July 6, 1997 - Mess and Maintenance Week

970706 - Moved to Weapons Battalion for Mess Week. Today, me and about 12-13 other recruits stayed in the squad bay and alternated firewatch while the others had mess duty. It was very easy and fun since the DI wasn't here. There's only one DI on duty each day and today and tomorrow it's Sgt. H__. He assures us that by Tues. morning we'll be exhausted. I'm sure he's right. I have maintenance duty with 4 other recruits somewhere. I have firewatch tonight and we wake up at 0230 tomorrow. Fun, fun, fun. 54 days left.
Mess and Maintenance week serves as a sort of mini-break from the rigors of boot camp. By that, I mean to say that we don't have formal training during that week. Instead, we are either assigned to work in a mess hall or to do some other maintenance. As I said in an earlier journal entry, I was deemed ineligible to work in the mess hall. I don't know why this was, and I don't care. As you will read throughout the next several days, being assigned to maintenance was a dream job.

Mess and Maintenance week, does not mean that trips to the pit and quarterdeck cease, however. As you'll also read this week, I probably spent more time on the quarterdeck during this week than I had spent there in all of the previous weeks combined.

A platoon's assigned location for mess and maintenance week is determined based on its performance in Mid-Cycle Testing. As you may recall, we boogered Mid-Cycle Testing, scoring the worst score, by far, in the entire company. Since we did, that meant that we had to do Mess and Maintenance at Weapons Battalion, which is way too far for us to walk to each day. Therefore, we had to move all of our things to a different squad bay for the week.

When we got to the squad bay, those recruits who had been deemed able to serve in the mess hall headed over, while the rest of us just sat around doing nothing. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was to be a common theme for that entire week.

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