Baby Bro meets the Marine Corps... #2: Training Begins

[Preface: if you guys have any questions about the "why's" the "how's" and the terminology, just lemme know]

Dear Jer,
Boot camp started off hard, no sleep for 24 plus hours, even waiting at the airport and MEPS to get to CA was a while. I left to go to MEPS at 4:30am, got to the airport at 1pm, got on the plane at 6pm and got picked up by the bus to go to MCRD some time around 8pm. After that everything went so slow. we got 6 hours of sleep max that first week, it was receiving week, eh, it was horrible medical and dental boringness for hours. it's not so bad now i'm giving 100% effort, but about 10% of recruits are not so the whole platoon gets yelled at for that [sigh]: less free time, more games, the IT (insensitive training) isn't that bad, we aren't doing hygene by the numbers anymore though i just hope it gets better and the days go by faster. hope you're doing good with your training.
love Davin


Dear Jer
tell mom and dad thanks for the letter, it's nice to get mail. I'm going to need to know the new address ASAP; I ordered some yearbook stuff and grad stuff, i mean i WILL be ordering them week 10. so i graduate on a wednesday. family day will be tuesday. i think time's starting to fly by. i'm used to everything now. i know usually what orders and what we are doing each day. a couple people have already broke down. they pulled all six platoons of A co outside the other day to watch a recruit get arrested. from what the chief ID said, the Rec gave up and refused to train. brig and a discharge for him.

a lot of people came in here and didn't expect this. i got chewed out bad twice: first time i was kind of shaky, cuz i didn't know how to deal with it; second time i kept my cool and he hasn't bothered me too much since. the food's not that bad. i miss my mom's cooking. when i get back i will pretty much eat anything. a lot of the food here looks and tastes synthetic. this week is drill week, well finishing up drill, and next week is swim week, then i go up north, field week, rifle week, team week, [gra]ss week. mail will go slow; same address, they just forward it up there. after it is the reaper and finals week, a bunch of testing. then crucible and graduation.

all i really think about is food now. the girls have got it so easy. i'm doing laundry tonight, haven't done any since i've been here. church helps, relieves stress here and gives me something to do. say hi to everyone for me. [sigh] another two months of this. how is the moving going? is everyone getting settled in? how is the girls' school going? i'm trying my best to get through this as fast as i can. i miss you and my sisters, and mom and dad. gotta go, house cleaning time
love Davin


Dear Jer,
Thanks for giving mom and dad my address. did they move yet? and yeah, my hand writing's horrible right now, got my fingers bruised and swollen from pugal sticks and marshal arts training, an dnice try with the candy. It was my SDI who did the mail handout today, he's the only DI who cares about us. my other 2 DI's which are here to train me would have IT'd me for getting candy. they do IT when you do something wrong or when they feel like playing games.

my SDI is the most intense DI on this base, he's got a rep for it too. he's usually chill to us, but when we mess up he turns into a crazy recruit-killing SDI. he has IT'd the whole platoon maybe 4 or 5 times so far, 78 recruits total. the training is still tough, and i'm trying my best still. oh, i get double rations so chow isn't that bad at the moment. we got an hour of free time because we have been doing good lately. unfortunately we can't eat dessert at chow. DI said he will IT us if we touch it. so every other platoon can touch it but us :(

you or dad should send me some power bars: that's one of the only things we are actually allowed to receive. i'm doing great in the classroom, we look awesome drilling, still got a long way to go. i miss home right now. i really don't have much freedom here. say hello to everyone. i can't believe i'm already almost on my second week of training. Nov 4th here i come :) i still remember eating at olive garden the day before i left. i miss good food. that's the first thing i'm getting when i get back.
love Davin

Baby Bro meets the Marine Corps... #1: Required "I'm alive and well" letter

I have arrived safely at MCRD San Diego, CA and have been assigned to PLT 1015/A Co/1st Recruit Training Battalion. We have four Drill Instructors (DI) and one senior Drill Instructor (SDI) for our platoon (PLT) that will be with us every day, everywhere we go.

Accountable mail (UPS/FedEX) is difficult to receive so PLEASE do not send it. While here at recruit training, I am not allowed to receive certain items such as medication, alcohol, gambling devices, tobacco products, and combustibles. If I am in need of medication, I will be provided the opportunity to see a medical officer and receive medication if prescribed. It is not necessary for you to send any money; I will earn enough to cover the expenses during boot camp. Everything that I will need to complete training will be issued to me in the future...


