Kitchen duty

This week somehow managed to fly by - it's a shame I don't know how it happened so that I can do whatever I did to make it happen again. We spent a lot of time in the classroom learning a lot - flares, mortars, the NBC (nuclear biological and chemical) system, and a lot more. I also loaded my first fake practice shell into the cannon which was pretty cool and not easy.

This week I also had my first shift of kitchen duty. How I managed to avoid this job for 2 months I have no idea, but very grateful. Additionally I only had a partial shift (from 10AM-11PM), whereas a full shift starts at 430AM. So my first task was to help unload a trailer of food - this was good practice for the loaders because there was a LOT of food in bulk so it was heavy. There was so much food it leads you to think that they might be feeding an army of people! Afterwards we took over from the people who were scrubbing pots and pans from lunch. When we walked in the ktichen it looked like the guys before us had done everything except clean. You could barely move in the kitchen because there were pots and pans all over the floor stacked up high. Everything was dirty except for a few piles of clean pots in the corner. By the way they had to point out the clean pile because you couldn't identify it on your own. After finishing with the pans from lunch we got to do it all over again with the pans from dinner. The worst part was that the food from dinner was exceptionally crappy - and what made it even worse was that it stuck to the pan and was a major pain in the ass to clean. I usually eat most things but I don't even know how to describe what it was - (I think it was a dry and gross egg and vegetables concoction). It came in 2 parts - the part that ended up on the plate wiggled when you poked it and the part that stuck to the pan really did not want to end up in the garbage and was hanging on to the pan for dear life, and made it very difficult to clean.

We had another masa - 15km (12 + 3km with the stretcher). The first half was very boring but once we got to the halfway point we started to pick up the pace and people started struggling so it made it more interesting and there were more things for me to do to help people keep pace. And obviously carrying the stretcher is more fun, but also more painful because in you rest the stretcher on your shoulder which happens to be directly on a button, so all the force from the stretcher is concentrated to one point. Needless to say my legs and shoulders were sore the next day, but right after the masa I was ready to do it again!