Playing catch-up, yet again...

exam, e-course, fire support, helos, land nav 3 and night, hmx-1

Due to a busy schedule again, I'm forced to try to recall every thing that happened last week to give all my faithful readers a taste of the TBS life. While we lacked any cool Field Exercises, we had a very busy week in garrison. Monday was a morning exam, followed by our first running of the Endurance Course. This is a 5.5-6 mile course (it's a little fuzzy, I think it's closer to 5, they say 6) in the forest that is run in full combat gear, starting with one running of the O-course. To max the course you need to run it in 60 minutes or less, 80 to pass. I started out slow to conserve energy before realizing that I was doing fine and I came in at 62:18. I fully plan on getting that down to the 58 minute range. Tuesday was Land Nav 3, this time involving 8 boxes in 6 hours. It snowed all morning we were out there and the base was actually closed for training at 2pm when we got done. Had I not been racing a friend to see who bought lunch, this would have been a great day. The fresh snow made it really easy to see the red boxes and the weather was perfect for hiking up and down hills. Land Nav is probably my favorite thing here, as weird as I'm sure that sounds to a lot of my peers. Nothing beats getting the entire day to trek around in the woods on your own with nothing but a map, a compass and some little boxes to find. Wednesday was a day of classes on patrolling to get us ready for this week, with a sprinkling of fire support and helicopter capabilities. Thursday was more of the same, but then that night things got interesting with our first Night Land Nav event. The only thing that made this bearable was the snow and moon combo, giving us a little bit of light. I made it through, it wasn't pretty, but I didn't manage to poke myself in the eye with a stick like one kid in my squad (who had to wear an eye patch for 3 days afterwards, hilarious). Friday finally came, along with some cool surprises. First was when two helicopters from HMX-1 (the President's squadron) flew in for us to practice loading and unloading on them for patrolling operations. HMX-1 is based in Quantico and we're constantly seeing these things flying around here. A CH-53E Super Stallion and a CH-46 Sea Knight were the two helicopters we got to see up close. I'd seen the 53 before and it was just as huge as I remembered. The 46 on the other hand was a lot smaller than I anticipated...they look a lot bigger flying in the air. After that we did a little patrolling practice and it was time for the weekend! Today (Monday) was our first day of patrolling, and it was awesome, but that'll be another post for another time. I'm off to eat some chinese and get this camo paint off my face and out of my ears, take care!