White Phase: Week 1 - Day 1

Hooray! We made it to white phase! Of course, our Drill Sgts informed us that, white phase or no white phase, they remain in control. We did learn that one new privilege is weekly access to the internet cafe. It'll be nice to check my pay statements and send email, even if it is only from my Dept. of the Army account. As far as today's events, we had a drill and ceremony competition this morning that I'm pretty sure we failed. I say this since both of our Drill Instructors see no need in devoting much time to drill and ceremony since it has no applicability to "the shit going down over there in Iraq, Privates". In the afternoon, we had our Period III inspection. This was odd since I don't recall our Period I or Period II inspections. Anyway, our platoon passed and I was really squared away as I didn't get gigged for anything. The worst part was standing at parade rest for about an hour. Hated it. Overall, not a bad start to white phase.

Red Phase: Week 3 - Day 4

Today promises to be another uneventful day. Today SHOULD be qualification day on the M-16. This would be my opportunity to improve my score so I could get sharpshooter. However, half the battery (about 100 people) still hasn't qualified after 2 days of prequalification. So, anyone who has already qualified is staying in their bays and cleaning...again. Oh well, no sharpshooter for Mitch.

On a lighter note, I think my fever broke this morning on the way to PT. As we were marching, I got really light headed and starting sweating profusely. I thought I was going to pass out, but didn't. I've been feeling better since. Still have a cough and sore throat, but generally better. To top it off, it was a very intense PT session. It's tough to run with a chest cold.

The rest of the day was pretty boring. Just sitting around and cleaning. That was until after chow. Then we got a doozy of a smoke session. With the fever (yeah, it's kind of back), no fans in the bay, and the exercise, sweat was pouring off of me. And we had just taken showers. We go downstairs for accountability formation where we get it a little more. We're dismissed and I decide to change shirts. I put on a nice dry one to sleep in. Mistake, as we weren't even close to finished. We got smoked for another hour. We were also told that we would not be going to white phase next week. All of this ostensibly because one private was late getting out of the shower and into formation. I think it was planned to keep us in check because we were getting a little lax. We shall see.