I fucking hate all things excercise. Not physical excercise, like PT. I mean the "War Games" we've been "playing" for the last week. Starting on sunday the eleventh, we've been donning chem gear and gas masks and whatever else is deemed apropriate and going to our asigned stations to sit around and eat MREs and duck and cover whenever they decide it's time to pretend we're being gassed. I've been "working" (more like wasting) twelve hour shifts since monday as door guard for an office facility with nothing to do but answer the door, eat MREs (nasty things, those) and duck and cover whenever we get "attacked." I'm not entirely sure wether to be annoyed or elated when an "attack" breaks the monotony.

If this is what it's like in a combat situation, then my name is Martha Stuart.

It's been a while since I posted. It's not that I had nothing to say, but I have Infosec responsibilities and not everything can be mentioned in a public forum.

That being said, I have word from the people at personel that my orders are on their way and should be in by monday so hopefully i'll be out of here soon. It took a while but it seems that all the red tape is finally out of the way. Hopefully that means that I should be out of here before christmas, but not too soon or else I'll have to ship out before then. In either case, it means i'm coming home soon.

Yay, me.

Also, try not to call me before four o'clock because I work the eleven PM to seven AM shift and I try to sleep in the morning so my days are free.

I'm sure you all know about hurricane Gustov.

Well the not so little bastard is in the gulf and moving fast tward the coast, which means it's just a matter of time before they evacuate Keesler AFB and if they do, all those people are coming here. The thing about that is, we don't have the facilities to house them all, so if that happenes, we'll be living three of four to a room for a while, which means someone will be sleeping on the floor and good luck getting in the shower.

And of cource, with over a thousand people from two different bases in our building, there will be accountability issues, so we'll all be on phase 1 lockdown. I know there's nothing that can be done about it, but it feels like we're being punnished even though we haven't done anything. It's a blow to the moral.

I've been reasigned to a new base after finishing classes at Keesler (with a 99.5% GPA I might add). My new home is Shepard AFB in northern Texas, and that's about as much as I can say about that. 

The first floor of my dormitory is being reserved for med students, so everyone on it is being moved, myself included. The funny thing is, I had a room mate before, but now i don't. It's actually kind of stupid. To think that they had enough room to put most of the people from my floor in their own rooms makes me wonder why we had to move and not the ones on that almost empty floor we got moved to. Also, the top floor of our squadron's other dormitory is compleatly empty, but do they put the med students there? No, of cource not. That would make sence.

I did my Phase Up Run today for phase three. Final count 45 push ups, 50 sit ups, and 11:27 on my 1.5 mile run (the cource is actually more like 1.8 miles but it gets scored like it's only 1.5.) I'm not entirely sure weather that's passing or not. Either way, I need to work on it. Extra remideal PT for Mr. Goldsberry.

Fuck.

Also, I passed block four with a 97%. There was no excuse for me to have missed that one question, but I assure you I won't make a similar mistake again. In the opperational Air Force, mistakes get people killed. I test for block five on  monday so we'll see how that goes. 

 In my squadron, we do three days of physical training together on monday, tuesday, and friday. I've done the Monday and Tuesday PT secions and I can say with some certainty that there is something very disheartening about doing PT under the beating southern sun when it's 90 degrees in the shade. Needless to say, we either drink a lot of water over the cource of the day, or colapse and get carried away by an ambulance, which has happened twice so far. 

The excercise, heat not withstanding, is not so difficult. We do pushups, crunches, leg lifts, and some other more exotic things which i've been introduced to recently. First there's pyramid pushups. 15 pyramid pushups are done as follows. Do five pushups. Roll over sitting straight up with your legs straight out and your arms straight up. Drop and then lift your arms five times. Roll over. Do four push ups. Roll over. Do four arm ups. Roll over. Do three push ups. Ect.

The second is reverse sit ups. You sit with your back flat on the ground and your legs straight up in the air with your arms crossed and your hands on your shoulders. One reverse sit up is done when you bring your elbows up to your knees and then back down without moving your legs.

Finally, there's body builders. This is an eight count excersize starting from standing position. From there you:
1. Squat down
2. Thrust your legs out
3. Go to the down position of a push up
4. Come back up
5. Spread your legs apart
6. Bring your legs back together
7. Come back to a squating position
and 8. Come back to a standing position.

I strongly suggest that anyone on an excersize program try all the excersizes mentioned here in reps of 20 (10 for the body builders) and drink lots and lots of water (not too much, more than 10 liters in one day can split the lining of your stomach, as happened to someone in BMT recently). 

And to those who can't stand excerceze, just be glad you're not me.

On an other note, I learned an other jody the other day, this one a running jody (sang in agitance cadance).

C-130 rolling down the strip.
332 'bout to take a little trip.
Mission top secret that's a mission unknown.
We don't know if we're ever going home.

Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door.
We jumped off the plane and we was READY FOR WAR!!
If my main don't open wide.
I've got an other by my side.

If that one should fail me too,
LOOK OUT BELOW, I'M COMIN' THROUGH!!

I kind of thought the end was funny.

Well, I took my first test today. On my block 1 test, I recieved...

Drum roll, please! 

Is it too much to ask for a fucking drum roll!!

Thank you.

100%

This should be fairly easy.

Aparently, the special olympics isn't the only strange happening to be going on right when i'm entering tech school. I participated in a parade today. It was a ceremony to celebrate the passing of comand of the 2nd Air Force to Major General Flowers, which is a big deal, because both the new and old comanders are moving up in the world today and the old comander, Major General Gould, was awarded a medal at the ceremony for exceptional service. There's an other parade next thursday for a retiring First Sergeant.

I learned a new marching jody that we sing when marching to and from class. Here are the lyrics:

I know I left,
(repeat)
Know I left, on my own.
(repeat)
And it won't be long,
(repeat)
'Til I get on back home.
(repeat)

(from now on, the repeats should be understood, because they're always there)

Got a letter in the mail,
Go to war or go to jail.
But it won't be long,
Til I get on back home.

Momma, Momma don't you see,
What BMT's done to me?
But it won't be long,
Til I get on back home.

Dropped into a combat zone,
Left to survive on my own.
But it won't be long,
Til I get on back home.

Bodies lying everywhere,
M16 has done it's share.
And it won't be long,
Til I get on back home.

Momma, Momma don't you cry.
This Airman is too tough to die.
And it won't be long,
Til I get on back home.

 I just started classes today. I'm not going to go into the details of what i'm learning, (no reason for the public to know, but if you really must, try to dig it out of the Keesler AFB web site,) but i'll tell you that day one was rediculously easy. There is the general problem that the chairs are rediculously comfortable and it's early in the morning and it's easy to fall asleep, which is an easy way to get administratively fucked by the teacher, but I get past that with rediculous amounts of cafine. And by taking notes. I find that the easiest way to stay awake is to anal retentively write down every damned word I hear. If I'm never done writing, then I never have a chance to sleep, and then i'm gaurenteed to have good notes at study time. The information sinks in better as well. I had homework on my first day, but it wasn't really long or hard, and i've taken a crack at some of the work for the next chapter. If today was any indication, this should be cake.

The special olympics were held on Keesler AFB today. It was a rather odd experience for my first day here. Some airmen were assigned an athlete to sponsor. They took that athlete to their events on base and acted as a guide. I wasn't so lucky. I got basic details. All that means is that I had chores to do when they needed me, which was almost never, leaving me with nothing to do for hours but  sit in the hot sun and get badly sun burned because eight hours of direct sunlight will burn you if you're wearing SPF 9000. Especially here in the south.

Before anyone asks, I was wearing SPF 30. That would have been enough if I had had the chance to sit in the shade for a few hours like everyone else.

It's kind of strange. The athletes were all physicaly challenged in some way, but from speaking with them, I discovered that they're all quite lucid. There are two ways to become physicaly awkward. You can have a mind that is incapable of correctly handling the movements of your body, or you can have a body which doesn't function properly. Many people seem to assume that with one comes the other. Especially when the physical impediment is speech related. The reallity is that most people who are physicaly impaired are quite smart, but it's easilly forgoten that when someone is fumbling with their words, it may be because their mouth isn't properly following orders as opposed to them just not being able to handle speech.

 After two days of town pass, i've come to a realization.

San Antonio SUCKS BALLS.

It's not that there's nothing to do. There's all kinds of things to do there. There's a Six Flags and a Sea World and the Alamo and there's malls and movie theaters and all kinds of stuff to do on base... in 98 degree weather. I'm from Michigan, damn it all. I can't stand in 98 degrees let alone have fun. I'm glad I just got out of basic training because it took almost all my military bearing and disciplin just to make it from the car to the door without passing out. 

And before any of you Texans call me on this, try going to Michigan and when you freeze your balls off you'll regret calling me a wimp.

Hi everyone. I'm an American Airman, graduated BMT with honors! I'm on my base liberty now, and tomorrow I march down the bomb run at parade and then I get town pass until I ship out on monday. Starting problably on tuesday, i'm going to start using this journal to talk about the things on my mind. I'm going to make one thing clear, though. I mentioned that I'm in the air force because i'm proud of the accomplishment of completing basic training and achieving honor graduate, but i'm not an information pipeline for military secrets. If you ask me a question and I think there may be someone who reads this journal who problably shouldn't know the answer, I'll refuse to answer it. Just as long as everyone is ok with that, this should be an interesting experience for me and anyone who may read this journal.

Thanks for reading.