we improve over the next two weeks, because I really do not want BCT to be like this the whole time.
     The day ended with Hydration Formation, and the lovely news that wakeup isn't until 0600! A shower and then bed for me! Tomorrow will hopefully be a bit less stressful, as it is Sunday.