Update on Michael

Here is the latest on Mike:

While boarding my tender boat back to the beautiful Jewel of the Seas cruise ship I was sailing on, my phone rang. Guess who? Mike had earned a 15 minute phone call. Well, as you can guess, it made my day. I was in Bar Harbor, Maine at the time and the phone service was extremely poor, but I was being watched over apparently, because the phone worked perfectly during the whole phone call. It was nice to get to talk to him after 4 weeks. So, here's what he's up to:

He sayd his dress blues, dress whites and coveralls are being tailored and he'll be getting them pretty soon. He's looking forward to graduation, which will be on October 24th. He will be what is known as a "Grad-n-Go", which means that his graduation will end around 10am and he will leave to the airport about 1pm that day. We will be able to spend a couple of hours with him and then meet him at the airport before he is on his way to A School, in Pensacola Florida. It will be short, but we are looking forward to it.

He passed his first basic training test with a 5.0 (perfect score) and his commander told him if he gets another perfect score, they will put in for an academic award for him. He said that his dress blues will have 3 diagonal green stripes which mean Airman and one ribbon they call the McDonalds ribbon, because it's a red bar with a yellow break in the middle. I guess I'll just have to see it. He is also hoping he earns the marksmanship award if his shooting is good enough.

One event he told us about was when his commander did a surprise locker check. He says, "A lot of my shipmates lockers were messed up so we had to strip down to PT gear, don our sweat tops and pants and endure 2 straight hours of IT." My clean freak son hated that he then had to go to bed sweaty with no shower.

He also says that as soon as he gets to A school, he can start working on advancing to Petty Officer 3rd class and doesn't have to wait the 6 month required time. I'll have to ask him why not, but that's pretty cool for him.

Finally, he says that after A school, which is I think 6 weeks, he will find out what his next duty station is. Based on where he is heading, he will have either 2 or 3 weeks off to come home and visit. We are very excited on this.

More to come when I get another letter