A lot has happened in two months time… Sometimes two months will pass and it will seem like it flew by. And sometimes - as in the case of Basic Combat Training - it will go by in an extremely slow fashion and you will lie to yourself saying: “Only a few short nine weeks” or “It’s only 27 more short days” or my personal favorite “So short a time left ’til we’re done.” This was my trend during the long waiting times after a days training was done or while I was waiting for that training to be executed.
I will organize this returning post as such: PT, BRM, road marches, MOUT, NCO’s, CO’s, the battery and overallĀ assessment of my Basic Combat Training experience. In fact, I’ll start with the summary and mayhap help the people who don’t like long winded assessments out.
It goes like this: myself and many others in my platoon figure that a breakneck version of basic could be completed in about three weeks if the assembly line approach was taken. I do admit there would be many drawbacks to this particular setup, but in the end the soldier would hit the field faster. The battery I am assigned to (until tomorrow night or thew following day) is understaffed by almost 35%. At least two platoons had only two drill seargents of the normal three at all times. The supply office and training coordination staff were both a single person. The battery 1st SGT (the non commissioned officer in direct charge of the Drill Seargents) was changed out at week six of nine and chaos followed.
That moves me to my assessment of the battery as a whole: well done for as understaffed as they were. The Command Seargent Major of the entire training section at Ft. Sill addressed some of the issues. Apparently it was a policy from the top down that cell phones be allowed every Sunday for a few hours. It was also of interest to him that at the 95th Processing Battery ‘across the tracks’ an entire platoon was issued a single stick of deoderant. That was my platoon. We went the entire weekend with one stick.
The reason our entire platoon had one stick of deoderant is because everything else had been declared contraband: if it wasn’t issued by the Army in-processing battery it was contraband. Needless to say the Command Seargent Major was not happy.
The CO’s in the battery are pretty much on the chain of the 1st Seargent. The man is… shall we say demanding in the areas of cleanliness and discepline. Our wakeup times for the week-days were rolled back an entire half hour. I stress this single half hour because for someone who came from 10 hour sleep marathons I pulled before I came in 6.5 hours is not quite enough. I’ve been completely tired for the last three weeks (the result is a shortening of temper). I’m hoping to regain some sleep in the coming week or three… It all depends on how AIT is at Redstone.
The NCO’s (non-commissioned re some of the better officers) and Drill Seargents are excellent. So far as I can tell they are some of the best Drill Seargents on base. Once people got to the point of being actual soldiers things went pretty well. For the most part. At points in time someone would mess up and platoons would get caught in the cross-fire. About two or three days ago the battery was coming back from chow after graduation practice and we got into a smoking session (where a Drill Seargent will begin to ‘physically train’ the battery with things like push-ups, v-ups etc.). During the middle of the session he admitted to not knowing why he was smoking us… There are the good and the ok. Well… Maybe the bad. The same Drill Seargent tried to do some trick with his bike one morning when he was going home and the bike wound up halfway across the parking lot on its side. Needless to say he was being sent home for being drunk when showing up.
MOUT (Military Operations Urbanized Tactics) is the art of urban warfare. We got two exercises and a little bit of glass houses. A glass house is a door and walls represented by lines painted on the ground. We practiced entering rooms once before we went to Freedom Town. Then we cleared Freedom Town and evacuated a downed pilot (a dummy). We were ‘ambushed’ after having extracted the pilot and after most of the platoon was out of the town.
The next time we used this intro to urban combat was Liberty City: a cluster of four two story buildings made out of ‘connexes’ (train cars with doors and windows). Stupid people were playing the apposing force. One guy broke the close kill rule (if you are within 10 feet of a person you yel ‘close kill’ instead of discharging your weapon).
Road marches. Long, boring, they made me wish I had an I-pod. Nothing more to sayh here except to say that your feet hurt after a while and the first marchesĀ your shoulders hurt sometimes. Once you figure out how the rucks work you’re good to go.
BRM… PT… Guns and exercise. I can group, zero and fire a weapon with enough proficiency to meet the minimum Army standard. I also meet the standard for Physical Training… ‘Nuff said.
I don’t know when I’ll have the opportunity to be on next… It may be a week or it may be two months. We’ll see.
Much love to you Timothy and Ponbiki. Y’all don’t know each other. But I know and treasure you both.
-Albert