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Comment by TravelinMom 2 minutes ago

It seems they will give them the final 2-3 weeks (usually 3) if they are pre-Battlestations, after RCU. So when your sailor gets ASMO'd back to RTC to a new ship/div, you'll get that info and it's go time! By the way, it takes those bones quite long to heal and so they can get a waiver to use the stationery bike for the running portion and will do the rest of the OPFA as normal, if that's any consolation. And yes, those questionnaires are keepers! Do yourself a favor when you get to PIR, take cash, quite a bit, because they will offer some things before PIR you can't get later like official challenge coins if those are of interest, calendar, a few other things. Each item is $10 - $20 and they only take cash! Why they don't tell you this beforehand is beyond me, but like everything else I guess. (The "calendar" is of no use, seriously, it's the group photo printed on photo paper with the whole rest of the year printed on that same page so the photo is too small, and you will get a much larger photo if you bought any photos at all.)

Comment by Staci 2 hours ago

Agreed! These stories are the best and giving me good ideas. I find I’m struggling more with this than initial training. The phone calls help a ton though.

I’m a little worried about us being able to get time off work and book flights/hotel w/o much notice. Since he ended up in RCU after all of the assessments and just before OPFA he says they will likely send him straight to battle-stations once he’s healed enough to pass OPFA…I’m guesstimating we’ll have a few days to a week max to pull it all together. At least we have all of his stuff packed already. I’ll probably also pack myself a “go bag” w/list of last minute items in a few weeks so I don’t have to worry about forgetting something while we make last minute preparations. This makes it sound like getting ready to go to the hospital to give birth! Hahaha

TravelinMom - love the idea of sending portions of books, turns it into a series and something to look forward to - brilliant!. He couldn’t think of a book he wanted during our last call so I found the first 20 pages of a book series his older brother loved and sent it. If he likes it I’ll follow up w/the actual book. Good reminder on the questionnaires, I might try those again - they will be a great memory.

I truly appreciate all of you ladies thanks for donating your time to help a stranger!! 🥰

Comment by B'sNukeMoM⚓️MMN(Vet) 12 hours ago

TravelinMom - thank you for sharing your stories of your sons time in RCU and providing encouragement to Staci!  This is awesome ;-D

Comment by TravelinMom 12 hours ago

Staci: Yeah, not worth sending those home. Let another sailor enjoy them. Another funny RCU story, when everything was "secured", we only got rare 5-6 minute phone calls before they started barking at him to end the call. I guess they were calling in shifts at the phone bank. Anyway, he wasn't allowed to receive books so we discovered how many pages of a book he could receive as "regular mail, cut a book down and stapled the pages (12 sheet, I believe), and sent him the book in pieces. It wasn't cheap but it was sort of fun and very funny. It was cracking up his RCU-mates for sure! The common literature title escapes me at the moment but it was definitely sailor-related and he hadn't read it yet. He was always a musician and I used to send him song lyrics, too, and created lots of questionnaires because he's not much for thinking of what to say when writing! The responses were keepers, that's for sure. We'd send those with SASEs. Anyway, it was a hard time but he made it great, and it sure made for a lot of stories!

Comment by Staci yesterday

TravelinMom, those are great stories! My son said they had a shoe shine competition coming up, I’ll ask him about the parade gloss. I’ll have to tell him about D&D too, I could see him doing something like that.

Luckily he can get books, though he’s running out of space for them.  He was told he needed 39 stamps to mail a book home - of course since he’s on crutches he can’t go to the NEX and buy any. We told him it’s cheaper to donate it to the library and buy a new one if he ever wanted to read it again.

He only got a 5min call last week though because several recruits were acting out. They’ve had people from a couple of other divisions (swimmers and FIT I think) temporarily moved to their spaces because they were causing trouble and had to have their compartments inspected by NCIS (I think that was the acronym). There were 3 separate incidents (one involved ~30 people out of a group of 40). It was almost as though the whole place went crazy for a week. Things seemed to be back to normal on his last call though. He does regularly tell us he likes receiving letters so I’m trying to get everyone he knows to write. 

Comment by TravelinMom on Thursday

When he graduated, they had him in Holding for a bit on RTC until they got his orders cut for his A school. Once he got to Pensacola, one of his duties while awaiting his classes to begin (called Classing Up) was being a spotter in the van that picks up the recruits from the airport. So he'd go collect the new sailors fresh from RTC. I asked him why he didn't want to be a driver. He said he didn't want to take that many lives into his hands - good call! He was a new driver when he went in the Navy at 17! But he apparently loved regaling riders of the van with his RCU stories.

Comment by TravelinMom on Thursday

Yes, it's a serious challenge for them and a lot of them separate. When my son first got to RCU, 4 recruits had messed up ("hooked up in the laundry room as he reported it) and caused everyone to get punished - they secured all movies, books, games everything for many, many weeks -nearly the whole time he was there in fact. They overcame that eventually by playing D&D when they could - with a piece of wadded up paper! LOL - nothing like innovation and imagination! For a while we couldn't send him books either, but apparently my boy got so good at polishing shoes, they did allow us to send him that crazy parade gloss shoe polish and he relayed the story about how upon inspection, the RDC or whomever's eyes bugged out and he used some creative swearing and said his boots were ACTUAL mirrors - hehe. Cracked me up, the way he told it though.

Comment by Staci on Wednesday

Thanks B’sNuke & Travelin Moms! After talking to him I’m almost more impressed that he’s making it through this than I was the core bootcamp training. Lol

They say he has a good 6-7+ weeks to go.

Comment by TravelinMom on Wednesday

Staci - so happy for y'all! I know it's a big deal for you, too!

Comment by B'sNukeMoM⚓️MMN(Vet) on Monday

Staci - that is fantastic news!

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