From the SDI:
My name is Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Taylor, and I am the SDI for PLT 1015. I have been assigned to care for and train your young man for the next three months. I am responsible for leading and guiding this future Marine through the many challenging and demanding stages of his training. My DI's and I will ensure that he puts forth his maximum effort. Through concerned and positive leadership we will help him develop a strong sense of pride, self-respect, confidence and a greater level of physical and mental endurance.

He is about to undergo a rigorous training cycle, which will test him both physically and mentally. The first phase of training takes place at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD), San Diego, CA. Training consists of physical training, close order drill, water qualification and an introduction to military life. Extensive classes on Marine Corps history, first aid, military customs and courtesies and military law will be taught.

The second phase of training takes place at Camp Pendleton, CA and consists of rifle marksmanship and field skills training. Upon returning to MCRD the last four weeks will consist of final tests, administrative procedures and preparation for duty in the Fleet Marine Force.

Your young man will be facing many obstacles and may experience periods of frustration, especially during first phase. Positive and encouraging letters as well as prayer from relatives and friends will greatly contribute to his morale and attitude. High morale and a positive outlook are assets for a solid foundation and attribute to successful training. Your role in maintaining his high morale and motivation, which can benefit his positive development, is vital and encouraged. Our graduation date is scheduled for November 4, 2009.

Again, I assure you that your young man is in good hands. My team of DI's and I will always use positive and concerned leadership in the course of training and development of your future Marine. If any problems or questions you think best answered through me should arise, feel free to contact me. Your role in helping to encourage and motivate him through letters is greatly appreciated.


In his own words:
Dear Jer,
so after i got off the plane, i got to talk to some of the marines shipping out to their job. i learned some stuff from them like you can get away with eating chow at night if it's not loud food. the first hour at the MCRD which is where i stay for my first phase (3 weeks), it could only be described as crazy and insane. at about 12 when we were at our barracks i thought we would go to sleep for a few hours but we ended up staying up til 8 the next night, now i realize why you doze off after 5 minutes or so... i was about to get a shot when i almost fell asleep. a lot of the recruits are "stupid" as my processing DI says, who is a hilarious bad-ass. not only do they ask stupid questions, they cannot get it through their head to say "this recruit" or "that recruit" instead of I, me, we.

Sadly enough at lease a quarter (10/78) of the recruits are like that; as my DI says, that 10% cannot even lace their boots right or fill in a box on an inventory sheet of what size your gear is. I have not gotten to boot camp yet. My company is still being processed, which is just medical shit over and over. today is thursday, i run the IST tomorrow, i'm going to pass it. i also learned from a couple marines and from experience so far, to keep a low profile and blend in and not do stupid shit. i've got to write two more letters and i got fire watch tonight, so i will talk to you later. hopefully i will have time to mail another letter sometime this week
bye
love,
Davin

update; week 14 (or 8/16)

military update

Current mood: awake

at some point, i was supposed to start an e-bulletin for everyone once i got settled at AIT, to keep everyone updated with the cool shenanigans here...

well, i didn't, and there aren't really any cool shenanigans to report on.

it's been about... forever... more or less 3 months and more (14 weeks, i think) that i've been on post; 6 taken up doing naught but detail, waiting for the class cycle to start; the rest in class, 4 of those weeks in weapons immersion (sucketh) and 2-3 weeks of relative sanity (almost). so, i suppose i should break it down a little more:

weeks 1-6: arrived here, totally squared away, all the sgt's loved us, we were quiet, goofy, and high-speed; newbs came in 2nd-6th weeks, and it all went to shit. still can't tell if it was Ft. Jackson or D-2-10/ Ft. Leonardwood who screwed us up the most... but for solidarity, we like to blame Jackson. and, again, i'm stuck in a platoon with an unprecidented number of females... gah!

weeks 7-8 (class week 1-2): started class, doin' all sorts of high-speed classified schtuff... awesomeness. i'm one of only like 5 in 150 that pass the pre-emptive IP/networking quiz; and though the instructors profess that no one really has a background in the stuff we're doing... i slowly raise my hand, begging to differ...
about 1/3 of the platoon actually passed the "break-off" test (maps/symbols) the first time around; 1/3 more passed it the second time around, and all but a handfull actually managed to pass the third go-round. we lost fewer than the senior platoon.

