Phase II - Week 4 - Crucible

Per my Marine in cyberspace:
The culminating event, 56 hours of little food or sleep where recruits are pushed to their limits, which to their surprise might be a lot farther than they thought. The recruits will patrol with day packs (a lot lighter than full packs) about 40-60 miles going from event to event including: team building exercises, day/night fire team assault courses, live fire combat marksmanship, a lot of blanks shooting, field movement exercises, the re-supply exercise (Bastilone's Hill) which was probably the worst one. They will get about 6 hours of sleep total, 3 on each night, and 3 MREs total for the two days they spend out doing the exercises. After their second night's sleep they get up early, pack everything up, and hump out to the reaper (about 5-6 miles.) Here they will stop in Mountain Town and get a break with an orange and some juice before they head up. Then they start. They don't run up it, like I've heard, they "hump" up it just like everything else... it's just so steep for so long that some people just look at it and automatically give up in their minds. You'll go up one steep portion only to be greeted by another steep portion once you reach the top of the first one, and so on and so forth. Anyways, after they reach the top they get a motivational speech from their SDI, and they make the hump back to Edson Range as 3rd phase recruits. From there, they will have the warriors breakfast which... I would need a whole new post to describe that, but to a recruit..it's Heaven on Earth. Then they will get their stuff all cleaned up and ready to go back to supply so that they can get bussed back down to MCRD the following day.
This just about sums up Phase II of training. A lot of the assault courses are actually a lot of fun with actual battle sounds being played out on loudspeaker, crawling under barbed wire, jumping walls, moving from covered position to covered position. Another unofficial competition is setting up hooches on both field week and crucible week. The first platoon to get them all set up wins... good team building exercise. And again, that's an unofficial competition, doesn't count towards honor platoon, just like pugil sticks.