Friday, January 23, 2009

Busy busy lieutenants...

It's been a while since I've had an opportunity to sit down and write something, so I'll jump right into what I've been up to the last couple weeks.

Last week:

At the start of the week we had the Squad Weapons Field Exercise (FEX for short), probably one of the coolest things I've done so far here. We got up and hiked out to the range where we fired M249-SAWs, AT-4 rocket launchers, M203 grenade launchers, and threw grenades. After that exciting day, we spent a couple days in garrison before pushing out to FEX 1 (squad tactics). We got up at 4 am and hiked out to the woods where we froze our asses off in single digit weather before spending an exciting day of attacking sergeants in desert camo in the woods. I got chosen as a tactical billet holder for the second attack of the first day and all went well despite a small land navigation error. After this was done, we went back to our packs and camped out for the night. It's amazing how beautiful it is in the winter at night, despite the cold. The next morning was rough, with half the platoon in a hypothermia-induced stupor, aided by lack of food and water (since almost everyone's water froze in the cold. Even those of us like me who slept with our camelbacks were stymied when the straws froze after 10 minutes outside). We did some more attacks the second day in a new part of the base and finally around midnight Friday night we were secured for the 3-day weekend.

This week:

This week was a pretty relaxing week. We started out the week with first aid and combat lifesaving classes on Tuesday. Wednesday we headed out to the field again for a live fire range on Thursday and Friday. When we reached the range, we were informed that our night shoot would be cancelled due to a range violation that happened to the first group that went on wednesday. We camped out Wednesday night (much warmer this time) and then started off the day Thursday bright and early with a walk-through of the range and then jumped right into live rounds. This was a blast, but extremely tiring rushing up the 300m course in combat gear. We did this twice with live rounds before the day was over and then got shipped back to base in the back of 7-ton trucks (terrifying). We had been scheduled to stay out and do the range at night, so we had to go back out again this morning and police the range for spent rounds. This took forever, but we finally finished and now we're done for the week!

With that, I'm outta here, time to get some real food.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

A little bit on the awkward side...




Well I'm back at Quantico after a much-loved and restful break. I gotta say I was lacking motivation on Monday, but I think back up to about 90% focus and this weekend with duty should help get that all the way up. I don't have much I care to say now, class all week has been what I expected. Tonight we had the opportunity for the first time to talk one-on-one with Captains from every MOS to learn what we an about them. While this is most important for the ground guys (since mine is already chosen), it's still a fun time and good information to have, especially if you fail out of flight of school, like one of the Captains I spoke to did. That's all I have for now, back to writing Op Orders. I'll leave you with these two gems I saw on the news yesterday, I hope you like them!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7816336.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7816511.stm