week 9-13 (class week 3-7): and we start weapons immersion... which in our company means full battle rattle; and it also just so happened to fall at a time when, instead of doing two incriments of 10 days... they decide to land us with it for a solid 30 days straight, doing training after class and going to range on fridays, with make-up classes on saturday, so we have a whopping 8 hours to ourselves each week for four weeks => we go batty. i twist my ankle twice... run on it for 2 miles for APFT, it turns interesting shades from purple to green... i finally go to sick call after landing a 288/300 on the APFT, and i'm on a 2 week profile after my second injury... yay!
we get off of weapons immersion in time for a four-day weekend... yeah, that didn't go so well... for any of the platoons. i got put on flag detail (raising and lowering the Post flag - Garrison on the holiday - twice daily) over the holiday, and consequently for the next week = no running for 3 weeks.

week 14 (class week 8) (i think this is right... maybe): we get our asses smoked so bad for 10+ people in the company (over 300 people) fucking up royally that we all bear the mark of Charlie company on the palms of our hands (thank you, tire pit). this smoke session occurs at morning pt and after classes... most of the females (myself included) have nervous breakdowns of some sort (and i didn't even get the worst of it - thank you SSG in charge of flag detail - because SSG had an eye on all of us over the weekend and knew we didn't fuck it up - fourth on my list that i owe the uttmost to). First SGT confesses that we're the worst platoon he's had at Ft. Huachuca. but how anyone would take a platoon called Cottonmouths seriously, is beyond me.

i have pictures on 35mm that i haven't developed yet... and most of the others i've posted... but all the interesting shenanigans that go on are at times when we're not permitted to have media-electronics on us... sucketh...

alas...

my ankle is better... still on flag detail, until the 15th, so i'll have to get back on how my runs are coming... and i have a new phone with better digital resolution on the camera, so the future pics should actually be discernible.

going over basics

As a follow up to an exercise with terms let's review a few from a biblical context.


Many may be familiar with the concept that the term messiah means 'anointed one', being no one in particular save the 'crowned' ruler of the Jewish people, usually from the line descended from David. This term is not applied to rabbis or priests, and the station being occupied by someone in the priestly elite was not only unorthodox, it was reserved in part by Levites. It also has some very important aspects commonly over-looked by non-scholars: the first being that Jesus, as a pretender to the Jewish throne, and thereby one who may be deemed under the general term 'messiah', was only thus if he was directly related to his worldly father Joseph, who's patrilinear descent from David is commonly known (otherwise his brother James would have been deemed the true scion of the Davidic line, and thereby the true Messiah); the second is the nature of the relatively recently adopted apocalyptic attitude of the time where it was believed that a king would come who's reign would force all those foreign nations of the world to cower before Jewish law and thence redeem the world from its sin (in so many words, but the nationalistic attitude at the time spelled out by the zealots simply said it in nicer terms) -- redemption from sin in Jewish terms means living by the Law.

In taking terms that have previous meaning in a society and expanding it's boundaries to encompass what later becomes a philosophical concept or other is a form of creating elite-speak. Other such terms may be applied to things like pigeons, the Meek, the Poor, Messengers/Angels, the Holy Spirit. The Poor and other specific terms often used describe not the homeless beggars commonly believed, but more likely ascetics who have cast away possessions, wear white, lime-washed linens, and dwell in the "wilderness". Lamsa's enlightened reflections on idioms used in the Gospels are close to what historical researchers believe they meant. 'Angel', for instance, according to both Lamsa and biblical scholars, refers to members of the priestly elite.

The terms don't just stop at nouns, but also ways of describing time. Great and lengthy care has been taken to reconstruct the Gospel events by some biblical scholars in conjunction with the Peshers found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the time spanning the last centuries of BC and first century of AD, there were a number of different temporal reckonings: the solar, lunar and lunisolar to name a few. Each reckoning shifted the dates of years based on whether they recognized a 0 year from when a prophecy was made and when it was supposed to be fulfilled. Also varying in the length of the year, some made up for the leap year in a solar calendar with an extra 10-day period every dozen years. Terms like 'about' indicated a full day previous and the word order determines which hour on whichever numbered day of the week. 'One of these days' indicates the first day of the month, as each day is referred to as a number, and each week will have the same numbered days of the month on the same day of the week every year, even with a leap year (so the last day of one month could be 10 days away from the first day of the next month). In the leap on one of the calendars in use, a half-day was observed as hours shifted through daytime, and therefore the 3rd hour, or 9am, could be observed as being at 6 in the morning during certain times of certain years before a leap brought the times back round to "normal" again. (Please shoot me now, they must have been so incredibly bored to be able to keep track of all this.)

