My tattoo

On January 27th the 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Terry Conway and the 16th Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Carlton W. Kent came to the base. The had a few Marines from each company come to the auditorium. It was real motivating. They laughed and made jokes with us. It was interesting hearing some of the plans for the Marine Corps from the head honcho. The white guy in the pic is the Commandant and the black guy is the Sgt. Maj.

Since we could only have our uniforms in the wall locker all civilian gear had to go. We had to stuff as much stuff out of sight and the rest stack neatly in the corners. Our room was inspection ready on Thursday, Friday afternoon it looked like the pics, Saturday morning it was inspection ready again.

This morning we had an alphas and wall locker (closet) inspection. We knew about it for about two weeks but did not find out the full details until Friday afternoon. So we all had more to do than we thought. Most of us were up till at least 0100. All they wanted in the wall locker was our bootcamp issue uniforms. Pic 1 inspection ready, pic 2 the closet is clean.

I got to Camp Lejeune on 5 Oct 2008. I moved into the barracks on the 7th that following Monday. These pic are of the room the night I moved in.

These next pics are 3.5 months later. We changed the arrangement, unpacked, and made ourselves at home. It's pretty comfortable here and the barracks are the newest on the base. Two people per room instead of three like in the older barracks.

This morning we had a Company hump. We hiked 6 miles through the woods within the gates. It was pretty cold but a sweatshirt was enough. We had to be at the armory at 0430 to check out our weapons. I had to wake up at 0345 to have enough time. Yuck. The guy in the second pic from the top is my new fireteam leader CPL Cornell. The guy in the first pic was smart and brought a stool to sit on at the half way point.

It was about 28 degrees on Jan 20th 2009 when these pics were taken. The guy in the white hoodie is a buddy of mine Rios. This was his first time seeing snow. He is Cuban from Flordia and the hoodie is the heaviest winter coat he owns. For most of the day we had snowball fights with the barracks next to us. It was a lot of fun. We didn't go to work until 1200 the next afternoon.