CX wrote:justTripn wrote:Did they purposely pick a day when it would be 30 degrees?
I'm going to guess that they did, since afterwards they were supposed to perform tasks, like emptying their magazine. After all, they might actually have to go through something like that in combat conditions, so they have to know how to deal with it when they can't just go inside a nice warm building and take a warm shower.Also do you always have those red plugs on the end of your guns or is that only for crawling through water?
Those are there because their weapons are loaded with blanks, and they're to keep the gases from a blank being fired from shooting out however far it normally would without it. Believe it or not, those gases by themselves could cause death or injury if someone was close enough to the muzzle.Alelou wrote:I'm wondering if they give you polypropylene thermal underwear or what? How DO they keep entire platoons from perishing from hypothermia?
They probably have medics there in case anyone has it too bad.
Right on all accounts. The BFAs on the muzzle are to block, well they didn't say gasses, CX, they said there's a wad of paper that actually comes out and can be lethal inside 20m in some cases.
We were issued poly-pro as we called it, but we didn't wear it that day. Come to think of it, I never wore it. They told us we could take it with us on field exercise and wear it at night in the tents b/c it was cold, but they gave us these subarctic like 0 degree sleeping bags that were pretty warm. I just slept in my cammies
. That was primarily b/c I was trying to cut down on weight in my pack and I didn't want to take anything extra. Plus... lights out is at 2100, and in the field, it's pitch black like 2 hrs before that. So, even without the weight issue, I think the first FEX I had my polypros with me but I didn't get em out b/c it was such a pain to unpack and repack my ALICE pack in the dark. We had these red LED headlamps that weren't issued but almost everyone had (Walmart!), but I'd forgotten to take mine on FEX the first time 
As far as uniforms, they're real nazis about that in the Marine Corps too, but these were all uniforms we were supposed to trash. We were actually supposed to set aside a completely fresh pair of cammies we never wore in training for inspections. We had two inspections while I was still there and 1 guy passed it the first time (prior enlisted and prior OCS) and nobody passed it (including him, ironically) the 2nd time.
I don't know that they specifically chose a day it was 30 degrees because we all had schedules printed off ahead of time that said what we were doing on what day. The IMC was scheduled on that day a few days ahead of time, but it was pretty dreary and cold pretty much all the time, b/c it was getting on into November in Virginia. It's just kinda the way it was. I'm sure it was just fine with them that it was miserable though,
, like CX said, everything is about training for the worst case scenario in combat.Oh, and yes, there were corpsmen all around. Those are the Navy medics the Marine Corps uses. That's one thing I have to say was always pretty obvious. On Fartlek runs (3.2 mile courses where you stop every quarter mile or so to do pullups or pushups or crunches or w/e) there were "heat points" where there were like 10 gallon jugs of water every half mile and radio man points where there was some poor Marine who got the short straw to stand there and wait for a candidate to pass out and have to radio up to medical
, and there were Corpsman points where there was an actual Corpsman sitting there. Same thing on all events, particularly the PFT. Man it looked like THE ENTIRE BASE turned out to watch our initial PFT. There were tons of people there, and not just medics, but Navy Docs, like Commanders and LtCommanders, everywhere.
He is a very wonderfull guy.
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Awesome. I wish I could turn MY room into... that 
Then I finally noticed the month although I was still a bit baffled why on earth would you think it's March until finally I realised that although you are a swede and know that I'm a finnish person you might still for some reason think that I use English in my everyday life. It is morning I'm still feeling very tired and sleepy and I'm not usually this slow.