The 2nd Longest Day

My Vehicle Commander and buddy, 2LT Tyler Smith, from the Kansas National Guard doing what he does best.

So. Live gunnery. Had a blast (pun intended), started a pretty serious fire, put some heavy rounds downrange, got yelled at as a group at 2:30am on the side of a road in the middle of Ft. Benning and stayed awake and in my full gear for 25 hours. It was a roller coaster of emotion… 

 

My "Ma Deuce" M2 .50 machine gun, getting ready to rock and roll.

Firstly, that training was fantastic.  We were intimately familiar with the weapons we were using (M2 .50 Cal and the M240B machine gun mounted on Humvees) and we were pretty darn familiar with the fire commands we needed to use after a full class and multiple days at the electronic range. So, when it came time to do it live, as they say, all we needed to account for was the nerves of doing it with live ammunition and for a grade. The actual firing iteration is like an oddly choreographed dance that you must control every move of. You have to tell the driver to move and halt, and where to go, tell the gunner where, what, how far the target is, make sure he sees it (especially hard at night with optics) and then call your superior to alert them of the results of your engagement. It’s a lot to remember especially with a big 50 cal banging over your head. By the end of the day, however, we were all pretty comfortable, confident and excited about the day’s results although a bit exhausted.  

On the way to fight the fire with our 5 gallon "water source"

One of the reasons we were so tired was the fact that we never got out of our gear. After 19-20 hours, body armor, tactical vest and camelback starts to really weigh down, especially when you’re carrying crates of 50 cal ammo and fighting fires. Which leads us to the fire. Luckily for us, Phil Baki, my roommate, had fired the day previously and started a fire that burned most of the flammable material in the range area. The forestry guys were chopping down trees to keep his from consuming everything it was so out of control, if that gives you any idea… despite that, during one of my firing iterations my gunner sent some tracers downrange (tracers are bullets that are actually burning, giving off light so you can see visually where your rounds hit) where they hit a clump of dried grass and started a brush fire. Of course, we thought it would burn itself out (which it didn’t) so it was pretty out of control by the time we got to it. So off we went. A van, 5 LTs, 4 shovels, and a 5 gallon container of water (thus the picture), a lot of motivation, and no experience fighting fires. Luckily, despite all the smoke, the fire was pretty small and it only took us about an hour to fight it back to a manageable size and continue on. Still, it convinced me that fighting forest fires is something I’d never want to do. It was hot enough outside without the added heat from the flame and the irritation from the smoke… No thanks…

Anyways, we finally finished up around 2:30 AM, and, after some hijinks that ended poorly for us (involving a 2LT taking charge and sending our convoy off with no safety precautions and, more seriously, no cadre) we found ourselves getting berated on the side of some deserted road in the middle of Fort Benning at 3 AM. A moment that is rarely seen in Army recruiting videos… Of course, with a marked amount of irreverence often shown (perhaps a bit insensibly) by our Platoon, we have changed our Platoon nickname to “The Midnight Express” in homage of our wild midnight ride. A crazy day, but a productive one. That’s how we roll.

The Good Stuff

The Scout's Noble Steed

Again, my profoundest apologies for the long delay between posts. I’m halfway through the superweek, I’ve only slept three hours in the last 48 and it’s only Monday… But despite all that, a lot has gone on in this past week and I’ve certainly had some fun and gotten some good training. As I wrote previously, our platoon is currently in the Cavalry Scout phase of Gunnery which, though we still have several days left of it, culminated yesterday in a 25 hour extravaganza of Humvees and heavy machine guns. More about that later though. 

I’d like to hit on a few events that transpired last week that I found amusing and some of the training I found particularly useful and, well, downright fun. I’ll go for the training first. Over the course of the week, we continued to work on the weapons systems until we really knew them inside and out (literally). Although it felt a bit (ok, extremely) tedious at points, it’s all stuff that we’ll really need to know when we get to our units, so not much complaining. Along the way, we got a good look at some of the fantastic optics the Army uses, both for mounting on weapons and the LRAS, a giant box on a tripod that lets you watch soldiers smoking from about a mile away in alarming detail (at least that’s what we used it for…). 

