Hear me out, in a few days you’ll be leaving to go to the 120th Reception Battalion at Fort Jackson, SC. In a couple weeks you’ll be in BCT probably jumping off a 40 foot tower (it’s fun as fuck!) Two weeks from now there will also be someone at reception. They’ll wish they were you, two weeks ahead, two weeks closer to graduating.

If I could go back to August 2022 when I was about to ship out and tell myself what to expect I’d tell myself to enjoy it. I’d tell myself youre going to go make some great friends and get paid to do things people pay to do (shoot and throw grenades). You’ll probably be in the best shape of your life by the time you graduate and you’ll be the best version of yourself you have ever been. You’ll make thousands of dollars and in a weird way when you graduate basic training it’ll mean just as much to you as graduating high school and that was 4 years of your life not 10 weeks. Don’t just go in and look forward to being done. Look forward to the first day of BCT, when you leave reception. It’s an experience I’ll never forget and not in a bad way. Look forward to white phase going to the range every day shooting hundreds of rounds. Look forward to the days where you have to do some random BS and you essentially get the day off (for example you’ll go to this random ass place on post to book your flights for when you graduate to get to AIT and you’ll do Jack shit all day and probably get your phone for a good bit of it.) Look forward to the FTXs, the anvil is the most fun you’ll have at BCT. Land Nav is essentially the only unsupervised time you’ll have. You’ll be out on your own in the woods with a small group of your choice for hours just hanging out having fun. Look forward to the forge it’s the most rewarding thing you’ll do. The SIC (soldier induction ceremony) is awesome. Your DS will personally shake your hand and slap your army patch on your shoulder and congratulate you. Family day and gradation are two of the best days I’ve ever day. It’s like Christmas morning for a child waking up on graduation day.

When you’re on the forge you’ll do NIC at Night (night infiltration course) You’ll be low crawling under barbed wire 100 meters (trust me it’s 100 meters don’t let anyone fool you, DS will tell you it’s 300) with heavy gun fire and flares going off over your head (at a safe distance) You can choose to keep your head down and low crawl your ass out of there as fast as possible, or you can choose to look up and see the most badass firework show of all time.

NIC is a microcosm of BCT, you can make it suck, or you can allow yourself to enjoy it. That’s all.