Career and Life Ascension
Copyright© 2026 by Wojtek
Chapter 5
I was up at 0430 and in the Mess Hall a mere ten minutes later. There were forty-eight Marines that I had to cook for, so I was cooking three trays of bacon and three trays of sausage in the oven at a time. That was about three pounds of bacon and the same amount of sausage at the same time. I kept cooking until I had two serving pans of each for the serving line.
My helpers came in about halfway through my cooking the sausage and bacon. I showed them what they needed to do and then kept an eye on them. The toast was made and put in the oven to stay warm; it kinda worked out. The last thing we had to do was make sure that the drink machines were prepped.
Once everyone had finished eating and had left, the leftovers were wrapped up and inserted in the fridge.
As I was finishing cleaning up, I heard a honk from outside. When I came out the door, I noted someone stepping out of a minivan with Navy markings on it.
I could see that the guy was a Petty Officer but
couldn’t tell what his rating was. In the Navy, the rating was what told you what job they did.
“Can I help you Petty Officer?”
“Nope, though I can help you.”
“At this point I won’t turn away any help offered.”
“I’m Petty Officer Raminus. I work in the Mess Hall at Pacific Missile Facility Barking Sands. Sorry I couldn’t have been here earlier.”
“So, you’re going to take over?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, I’m normally known by other names. Let’s go see what kind of damage you Jarheads did to the kitchens.”
We spent fifteen minutes going through the kitchen.
He was surprised that we hadn’t completely trashed it. I got a backhanded compliment.
“You could have done worse.”
It turned out that they actually had two more Mess Mates than their base actually needed. Those two were going to take care of preparing and serving the food. We would take care of the cleanup. Most of the work would be done at the Missile Base and they would transport it up here. They had already started.
I helped him bring in trays of Chicken Pot Pie that I put in the coolers. He would be back later with more foodstuff.
I was finally able to sit down and eat breakfast myself. When I walked into our Hooch, everyone was cleaning up from PT. We were in class by 0900.
They gave us an overview of everything we’d be learning. They then started off with knots. One of the interesting things we learned in that first class was how to create an improvised Swiss Seat Rappelling harness. This was going to be used several times during our training. Sgt Lawson and Cpl Morris were thorough but made the class interesting at the same time.
When we went to eat lunch, we were all surprised.
There were turkey and ham subs all ready to be picked up. I guess we were having Chicken Pot Pie for dinner.
We returned to the covered pavilion that was serving as our classroom. They gave a “pop” quiz on the material we covered that morning. Then there were more knots to learn and practice. At the end of the
day, we had a test. Not everyone was perfect, though good enough to not get yelled at.
We were released for dinner and free time. Norbert and Mutellip asked if we were going to have to go back to making meals. They were relieved when I told them what the new plan was.
I went to advise Petty Officer Raminus that the food was great when he brought out and served Tiramisu.
Fuck, if this is what the Navy got in their Mess Halls, maybe I chose the wrong branch. That wasn’t true; it just meant I needed to start spending more time in Navy Mess halls.
I practiced knots for an hour with a piece of 550paracord. Earlier than everybody, I put in some ear plugs and hit the rack earlier than everyone else trying to recapture some of the sleep I’d lost.
We got up and started with PT. After calisthenics, we jogged there and back to the spot that we were dropped off. After breakfast, it was straight to class.
The first two hours of the day were a review of the previous day.
We were told to go retrieve our ponchos and 550cords. As we made our way back, it started drizzling.
Like that was all we needed was rain. Shockingly, we were actually shown how to turn our ponchos into a rainfly. We took 550-cord pinched the hood portion and tied it as close as possible. Was it a hundred percent effective? Probably not, but effective enough.
Then we were taught the proper way to turn a poncho into a shelter. They showed us three different methods. The one they focused on was the plow point shelter. I had to kind of curl myself a bit to fit in it. It worked better for the guys that were shorter sized.
It was still raining and miserable after lunch when they went on to water collection and purification. We were shown multiple different ways. They handed out these little bottles of iodine tablets and explained that there were some slight health issues that might pop up, although they said it wasn’t an issue as we wouldn’t be using the tablets long enough. They then went about explaining about the three other methods I already knew about. Boiling water, collecting rainwater, and using manual filters were both the cheapest and most expensive options.
Before calling it a day, they started giving us an overview of what we were going to cover tomorrow.
We were going to cover fire building in a wet environment and camouflage.
As we sat in the Mess Hall that evening, everyone was bitching about the weather. It had been drizzling most of the day; we got about a forty-five-minute reprieve from the precipitation the entire day. Nearly everyone used 550-cord as clothes lines to dry out their clothes. The only silver lining was that it wasn’t hotter than Satan’s asshole. Everything I’d seen in
the paper said it was going to be in the seventies to eighties, which meant up here in the mountains it’d be a bit cooler.
As we ran in the drizzle, I had the thought that there had to be some better way to stay dry. As we went about our day, that thought was in the back of my head.
The fire-starting portion of the day actually gave me some new information. I already knew a good bit about setting up a fire ... They gave us new information on the use of batoning or “breaking down” wood for a fire. I knew about batoning but did learn some new approaches.
You had to baton the wood to get to the mostly dry wood in the center. We were instructed to gather wood and use our hand saws or any other method to cut it into usable pieces. Then we used our KaBar
and another stick to cut the wood into a square shape. Then baton that down into kindling and tinder.
The wood I ended up with was still damp in the center but not that bad. They then told us that storing the wood in our shelters was a good idea. Not only would it keep it out of the rain, but our body heat might actually help it dry out.
I set the four pieces I’d taken off to create my base.
Then I kinda combined the rest into a hybrid log cabin and teepee style, building the log cabin out of the wet wood and the teepee in the middle with the dry wood. This would help dry out the wet wood.
Our setups were looked at before we proceeded to the next steps. They then had us pull out the firestarting kits we had. Sgt Lawson came over and looked to see what I had.
“Who put this kit together for you, Badzinski?”
“No one Sergeant.”
“Then how is this the third one I’ve seen just exactly like it. Those Marines said the same thing that you just said to me.”
“Let me guess, Lance Corporal Norbert and Mutellip.”
“Yes.”
“Guess great minds think alike.”
“Is that what you are going to go with?”
“It is Sergeant.”
He then had me explain why I built my fire the way I did before he had me light it. Deciding to use two of the wax starters, I lit it and kept an eye on it. It took a few minutes before I could start adding anything of size, but I had a decent fire going in about five
minutes or so. Looking around, people had varying states of success. There were a couple of guys that were just lost.
We were told to grab the Jerry cans of water that were off to the side and put out the fires. We then went to lunch and were told to bring our camouflage paint sticks back with us after chow.
We started right back into the fire building. There were a few guys that hadn’t been able to get their fires going. We all spent time helping those guys out.
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