All that was good stuff, but the real fun began on Thursday. We’ve been rolling in Humvees exclusively (the Bradleys are still being unpacked after the move from Ft. Knox) and so we needed to do the class on what to do if your Humvee rolls over. With all the extra armor and weapons, these formerly light vehicles have an alarming tendency to roll over with serious repercussions on the crew inside- and especially the gunner sticking out the top hatch- so the Army has invested in a rollover simulator. And boy was it fun. Probably the best parts were the cameras and microphones mounted inside the vehicle body which was then rotated 540 degrees, coming to rest on its back, upside down. The driver and three passengers are all strapped in with seat belts, but the poor gunner must rely on the passengers to hold him to the ground/ceiling/ground/ceiling of the vehicle as it flips. This is tough under normal circumstances, but one of our poor platoon mates found himself in the gunner’s seat and, looking down to ensure that the passengers were prepared to hold him, found Lt. Aziz and our Jordanian in the back seats. Over the loudspeaker, we heard, “Hey guys, you got me, right?” On the cameras we saw Aziz shaking his head vigorously and pointing to the door and the Jordanian pressed worriedly up to the window. Needless to say, when the Humvee started rolling, you didn’t need a microphone to hear the poor gunner’s body slamming from floor to ceiling to floor to ceiling. He was not a happy camper… At the end of the day, however, it was great training and there’s something pretty entertaining about dangling from the roof of a car by your seatbelt then having to use the steering wheel to orient yourself enough to find first the door, then the handle, a process much more challenging than one would think…

Later that same day, we had the opportunity to spend more time on the Electronic Skills Trainer, this time with heavy weapons, simulating the fire commands we would be using during live gunnery over the weekend. After two hours of repetition on pop up wooden trucks, our cadre decided to have some fun and switch things up. For iteration after iteration we fought off enemy helicopters, tanks, personnel carriers in all sorts of environments from downtown Chicago to a hamlet in Vietnam. The hardest scenario by far, however, was trying to defend your position from a horde of escaped zoo animals. Who says training can’t be fun? 

That being said, we are having a blast, because the guys are fantastic and a lot of fun and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that our platoon is the most motivated, effective, and certainly the most fun of the group. It makes the long hours and early mornings seem almost enjoyable…

Something to Smile About

The 5th Platoon lads looking fly.

Finally, at long last, a fantastic day in the office! Today was our first hands on day of weapons training. Not M-4s, M-16s, or pistols and the like. We’re talking M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons, M-240 machine guns, M2 Caliber .50 machine guns, and Mark 19 automatic 40mm grenade launchers. From 9am to 5pm we went from weapon to weapon and learned how to clear, disassemble, assemble, load and unload each of these awesome weapons. There was enough firepower in that building to lead a fairly successful invasion of the DRC and that’s before the 16 M1A2 Abrams tanks are taken into account. It was truly one of those days where you sit there and think, “Man, I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this…”

 

Additionally, CPT Lichlyter, the Troop CO (Troop being the Cavalry equivalent of a Company- about 110 students and NCOs in this instance) gave us a bit of a pep talk at the weekly safety brief. He recognized that it’d been a tough week for a lot of us between the BRM failures and the additional failure of about 70% of the Troop on the Supply and Maintenance tests and exhorted us to not let it bother us move on. For the majority of us who have known nothing but academic success, or at the very least fairness in testing, this has indeed been a tough week and hopefully we’ll all pick ourselves up from it. Nothing like the weekend to recharge and get that sharp mindset back! Because next ‘week’ is a superweek… no weekend means 12 straight days of training. It’s going to be a rough one…

The Not Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Well, ladies and gentleman, the horror show of inefficiency and confusion that is BOLC crawls into its third painful week. We finished up rifle marksmanship, both beginning and advanced, and spent another several days cramming 30 minutes of work into 10-14 hours of 'work'. We managed to somehow qualify with a broken qualification range, all the while being mocked for not being able to shoot (cue indignant outrage as 50 Lieutenants who've all shot incredibly well previously get harangued for being able to hit half of the targets which are clearly not going down when hit...). Luckily I qualified on my second attempt and didn’t have to hang out at the rifle range until 8pm like some kids, who I know can shoot from time at West Point, try to qualify for the 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th times. It was painful… 

Anyway, yesterday set a new standard for the futility and needlessness at TRADOC (the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, our parent unit whose motto I’m pretty sure is: “We’re really far behind the rest of the Army in terms of training, but we’ve got the past decade down pat” or “Let’s read every PowerPoint slide, no matter how needless or trivial!”).

