09.06.09

Dear Everyone,
Thank you for all of your letters while I was in boot camp. You honestly will never know how wonderful they were for me to be able to read. Let me describe for you something. While I was in "Marine Week" or the last week of boot camp I saw a first phase recruit. He had jumped off of a third story balcony and killed himself. I won't describe it in any more detail because some people may find that disturbing, me being chief among them. But that is the kind of thing that happens when you are as depressed as you are at boot camp. One little thing could just set you off mentally at any moment. Now I will take some time to describe the crucible. In the first two days you hike about 60+ miles around the hills of San Diego, CA. We were split up into "Crucible Groups", which in turn split into two "Crucible Squads". Each Crucible Squad had about twenty to thirty members of it. There was also one Drill Instructor per Crucible Squad. So what we would do is we would go and hike with our day packs, back track. On Monday, the day before the Crucible we did the gas chamber, You go in in Camis and a gas mask. CS isn't really a gas, its actually more of an airborne dust if that makes any kind of sense. It is a severe irritant. People in America have different reactant levels to it ranging from, totally unaffected to severely affected. I was one of the severely affected ones. It didn't help that my Senior Drill Instructor loosened my mask and broke the seal and my mask didn't work in the first place. My skin was burning, I was vomiting, snot was coming out of my nose and I was crying, but I never once tried to get out. So as I was saying. We hike around with about 30 - 40 pound packs depending on what's in them. Every so often you'll stop at a challenge. Some of these challenges are individual but almost all of them require intense teamwork. In front of each one is the citation of the Marine it is named after. So you'd do the challenge then keep hiking. That was the first two days. It probably doesn't sound that bad, but believe me it was. On the third day you get up at 2:30 in the morning, stage your gear, then take your 115 pound main pack on an 8 mile hike to the "Reaper!" I won't lie there was one point when I reached out my hand and touched the Reaper. By the way, I forgot to mention the whole time your carrying an M16A2 service rifle, regulation weight: 18.6 pounds. It is slung over your shoulder the entire Crucible. The Reaper is just the first hill, but the Reaper Challenge is 7 hills. I'm not really allowed to describe to you what happens on top, that is for Marines only. Sorry. Then you do the 10 mile hike back to the parade deck. That was just miserable. I hated every second of it. Because we put all of our energy into the reaper itself. Then there's the EGA ceremony and warriors breakfast. Again I'm not supposed to describe them. But that was basically the Crucible. I forgot to leave out the details of it being 57 hours with only 5-6 hours of sleep and 2 1/2 meals. But yeah, that too. It was all worth it to be a United States Marine.

Once again, thank you for your letters. I'll write something else up here soon.

To all the Marines who may have read this, Godspeed and remain forever Semper Fidelis.

Pvt. Suter, World's Finest United States Marines