Disclaimer: this story is pure fiction, Parris Island is real, I've been there, so some of the historical facts and terms are real. I love the Marine Corps and if this story offends anyone I am truly sorry. If not enjoy.
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May 14 1999
U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island SC
I had just arrived at Parris Island it was 0200 and I was standing on the yellow footprints. They gave us the whole speech that thousands of marines before us had stood on those very footprints and some have given their lives to defend our country. They told us that this would be the last time that we would see them until we graduated 13 weeks from now. We were herded into the building and began the processing phase of training. We would not sleep for 36 hours. After all the paperwork was done we were taken into another room and told to strip down to our underwear or skivvies as they would now be called. We were given all the clothing and toiletries what we were to use in the coming weeks. All of our civilian stuff was packed into brown paper bags and taken away from this point on we would only be wearing what they called cammie greens. Our heads were ritually shaven All through this no one made a sound we did not question what we were told to do, they owned us now.
We skip forward a little bit to laundry day
Laundry Duty
A few us "volunteered" for laundry duty we were up at 0400 to get chow and wait for the bus to take us to the laundry facility. Now some people would not have wanted to be assigned laundry duty. There were a few great things about laundry day that we loved one was that it got you out of training for a few hours, the other was that 4th battalion also did there laundry at the same time as us. For those who do not know 4th battalion is the female battalion. All female recruits train at Parris Island this is one of only two places we would ever see them, the other is at church on Sunday.
Once all the laundry was collected we went to the facility.
While we were doing the wash we could see some of the female recruits doing theirs. There had basically been a perimeter set up so that we could not get to close, and the DIs were keeping a close watch on both them and us While the wash was being done we were allowed a little bit of freedom, most used the time to either sleep or write letters home.