Brass and Bonfire

Three weeks ago yesterday, we finally got our Corps Brass. We were woken up at about five in the morning to the sound of our sophomores trying to shake our doors to pieces and Squadron 21 and 12, who live below us, smashing slapboards against the ceiling. Within three minutes, we were all out on the wall stretching out to do some serious PT. During the course of the next two hours, we ran across campus to do pushups and flutterkicks on the hill in front of the Bonfire Memorial, pushups on the fish pond, and various other painful methods of common exercises. At the end of it all, we got the brass from our juniors in front of the arches, then ate breakfast with the seniors at Sbisa.

That weekend was one of the best, and also one of the worst that I've had so far. It was great because not only did we get our brass, but we also had Bonfire and I had college lunch at church. It was one of the worst because between the combination of Bonfire, guard room, and earning brass, I worked harder than I have in my entire life with six hours of sleep in three days. That, combined with a bad cold, caused me to nearly pass out at outfit meeting on Sunday night.

Bonfire was an interesting experience, not just for the traditional Aggie things you already know about, but for the unexpected experiences and snafus that night. One of the things that happened was we showed up at almost the exact same time as our sophomores, so we talked with them for almost the entire six or seven hours we were there. Talking to sophomores at bonfire is a strange experience that will probably never be experienced by anyone outside the Corps, or even by much of the Corps. It was a mixture of them telling stories about their time as fish, giving advice on how to be good fish, recounting their reactions to certain events, and general good bull.

The annoying thing about Bonfire is the way that it is set up now. Since it is off campus, you get about ten thousand people all needing parking. The parking lots are a series of huge fields about five miles from the actual burn site. There are buses running from parking to Bonfire, so you don't have to walk (in fact, they strongly discourage walking). The only trouble is, at midnight, when everyone wanted to leave, the twelve buses that had been running earlier had turned into three (no, I don't know why), so about five thousand people were trying to leave at once on those three buses. The only way we got out before about four in the morning was because several of our upperclassmen generously brought back a truck and carried a truckload of drivers to their cars so they could pick the rest of us up.

The thing that was really lousy about that weekend was that by Sunday morning, with the combined effects of a relatively late night on Friday, earning brass on Saturday, Bonfire Saturday night through early Sunday morning, and flag detail at 6:30 Sunday morning, and a bad cold, I almost passed out at outfit meeting Sunday night. I had bag-ins for the next two mornings, so I was able to recover pretty quickly.