Well, time zones and insomnia get me here first, so Happy Birthday to (in no particular order) @Earp, @Lewdog, @EFMingo, @zoupskim, and anybody else I missed. I predate the Crucible, but we had our own equivalent back in the day. Documentary footage:
That one's even better than the chess and dragon one! I didn't think it got any better. Amazing. The crucible was awful. The hikes and second crucible thing of combat training were far and away worse. Be happy you missed it. Although, at least I can say I did it though. I'm sure you have your own special line of bullshit you had to wade through as well. You may be half a day ahead of me, but still, reactions as follows as loudly as possible: Rah! Yut! Kill! Semper Fi(delis)! Followed by 244 push ups, crunches, pull-ups. And if you can, a solid 5-mile run whilst screaming cadence through the neighborhoods. Preferably holding beers. You should make it to 5am by then, leaves the rest of the day open for more adventure! Hopefully the ensuing blackout leads you to other magical places!
I've always thought the crucible looked like an interesting concept. There's no way I'm going to say boot camp was easy, but there's nothing that stands out 30 years later as being exceptionally tougher than any other part of it. Maybe Grim Reaper, we were lead platoon and I was one of only a dozen or so who managed to keep up with the company commander, but that was as much luck as anything else. I remember after I got KOed in boxing, and knocked airborne in pugil sticks, and knocked off the Bridge Over Troubled Waters we had one more round of roughhousing of some sort. My senior DI said to me "You shot expert, right Aschendale?" "SIR, YES SIR!" "Well, save the last round for yourself."
Boot camp. The funniest place on the planet where you can't laugh. The Reaper is still a part of the crucible, if you're talking about that endless hill that seems to have more hills inside of it and goes up into the clouds. Blegh. I kept up too, but I was dead. They put that as the last excersize of the crucible now, after you get three hours of sleep and already dealt with two previous full days of exhaustion and hell. It's fun.
Yup, it's like the micro-serrated knives in Gibson's Bridge Trilogy. Seventeen feet of edge in a six inch blade.
It's always a different reason, but I never seem to sleep on the night before. Between that and the time zones, I'm early again. Happy Birthday @EFMingo, @Earp, @zoupskim, @Lewdog, and whoever else I missed.
Dear God man, it must be 4 am there or later. Happy birthday to you too, but get some sleep! No reaper for you to climb at this unGodly hour anymore, unless you really really want to... Rah!
