It is bad enough when your friends call you fat, but when the government officially says your too fat, that just sucks!

This is Sterling by the way. I will now relate the story of the USMC OCS that I just experienced. While I might have simplified the details on the phone to save my sanity from telling the whole story over and over, here are the full details.

For the last year, Erika and I have been set on me joining the Marine Corps through their officer candidate program, and then I would go on to be a pilot. The last part of May, I went out to Virginia to start training. Needless to say for anyone who knows how the government works, training didn't start right away. When I got there, the game of 'hurry up and wait' started. We would be rushed around from place to place to get our gear, fill out form after form, go through my 3rd physical, and start marking our gear for the dreaded pick-up day when we would get our sergeant instructors and they would scream their heads off at us.

We arrived Thursday afternoon when this whole process started. Saturday night and into Sunday morning I got sick with chills, a fever, body aches, a cough, runny nose and sinus congestion. I went to the health clinic there on Sunday morning, and while I was tested for Swine flu upon my arrival to the base (my results were negative), they drew blood again to check if I had contracted the virus while I was there (there were already four people in quarantine with the virus). In addition to taking my blood, they gave me a bunch of medicine that made me drowsy and they gave me 1L of fluids with an IV.

Monday morning was the scheduled time for everyone to run the physical fitness test (PFT). To pass, you had to get 8 pull-ups, 70 crunches in 2 min, and run 3 miles in 24 min or less. This seemed to be no problem for me as I had been getting 19 pull-ups (out of a possible 20), 100 crunches (out of 100), and 21:30 (out of an 18 minute maximum score) on the run. These scores that I had been getting in Utah before I left gave me a score of 280 out of 300. However, because I was sick, I had to report back to the doctors during the time the PFT was scheduled. No problem, I could just make up the PFT on Tuesday morning with the rest of the guys that were in sick call with me. However, nothing is that simple in the Marines.

Throughout Monday, I had been told to stop taking my meds because they made me drowsy. My symptoms returned with a vengeance, so I was told to take them again and report back to sick call on Tuesday morning. It looked as though I would not be able to run the PFT, and I would be disqualified.

Now, back on Sunday night came the clincher, but let me back up one week. Before I left, I showed up to work out with the Captain that I had been training with for the last year. He told me that he was very mad at all the bureaucratic BS that had just taken place. Apparently, one of our top candidates who shipped out the week before I did was weighed in at 3 lbs over his weight and was at 20% body fat. If you are overweight in the Marines, you get a tape measure around your waist and then they subtract the circumference of your neck from your waist and that is a males % body fat. If you are more than 18% body fat, you are disqualified. This candidate was obviously over his limit, and even though he got a score of 297/300 on his PFT(almost no one gets that good), he was being sent home! Lucky for him, another kid in his same situation was the son of a senator and that senator told a general in the Marines to call up the colonel at OCS and straighten him out. So where does that leave me? First off, I was 69 inches (according to my military physical here in SLC), and 188 lbs (I needed to be at 186). My body fat was right at 18%. If I failed the weigh-in, I would need a score of at least what I was normally getting on the PFT to be considered to stay at OCS. The reason my captain and I were so upset was because none of this would have been a problem in the past - you could stay, you simply had to drop the weight by graduation. Nobody bothered to tell any of the candidates this new weight requirement early enough to do much about it, all thanks to the new Colonel that is over the candidates. Over the next week I barely ate anything hoping to drop the extra 2 pounds.

Now, back to Sunday night. I was being weighed in, and lo and behold, I was down to 185! I dropped three pounds - I was safe! But wait, what's that you say Mr Marine who does nothing but work out OCS candidates all day every day? I need to get taped? I didn't ask any questions because if anyone talked they were likely to be insulted and yelled at. Then I heard the problem as the guy taping me asked the first guy, "How tall is he?" "68 inches," came the reply, "he needs to be at 180 lbs!" When they taped me, I came in at 19% body fat and all because they measured me at 68 inches instead of 69. Great, so here I was, sick, I hadn't eaten much for the last week, and now I had to get an awesome PFT score to stay in the program.

Now, as I had explained before, I missed the Monday PFT, and now I had to miss the Tuesday PFT! I was sure I was going home. Then, a gunnery sergeant came up to me Tuesday afternoon and said, "Fenwick, go change into PT clothes, you have been cleared by medical, and are going to run your PFT in 40 min." By this time I was feeling ok, and I thought that maybe if I just do what I normally do, I could get my regular score and I could stay. I was, after all, 4500 feet lower in elevation and that fact alone was supposed to help my endurance by a lot.

When I showed up to take my PFT, I was feeling pretty good, but the weather was very hot and very humid. They normally try to do all physical training (PT) in the morning to avoid the hot and muggy Virginia weather, but no such luck for me this day. In fact, there were about 10 medics stationed around the area because they were expecting me (and about 4 other guys running with me) to pass out due to heat exhaustion! I went over to the pull-up bar and started out great, but then they said I couldn't move my legs at all, and I needed to dead-hang. I had not trained for this. I did as many as I could, but they didn't count a bunch because I moved my legs. I only got 9, not 19 like normal - I barely passed! Next, the crunches went fine, and I got 97, not as much as I would like, but pretty good. Next came the run. "This should help me make up on the pull ups, I could do this" were my thoughts as I approached the starting line. We started off, and everyone got out in front of me pretty quick, but I got into a good pace and went on my way. About a half mile into it, I passed everyone as they were starting to feel the effects of their speed in the beginning. This kept up for about 2 miles; I then heard my time, and I realized I wasn't going to make it under the 24 min mark. I kept going, but finished at 24:20. I didn't get a qualifying score.

After the PFT, I had to appear before the colonel and a few more officers that run the place. Despite being measured one inch shorter than normal and running a PFT in sub optimal conditions, I was disqualified from OCS. I later found out that there were too many applicants for the program and not enough money to pay them, so they were cutting applicants left and right for anything they could. Even if a guy had blood pressure of 140 or over, they were cut for high BP. Even the candidates that stayed and graduated would not be put on active duty after graduation. Instead, they would be put on stand-by for a few months, they would not be paid, and their family would not receive any benefits of any kind until they were moved to active duty.

This experience was only one thing in a long line of problems that I have been fighting through to get to OCS. At first, I thought they were just obstacles in front of me to overcome in order to reach a good thing. However, after talking it over with Erika, we feel that this was just something that we would be better off not doing and that we should move on. I am glad I tried, but kind of frustrated now. I have to start at ground zero and look for jobs and aim us in a good direction for our future. It kind of sucks not having something ahead of us in the foreseeable future. I have considered everything from taking the few remaining prerequisites at BYU and applying for medical school or PA school, working at getting a job with one of my professors and turning that work into a masters project and eventually a PhD, and even just applying for jobs in my field now and starting to pound out a career. I will let you know what we end up doing, but don't expect anything too solid right now. Thanks for reading, I know it was long, but there's a lot to the story.