FT Dix

As I sit in my room at Ft Dix relaxing while awaiting some fine Army training later on, I have finally found the time and motivation to reflect on my experiences so far. After a full week of Army training I have noticed many in my class are weak of mind and are quickly being assimilated by the Army. They are mindlessly shouting “WHOWA” at every possible moment; I have vowed to never say this word because it is gay. I am toying with my own motivational noise, I really don’t want to use the Marine grunt cause I am not a marine and aye, aye really isn’t all that motivational. I think for now I will just keep quiet and if pressed by an Army sergeant I may just belt out a hearty “ARRRGHH” and see what happens.

FT Dix has a Federal Prison on its grounds and the Army, being sensitive to its inmate population has worked very hard to ensure that the inmates do not feel discriminated against. They have insured that all of us live as the inmates do, a minimum of three to a cell, no civilian clothes, no alcohol, and of course we can’t leave the base. One privilege the inmates have that we don’t is the ability to have visitors. The base itself is huge; we mostly ride in busses or walk to wherever we are going. This brings me to an important observation, not only is this an Army training base, but I think this base is also a highly classified “sidewalk laying” training ground. There are sidewalks everywhere, this seems like a good thing, however none of these sidewalks seem to go where you need to go, so if you walk on the sidewalk you will never make it to where you are going. It is as if they were just randomly laid, about half of them just stop, you will be walking on a sidewalk and it just ends for no apparent reason. This sidewalk dysfunction causes you to walk on the ground, which brings up another problem, apparently the Army either does not like grass or it has all been killed by everyone walking on it. While walking on the dirt combat boots have the tendency to collect dirt in the treads, and if it has rained which it has every other day, combat boots are really good at collecting mud. So every building we enter always seems to have dirt and mud all over the tile floors and if it doesn’t it will after we have been there. This of course means after every class we get to clean up the dirt and mud that we tracked in. This is annoying however the real problem occurs back in our cells or as Army likes to call them barracks rooms, nobody likes living in a dirty cell so every day the cells and passageways need to be swept and moped. Many of the Sailors are conducting Army training at night so the only time available to clean their cell is late at night around 0300. At 0300 all this sweeping can cause a little dust, so you add a little dust and a very sensitive fire alarm in the cells and as you might guess it is a recipe for being awoken by the loudest alarm clock in the world. After the second dust fire in one week I have started sleeping in my Navy PT sweats, it makes it that much easier to roll out of bed and stumble outside into the freezing weather while waiting 30 minutes for the fire department to clear our cells.

Breaking news I was just informed we are on lockdown, all training suspended, no one in or out of the building and impending searches of our cells due to a missing M-4, Standby for further updates. I am not fucking kidding; the fire alarm just went off, this is the third time in seven days, and two in the last two days. I will be standing outside for 30 minutes, I am leaving the computer I hope it doesn’t get any dust damage.