June 22, 1997 - Black Flag

970622 - Sunday. Went to Chapel and Religious Ed. They were both Great! Tonight we're probably going to have to do drill (fun, fun, fun). Yesterday, SSgt. B____ said that after this coming week, it's all downhill. I really hope he's right because this week was a real struggle for me. I'm looking forward to the week we have mess duty because it seems like it will be sort of a vacation. The weather has gotten very hot and several afternoons have been black flagged. I've sweat more in these 3 weeks than I did in all my 18 years combined. I don't have anything else to say other than 9 weeks and 4 days from now it will be all over. 68 days left.

On all Marine bases (and maybe other bases as well), you will see small flags. Typically, the flags are flying near the administration buildings (presumably because Admin Marines don't have much else to do but check the weather and change flags). The flags are meant to signify the current weather. To my knowledge, there were green, red, and black flags (I actually just looked it up and there are several other colors. Click here for more info.).

Early in the morning, the flag would be green, which meant that we could anything outside: march, run, drill, go to the pit, you name it. When the flag was moved to red, I think that we would have some limitations, though I think the only one might have been that we had to go to the quarterdeck instead of the pit. When the flag was black, we could not march anywhere (had to walk in formation), couldn't drill, couldn't do PT, and definitely couldn't go to the pit.

Because I was in Parris Island in June, July, and August, we saw the black flag often. South Carolina in the summer is extremely hot. One nice thing about that is that I rarely had to deal with the infamous sand fleas of Parris Island. I think I only really experienced them on the nights that we slept in the field. The rest of the time, they did what every intelligent living thing was doing: they stayed home.

In addition to the heat, coastal South Carolina also has a great deal of humidity. The cool thing about that is that it didn't even have to be hot outside to make for sweaty conditions. Add to this equation the fact that I have always been a heavy sweater (as in, I sweat heavily; I'm not made of wool), and you had one foul recruit. I think I mentioned this before, but I distinctly remember sticking my nose into my shirt once and literally gagging on my stink.


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