Posted on 12/07/2003 7:06:29 AM PST by yankeedame
LETTER FROM A WEST VIRGINIA FARM KID, NOW AT PARIS
ISLAND MARINE CORPS
RECRUIT DEPOT
Dear Ma and Pa:
I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before maybe all of the places are filled.
I was restless at first because you got to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m., but am getting so I like to sleep late.
Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing. Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there's warm water.
Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc., but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food. But tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit between two city boys that live on coffee. Their food plus yours holds you till noon, when you get fed again. It's no wonder these city boys can't walk much.
We go on "route" marches, which the Platoon Sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it is not my place to tell him different. A "route march" is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks.
The country is nice, but awful flat. The Sergeant is like a schoolteacher. He nags some. The Capt. is like the school board. Majors and Colonels just ride around and frown. They don't bother you none.
This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move. And it ain't shooting at you, like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges. They come in boxes.
Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain't like fighting with that ole bull at home. I'm about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordan from over in Silver Lake. He joined up the same time as me. But I'm only 5'6" and 130 pounds and he's 6'8" and weighs near 300 pounds dry.
Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.
Your loving daughter,
Gail
A lot of people don’t realize it but wrestling requires a pretty good amount of strength, agility, and stamina. He said that when it came to push-ups, sit-ups, rope climbing, and pull-ups they trained harder in high school than they did in the Marines.
He could have been stretching the truth a bit, but I have seen them working out for wrestling and watched them do sit-ups by the hundreds on an incline board hugging a 50 pound plate. I’ve seen them do sets of 50 push-ups with another 180-something pound wrestler standing on their upper back. So maybe he wasn’t kidding much.
It does happen, although rarely. If you have a kid in incredible shape, who exercises regularly for long periods of time a day prior to recruit training, odds are he may lose a little in recruit training.
As a DI I had one kid who could easily run 3 miles in 14 minutes when he got to PI. I did what I could for him by having him run circles around the platoon and run him whenever I had a chance, but the days are too packed with other stuff and he lost time on his run. I think he graduated doing 15+ minute 3 miles.
Now for the gross majority of kids, this will never be a problem, and the kid will return home in great shape, showing off a new body for Suzy, but the rare exception does occur. But that exception was in incredible shape before coming to PI or San Diego.
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