Moving on, some idioms presented by Lamsa (these being colloquial expressions, not quite as esoteric as what may have been the period's elite-speak):
"Went up to God" - went to a high place
"Satan" - adversary, dishonest man, to stay, to slide, to mislead, to slip, to mis the mark (in greek, the term we get 'sin' from)
"Angel" - pious or holy man, God's council, a messenger, a minister
"Flame of fire" - speed, prompt action; fluency in speech
"Living water" - true teaching
"Bread of life" - eternal truth
"Darkness" - ignorance and superstition
"lambs", "sheep", "ewes" - children, adults, women
"Staff" - protection
"Mountains and hills leveled" - proud, arrogant men humbled
"Touch his garment" - an urgent need
"Horn" - strength and triumph
"Carcass and eagles" - weak nations and powerful nations
"Held him by his feet" - implored him
"Plant" - teaching, doctrine
"take children's bread and cast it to dogs" - sharing the truths of Judaism with the pagans
"Hell" (Sheol) - resting place for the departed ones
"virgin" - a girl who has known no man, also an unmarried woman
"be perfect" - all inclusive, thorough
"bury my father" - take care of my father until he dies

too much more to type,
i'm gonna go sleep now

Unfinished

Play with words

I wielded a double-edged sword in phrasing that continuities are all too apparent... this, aside from the affirmation of connection between similar aspects, also ascribes that I lack the discretion to discern a substantial enough difference.

Alas, there are important similarities, and it must be known that all things human, as all things are in the universe, are ever-evolving, and ever-changing.

The first thing I want to do before presenting any religious ideas is present a little exercise in the use of language. I've always been a very literal thinker, and my association with words and phrases often puts me in an odd position because things are said that I'm meant somehow to understand some colloquial association or double meaning that I fail to grasp, seeing the terms literally.

So, in reading the past year or so, I've forced myself to pull out the common phrases that writers, scientists, and scholars use and realize how absurd they are in a literal sense (making it doubly difficult to read a British English translation of a French work published 50 years ago, for example); this of course meaning not their colloquial application, but their original, root context, and in some circumstances, it includes the actual term-applying process when dealing with more esoteric topics (elite-speak). One thing I found to start is how ridiculous latin terms are as a means of general communication; they are a rather overly-poetic form of description and labeling, and many of our modern and technical words come from Latin or Greek, of course. In fact, and in odd coincidence, their descendant forms have very different contexts, even within related modern languages...

... and though I find linguistic progressions fascinating, I tend to put other people to sleep, so on to the exercise:

dead man walking
one in the oven
going nuts
relative/ism (at least three different technical meanings that are not directly related and even rather misleading)
jigsaw puzzle
objective

yeah, we could keep on going, but I'm sure you get the point (and of course when I sit down to do this, all of them escape my mind); and it doesn't just stop at short terms... but instances like describing continents as shuttling cargo, ants commanding armies; my favorite is how I might try to describe anything I did at the lab, no matter how simple it actually was, but it sounds so complicated and impressive simply because of the terms I have to use to describe it: it requires terms and concepts with which laymen are not readily familiar.

That's the important part... when terms are made up or borrowed, turned into something meaningful... when later people read them, which do they conceptualize?

"there was a discharge and later he died"

This could mean any number of things, and even more so now that the term is now applied to aspects of society and technology. We would assume there would be background included in surrounding text.

"a battle ensued, and the guard failed, and one innocent was hit and wounded"

a discharged weapon leading to a death?
the wound was infected and led to his death?
the guard was discharged from service and later died?

The key to knowing is either in knowing the most common usage for the term 'discharge', or else having a less limiting source of information...
this may all seem properly ambiguous, but to those who are among the elite for whom the text is written, there is an understanding despite the outward ambiguity; the understanding is either of the situation itself or of the terms involved to describe it.

If this seems far-fetched, consider one interesting thing about history: Europe's most famous romance: King Arthur. A man so famous in his time that nothing was written about him. Songs were written for him, but no one knows what they mean, everyone assumed everyone who would hear knew enough to know about him. And the killer is that (haha, snuck one in on you) he may have been known under this title or that (historians have only that to debate on), and even what may be his name referenced by even a contemporary Roman official, is still only a title of sorts. The only thing that can be said for certain is that he fought, died and the next generation of people on what's now England started naming their kids Arthur.

PFC Orwig

WOOT!

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS