Houghtelin Family Blog

holy cow i got a few days off because i finished basic yesterday. so far its been the worst thing and the most satisfying thing i’ve ever done lol. after getting of the plane and going to the base, i find myself with all of my stuff being taken away to be put in storage. and i mean everything. mom had me bring lots of clothes to wear at basic. all taken. cell phone? gone. so they put a tag on my bag and dress me in army shorts and shirt. then they keep me in some of the oldest three story barracks i’ve ever seen and for the next four days i go out and get issued gear and get shots as they prep me for basic. that time is called “reception” i spent a total of two weeks at reception. so after the first four days of getting my gear they just make us sit around and clean for the next week and a half. so. boring. so all of the guys there wanted to go to basic so bad. but we did leave finally and day zero was really intense. we throw our stuff on a few trucks and bus over to our new barracks and that’s where it all began. we get off the bus onto an open area where all of our stuff is piled up. about a 120 guys each with a duffle, personal, and laundry bag so that’s 360 bags in a big pile and we’re all told to get our bags. in 2 minutes. we failed. lol. but we all had somebody’s bag and we marched over to the barracks. and that was tough for most of us. but that first week we began to learn the standards for making bunks and making our lockers look good and buffing floors and mopping and general barracks maintance.  so i can make a room look clean. but the first few weeks are what’s called red phase. that’s the tough phase where we would spend hours a day getting smoked (pushups and situps and stuff like that.) and spending time in classes about crud we didn’t care about and falling asleep which would get us smoked some more. but after a few weeks we survived to white phase. score! fewer pushups and more flexibility. white phase also means we started weapons training. m4, m203, mk19, grenades, at4, m249, m240b, and the m2. just look em up if you want to know what they are. and after the next 3 days people in our compnay decided to steal from the store. so we got put back in red phase and after dinner each day they would bring us into the pit. the pit is very bad place. its like a huge sandbox. in the pit there’s four commands you need to follow. front, back, go, and hit it. when the drill sargeant says front, you start doing pushups as fast as you can. back, and you flip on your back and kicking your legs in the air(flutter kicks). go, and you run in place. hit it and you jump to the ground and smash your body on the ground and jump back up to running in place. plus they would switch commands very quickly front, back, front, back, front, back, GO, hit it. you can barely do half a pushup and they would yell back and you flip on your back. we would do this for about an hour and a half each day for three days while getting yelled looking for the people who stole. so it sucked to be thrashed for somebody else being dumb. but finally we got phased forward into blue phase (yay!) and things really got better and we even got to drive humvee’s and we did building clearing and did a few very terrible marches. up and down hills for 19 kilometers wearing full body armour and helmet with elbow and knee pads. three days later and my blisters still bug me. lol. and afterwords we found out it was closer to 19 kilometers. but that was the very last thing i did for basic. come monday i begin tank training. my emotions are all over the place. im excited but afraid. i don’t wanna fail but a lot of the guys in our platoon kinda suck. plus tankers are getting a lot of infantry training because tanks are not the future of war. so i joined a dying breed. i definitly plan on changing my job as soon as possible. back to psy ops. well that’s a fair bit of info. but hey, lets breathe some life into houghtelin.com. i’ll use it.