Boot Camp

[Mark Evett]

In case you're not up to date, here's what's happened so far:On Sunday June 7, we dropped Karen off at the recruiter's office in Bradley. From there, he dropped her off at a hotel near O'Hare Airport. She spend Sunday night there, and then early Monday morning (she had to get up at 3:45 am), they took her to MEPS, which is the Military Entrance Processing Station.At MEPS, she had an issue with a missing doctor's signature, so she called down to ask mom and the recruiter to help out. The doctor, unfortunately, was in surgery and couldn't be contacted until the next day. Therefore, she had to spend Monday night in the hotel. To make a long story short, it was a bit stressful for everybody - mostly Karen. She had to hang out at MEPS in a sort of limbo state until everything could get squared away the next morning (Tuesday).At about 1 pm on Tuesday, she took a bus to O'Hare Airport, where she hung out at the USO and got in a slice of pizza. She still had her cell phone at this point, so she called to let us know where she was. That was about 4 pm, and as she was on the phone, they called her to get on another bus to go to the Recruit Training Center at Great Lakes. I didn't think we'd hear from her again for several weeks, but she called around 9 pm saying, "This is my 2-minute phone call. I'm here, and I'm fine, and you probably won't hear from me for a couple of weeks. I'll be boxing up my stuff soon to send it home." Not much more than that!On Friday, her box of stuff arrived. Following the advice of others on this web site, I contacted her recruiter and got her mail address, so we mailed off our first letters yesterday.The big picture is that she'll be there at Great Lakes for about 8 weeks, whereupon she'll graduate. After that she'll go to her 'A' school, which is in Pensacola, FL. If you go to the Boot Camp Group on this web site, they have some great links and info about Boot Camp you might find interesting.And that's where things stand as of right now.

[April Tejeda]

We have her and you guys in out thoughts and prayers...this will be a great journey for us all....
Love,

April