His Marine - Michael Clifford

10. Signed His Marine

Three weeks in and I might as well have painted my body black and blue. My back was bruised, my arms were bruised, my face was bruised, my legs were bruised, my ribs were bruised. Any part of my body you could possibly think of there was a bruise there. There was even one of the back of my neck for gods sake.

They were pushing us to our physical and mental limits. Since we got back from the boxing championship we had no further contact with our families. We were completely cut off from the outside world. We hadn't even been allowed to send any letters home.

I don't even know why I'm bitching about any of this.

I have nothing outside of training.

No family, no friends, no one to send a letter to.

Today we were lucky. They let us lie in until oh-seven thirty. That was the latest we had been allowed to sleep in since we had arrived here. It would probably be like this all week because next week is hell week. We were all very aware of that but we tried to push it to the back of our minds so that we could focus on making it through this day. We had just been taking everything one day at a time. We weren't doing to bad either. The only injury anybody had suffered was when on of the instructors tripped over somebody that had fallen out of bed and ended up spraining his wrist. Other than that we were all good.

We had been woken up and instructed to go to the locker room where diving equipment would be waiting for us. Well at least we know what we'll be doing today. We had done a little bit of diving all ready and knew all of the basics. Truthfully we had done a little bit of everything. Parachuting, shooting, diving, and all the other crap like running, swimming and the normal stuff like that.

We were geared up and stood by the poolside in under fifteen minutes. That was another thing we had learnt the hard way; you're told to do something and you do it as quick as humanly possible with no questions asked. "Okay we've done a weeks worth of diving lessons now and it's time for your test." There was no way we had done a weeks worth of diving lessons, no way in hell. "Each swimmer will have one instructor down there with them. We're going to toss you around, pull your tanks of your backs stuff like that. We're going to simulate being caught in a rip tide so don't expect this to be easy on any of you."

Like we would ever expect anything they were making us do to be easy. We expected the worst and if it wasn't then we were lucky but nine times out of ten it was worse than the worst our imaginations could think up. "Hemmings, Fletcher, Brown, Walker in the pool now!" Instructor Wilkinson shouted and we jumped into the pool without questioning him.

The pool itself was twenty five metres long by twelve metres wide and was just over ten metres deep. That was deep enough to get decompression sickness if any of us panic and get it wrong. I felt my instructors hands on my shoulder and he began to shake me around violently and flip me over. My regulator was knocked out of my mouth and the house sent behind me as my instructor continued to shake me about. I wasn't worried. I had just taken a deep breath and I have once held my breath for ten minutes so that gives me a lot of time to figure this out. I just thought back to when I got my t-shirt caught at the bottom of Luke's pool the other week as a way to keep myself calm.

Who knew nearly drowning would save my life?

Oh the irony.

My instructor stopped shaking me about a little to make it slightly easier but I still couldn't reach my regulator and I didn't want to have to reach for me secondary one just yet. I did the one thing I could think of and began to take my tank off of my back. I saw two other begin rising to the top of the pool as my instructor offered me emergency oxygen but I knew taking it would mean I failed this conditioning and that was not an option.