Another remembered, "There were early morning drills, before breakfast, forenoon drills, afternoon drills, evening and night drills, beside guard mounting and dress parades".
From July 27 through Aug. 12, mother and daughter, like most of the Jets, attended two-a-day practices at Hofstra, the early drills running from roughly 8 15 a.m. to 2 15 p.m., and the night drills from about 5 45 p.m. to 8 p.m. "My body was aching a bit after those two weeks of practice," Ada Vapsva, a bookkeeper, said.
Here, 40 miles west of the state capital, crews work through the night drilling new wells deep into the earth, and a small army of laborers rips through just-planted fields of winter wheat to install miles of gas pipeline.
Then one morning, Dayna learns she's been invited to train as a "shooter": "six months of grueling day-and-night drilling in pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons, hand-to-hand combat, high-speed driving, killing someone by shoving a pencil up through their hard palate".
Sometime that night, during drills or the scrimmage — depending on who is telling the story — the 6-6 Gallatinicknamedmed the Horse, tried to dunk.
And in his first start for his new team the other night, he drilled one goal from an estimated 28 yards and laid out a perfect pass to set up another in a 2-0 victory against D.C. United.
What time of day it is, what the weather is like outside, even what day of the week it is -- it is all hard to track for the men working through the unvarying day and night to drill the support cables, called tiebacks, through the streaked, eroded wall of the bathtub, through the sodden soil beneath Vesey Street and into the Manhattan schist bedrock.
Although a measurement time of a few hours was usually enough to estimate the stress orientation, we took measurements all night, because drilling work was impossible during the night-time.
The lyrics to "All Nite (Don't Stop)" switch between 1-900 confessionalism -- "So intoxicated/ I'm so stimulated/ Feel so X-rated/ I could dance all night" -- and drill-sergeant attitude.
For many of the 17,000 marines based here, though, the movements of American warships and heavy rotations of night-flight combat drills speak loudly of what may lie ahead.
I'd spent the previous night drinking with drill rig operators and listening to their stories at the Shadowbrook Inn and Resort, a country getaway surrounded by a golf course about 20 miles away in Tunkhannock, a town that has turned into a de facto encampment for migrant gas company workers.
