BMT was the stretch where the food was bad, I missed home badly, and the rest of the term somehow felt painfully long almost immediately.
It did not begin as a heroic chapter for me. It began as a very uncomfortable one.
The term felt long very fast
The hard part was not only the physical fatigue. It was the total adjustment. Sleep never felt like enough, small routines disappeared, and every day seemed to ask for energy that I was not sure I had.
The food was bad. I was melancholy for home far more than I expected. When you are already tired and out of place, even small longings get amplified. Familiar food, familiar people, familiar freedom, familiar spaces: I wanted all of it back.
More than once, the rest of the term just felt painful to think about. POP was still far away, and that made BMT feel even longer.
Nicholas made BMT more human
What kept BMT from turning into one flat memory of suffering was Nicholas.
He was my buddy, and that mattered more than I understood at the time. I was kind of a massive fuck-up at times, and he was still patient with me. In a place that stripped away comfort very quickly, one steady person beside you changed the whole texture of the experience.
If you are reading this, buddy, thanks for looking out for me.
After we POP-ed, our paths split. Nicholas went to the Air Force while I kept moving along a different route, but he is permanently tied to that chapter in my head.
The SIT test was the weird part I loved
The funny part is that one of the stretches I would have expected to hate was the one where I suddenly came alive.
I killed the SIT test.
For some reason, that environment clicked with me. I was giving my food away, genuinely excited to camp, and weirdly energized by having problems to solve with the guys around me. Even the heat rash could not fully cancel that out. It still felt like problem-solving, just in mud, sweat, and heat instead of behind a keyboard.
By POP, I mostly felt relief
By the time POP came, I was less triumphant than relieved. I had made it through the hardest early stretch, and that was enough.
BMT did not make me feel exceptional. It just showed me that I could keep going on days when I felt tired, frustrated, homesick, and very far from confident. That was a much less glamorous lesson than the usual military-story version of resilience, but it was the true one for me.