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Show DU TI EXTON p B R 12 2 09 communicate and I think that helped a lot. A lot of guy I rem mb r a lot f guy w r sneaking over and getting the phone from Yoshi. I remember there was one incident with First Sergeant [ unclear WA V 7 ....... g: 12) got screamed and yelled at because there was an illegal cell phone or something. They got seized and taken away and there was this big threat to dump everybody's gear and all this yada yada bullshit. I pulled my squad into my tent and I said, "Listen, does anybody got a cell phone?" Nobody said anything. "Okay, if you got a cell phone, don't let the first sergeant fucking catch you using it. Not to mention the bill's going to be astronomical if you do use it over here. It's not that big of a deal. Go talk to Yoshi. Go use the phone bank, whatever you need to do. It's not that big of a deal." First Sergeant caught, I mean, I never dumped my gear or anything like that, but the First Sergeant, he caught three or four other cell phones and he took them. There was a big to-do because, "You can't do that First Sergeant; it's personal property," yada, yada, yada, and he fucking took them out in the desert and buried them or some bullshit, I don't remember. JCW: How were you communicating with your family at this time, do you remember? OS: I wasn't. There wasn't any communication at all. JCW: No letters, no nothing? OS: Nothing. We hadn't got any mail, we hadn't got nothing, which that really surprised me and shocked me because one of the things you expected was mail. That's kind of one of the things you always said is you never take away a Marine' s mail. There wasn't really a whole lot of it; there was none of it. Basically the system was overloaded with mail and they didn't know what to do with it, so they burned it all. I don't know (laughs). So we weren't getting anything. We weren't getting any word back home. I 32 |