The M-16A4 rifles we were issued, when they were issued, were filthy. When I broke it down there were chunks of carbon on the firing pin, which is probably the easiest piece of the weapon to keep clean. After three days of use and several field cleanings, my rifle was already significantly cleaner than it had been when I had received it. So, when we found out we only had rifle cleaning yesterday afternoon and then calling it a day, I was excited. Even the most diligent rifle cleaning has never taken me more than two hours and I thought I might actually be getting home at a reasonable hour after multiple days of going home much later than scheduled. In the end, it was the optimism that made the result so much worse. At 5:30pm, after 4.5 HOURS of cleaning my rifle without pause, I was finally able to turn in my rifle. And I was one of the first. I’m pretty sure I did more damage than good to the rifle as I went to town on the years of carbon buildup in the most inaccessible crevices of the rifle. I got turned away on multiple occasions for dust in the most obscure places that most certainly have no effect on the functioning or appearance of the weapon. On the plus side, at the end of the day, I did turn in the cleanest weapon I’ve ever seen (that’s not factory new). On the negative side, all of my weapons cleaning equipment, carefully hoarded and collected over the past four years, was stolen right off of my table. I left cursing the Army, a condition that is always cured by a good night’s sleep and an opportunity to vent to someone else.

Sorry for all the negatives! Today we’re working on the fundamentals of tank gunnery. It’s a bit tedious, but incredibly pertinent to my future job so I enjoyed it! And as a teacher at West Point once told me, “Once the Army stops infuriating you, you’ve failed; become part of the broken system. You need to keep that frustration and work against it.” Of course, staying sane long enough makes this difficult.

Almost the weekend!

In the Army Now...

Almost a week since my last post! My profoundest apologies. One of the many inconveniences of the ‘9 to 5 job’ that turns rapidly into a ‘5:45am to 7pm job’ is a complete lack of will to do anything but collapse into bed at the end of a long day… No excuse though, I know! It’s been a bit of a roller coaster this week. I’ve seen the Army in all of its bureaucratic horror and also in the professionalism and dedication of its NCOs.

So, first a great exchange with our resident member of the Saudi Royal family, Prince 2LT Aziz:

Aziz: “How can you let the Sergeants talk to you like this?”

Us: “Like what? They call us ‘sir’ and are very respectful.”

LT Aziz: “Yes, but they treat you as equals. They should know they are beneath us. They wouldn’t even dare look at me in Saudi Arabia.”

Fantastic stuff, although because this is the month of Ramadan, we don’t see much of our Saudi or Jordanian brethren because without food, training in the heat could very easily be lethal and I feel like starting an international incident at ABOLC is not high on the list of things to do for our cadre.

I suppose the highlights for the week would be a couple humorous if painful little events. First, on Monday we were tested for ‘height and weight’ where every officer is weighed and measured and if you are too heavy for your height you are ‘tape tested,’ literally tape measured at the chest, neck and waist to determine mathematically weather you are overweight or not. Then, on Tuesday, we ran the standard Army physical test, the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test) to determine what kind of shape we are in. The test consists of push-ups, sit-ups, and a 2 mile run and is scored out of 300 with 180 or below a failing rate. Most folks did fine, although some of our National Guard brethren showed up rather out of shape, and following that we moved on with our day. At the end of the day, all the tape test failures (overweight) and the APFT failures (out of shape) were called to the rear to be counseled. For the most part, if you failed one, you failed the other or at least barely passed one. Except for LT Gomez. A West Pointer, LT Gomez is a workoutaholic. He’s only 5’-6’’ but he’s about as barrel chested and thick as they come. He scored a fantastic 297 on his APFT, falling only 3 points short of the maximum. But he failed his tape test. So, now he joins the ranks of the failures to join the AWCP (the Army Weight Control Program) and has a black mark against his record. Protest as he might, the fact that he’s in fantastic shape had no bearing on the cold hard facts of the tape test and the Army, in its infinite wisdom has decreed that he must lose 20 lbs. or fail the entire course. Goodness me…

