Review for Six Traits Quest - Read and Answer!

Food is important to recruits. It’s not only an oasis from the stress, it’s absolutely necessary high-octane refueling. I’m pleased to assure American moms and dads who’ve donated their kids to the Marines this: they eat well. Very well. Good home-style cooking, wholesome and plentiful. I’m a weather lover, but there’s one type of weather I loathe -- cold, driving rain. On one of our observation days, teachers joined recruits (who haven’t yet earned the right to even be called “Marines”) for some hot chow inside, sheltered from a December deluge. As the pampered teachers scurried into mess, a whole platoon’s gear consisting of three perfect tepees of M-16s and about twenty fifty-pound packs sat outside the mess hall – silently, ponchoed, pelted with cold rain, assembled on the grass in a perfect line-up, as if their owners had somehow been magically sucked out of them. They were gratefully inside, gleefully protected from this
bone-chilling rain, practically inhaling all-you-can-eat fried chicken. All but one. One lucky recruit was standing sentinel, totally soaked, pointlessly guarding the dry gear apparently from middle-aged teachers and guidance counselors. What he did (or failed to do) to draw this abysmal duty, I don’t know. But my respect for the Marines rose one thousand percent watching this guy not move as if he were guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, getting major wet while all his buddies were snug and dry eating Sergeant Mom’s home cookin’. That was it for me. I came home jazzed on how great Marines really are because of that one thing. If that’s how they perform a menial task, I pondered, imagine how they operate when it’s life or death.