First days at MCRD

...well after being up something like about a week with no sleep, we, the new recruits finally head over to a place to sleep. Now MCRD San Deigo is an interesting place...there are real building there very typical of any military installation and the style out there was mostly like California. There's also a bit of real WW1 and WW2 history there....I'm not saying the dates of those great wars but the wonderful quonset hut. These are going to be our homes for now and we have at least that in common with days, many past. A Quonset hut is a lightweight prefabricated structure of corrugated galvanised iron having a semicircular cross section. The design was based on the Nissen hut developed by the British during World War I. The name comes from their site of first manufacture, Quonset Point, at the Davisville Naval Construction Battalion Center in Davisville (a village located within the town of North Kingstown, Rhode Island). If you want to get a picture in your mind, just take one of those round drive way culverts, not the concrete but the metal one, cut it in half blow it up to about 10 feet tall put walls on each end, two doors and voila...home for grunts. Oh and Grunts is what you USMC ground pounders, infantry men, and...there are a lot of other terms I'll explain later....recruits aren't really grunts yet, we're actually nobodys....and that's part of the plan to build Marines outa civilians...first you take all the individual out of an individual....sounds strange doesn't it...then from that amorphous blob and all the blobs around him, you build up a Marine. It works and funny as I'll try to explain later, I rather liked it. Back to sleep...I can't remeber when or how, but we were marched to some quonset huts with our sea bag of stuff which included sheets. pillows and wool blankets with the Eagle Globe and Anchor on it....I think we were just told or orderd to 'stow' our stuff and then....'light's out'...oh and our bed was a standard issue wooden cot. It doesn't matter, cause I just crash....I think I've been up 40 or 50 hours....can't tell any more.....when I wake up and that was some event....I'll blog more.....