Ship log – Monday
Losing count of the days so you’ll have to resort to a calendar to figure out how many nights have gone by without you noticing. If your one of the few Marines that showers every night then you will know the number of nights because the pain that the high pressure showers brings to your skin. The showers are a long tube with a nozzle at the end with a button on the side. Press the button and the nozzle shoots out water that a normal person would use to clean graffiti off the side of the walls on their corner store. I guess the dirt and muck you aquire from being in a confinded space for the entire day builds up and the US Navy thought it be a good idea to not take their chances and up the PSI as to be certain to not leave any bacteria on our skin. As the bacteria get scraped off, a sharp sting replaces it. So fresh and so clean. If your lucky to get one of the few chairs in the berthing, oh by the way, berthing is the area we live in on the ship; much like a barracks or a squad bay, so if you get a chair, be sure to not get close to the 1MCs or the intercoms cleverly located near your ear every time you get a nice spot to sit and watch TV. When a message is about to be broadcasted over it, a loud whistle will come first, heck, sometimes its two, but only after this ear splitting and after a few days in an hour, annoying sound comes over, do they blab out what information YOU MUST HEAR! I don’t even notice the sound anymore, good technique with the whistles. At night the sound is replaced with the coughs of your few brothers in arms. Everyone is sick by now and no one knows what it is. As we lay in our small, tight, cold racks, the sounds of the ship are joined by the sounds of the sick. Harsh coughs fill the night with the eerie sound of the TV set on low volume. This combinded with the red lights adds up to one scary place. I don’t know what to fear anymore, the sickness or the confusing sounds of the ship. Oh, and by the way, I do have a calendar now; I hand wrote it in my notebook. I too can now start counting the days down like my soul mate. Soon Honey,soon I will be back,forever.

Ship log – Friday
We ported today just for the day and it was nice to touch land. During these ports you can expect at least a half hour wait for anything. PX, ATMs, fast food, beer, restrooms, pretty much anything. You get off with about 5 hours of liberty but you get that cut down into half with the lines, then another half for the walking. It quickly turns to two hours of liberty. Either way, you manage to get the real task at hand done; whatever it may be. With the waves of amount of people leaving the ship at once, the berthing areas become a ghost town and it’s great. Silence. No TVs, no DVD players, no loud people talking about some girl in some town with some problem. Blissful silence. Pulling away not I’m thinking, finally, another milestone in this deployment and the gap between now and the end is narrowing. Hiromi’s birthday is today and I plan on getting a phone card just to call her. Calling the parental units will also be a must because our six months of silent treatment seem to have done the job. Although the end result was nonexistent, it feels as if one of us, if not both, imposed this as a torture to each other. It worked. We are both dying for lack of communication. Hoping to end this, I sleep. Good night log file.