Almost There

Sunday, March 10, 2013- We're on the eve of Victory Forge, our last field exercise and required 16K march. Everyone is excited because this time we get issued tents! No more sleeping in a puddle because the ponchos on a string let water in on all sides! Victory Forge is a 5 day event that will test all of the skills we've learned over the last 8 weeks and during which we will sleep VERY little. Everyone has been rushing around like crazy, washing clothes, prepping gear and packing our duffel bags and ruck sacks. There's so much talk of how close to graduation we are right now. Ten days and a wake up 'till we move on to the next phase of our military careers. Yesterday, we took our end of cycle testing over the skills we learned so far. It took all day but it was worth it. Everyone, for the most part, did pretty well. A few days ago, we took part in the Confidence Course, complete with rope swings, logs you roll over on your belly, walls to climb over as a group, a giant log thirty feet high to walk across and a long zip line down. The most imposing part was a forty foot tower that gradually gets wider at each successive level going higher up to the top. Teams of four were told to get up to the top and back down the other side without leaving anyone behind. I almost fell off the damn thing 35 to 40 feet up with PVT Sulu almost let me go and forgot to grab my belt while pulling me up. Lol. And just after getting up to the second level, I cut the crap out of my hand and started bleeding pretty ugly. I didn't quit though and we got up to the top of the tower. We were almost all the way down when PVT Sulu and PVT B-Boy were helping down PVT Jukebox from the level we just came down from. The way they pulled him in, his elbow swung in and down hard striking me right on top of the head!! It stunned the crap out of me and I blacked out for like five, ten seconds, but I finished the event and eventually the course. They said I looked pretty funny though. Lol.