After that, on Wednesday we took a 6 hour course on filling out supply and maintenance paperwork. An unavoidably large part of the PLT Leaders job, the criticalness of the task didn’t make it any less mind numbing. Over 100 power point slides of different forms all with their unintelligible titles, columns, numbers and codes. Despite sitting in an air conditioned class for nearly the entire day, by the time we headed home at 6pm, I was completely exhausted. It makes me thank God for the NCOs, soldiers and officers in the Quartermaster Branch who fill out those forms day in and day out. I don’t think I’d be able to get out of bed in the morning…

Final note for the week: It is incredibly hot here in Georgia. I did notice this, but I didn’t take it very seriously until Friday. We started rifle qualification (on old M-16A2s L) which required us to be in the hot, hot sun from about 11am until 6:30pm. I drank literally 2 gallons of water during this time period, in a valiant bid to stay hydrated. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to grab a bite to eat. This was very nearly my undoing. By staying hydrated, I flushed all of the salts and electrolytes out of my system and I finished the day dizzy, nauseous, and with a blinding headache. I was very nearly a heat casualty (something that could possibly kill an Army career in these times of tight budget constraints) but it was a very clear and good lesson as to why hydration is only part of the way to prevent heat stroke or
heat exhaustion.

Well, qualifying continues this upcoming week followed by the beginning of gunnery! As a Cavalry platoon for the first half of this course, that means I’ll be learning the ins and outs of the M2 .50 caliber machine gun (a weapon that has been in use in the U.S. Army since 1923) and the M19 automatic grenade launcher. Should be fun!

Everybody's Working for the Weekend

The last couple days of work were… fine. Lots of waiting around, getting shots, being annoyed, waiting around, filling out paperwork, being annoyed, repeat. But! I’m beginning to really enjoy my fellow students and getting into something of a routine makes everything better. We truly are creatures of habit. But finally it was Friday and, after the obligatory Army pre-weekend safety brief (don’t drink and drive, don’t do drugs, and many other hilarious but wildly inappropriate warnings that I won’t repeat here and are honestly shocking, especially because you know every example has a real life story behind it…), I was free for the weekend!

Friday night some buddies and I explored the awkward result of going to what was essentially a bar crawl with half college students, half military guys. Lots of long hair and lots of crew cuts, with most folks mingling in groups with other like-groomed individuals. Thankfully, everyone seemed well behave (for the most part) and it was pretty shocking how many West Point guys I saw there. With the Infantry and Armor schools here, nearly 40% of the Class of 2011 will be here at some point in the next 6 months. For the most part, this is rather disappointing… All in all, an amusing night and I got to know some of my new friends perhaps a little too well.

So, I just got back from church, which has a wonderful and well supported parish (likely because it’s the only one here and nothing brings people together like the vague threat of persecution being the only Catholics in a sea of Southern Protestants). Phil and I were both in the Catholic choir at West Point and, being modest, we’re fairly able singers. Well, we were noticed today and the woman in front of us, as soon as mass ended, said, “You boys are too good not to be in the choir.” We were then essentially frog marched to the front of church and introduced as the two newest recruits to join the St. Anne choir. Within about 30 seconds we’d been introduced to George, the choir director, Stan, the Superintendent of schools in Chattahoochee County (which, awkwardly, are very publically failing right now), the priest, who’s name I didn’t catch, and several other members of the choir. At no point were we ever asked if we wanted to join, if we had time, inclination, or desire to be on a choir where the next youngest person was probably about 65. But, honestly, by the time I had recovered from the shock, I was already being fitted for robes. So! That’s what I’ll be doing on Sundays… Should be interesting…

The X-Games: X-Treme Time Wasting- Day 2

Arrived at 6, left at 4:30. 10 ½ hours at ‘work’ and I accomplished about 30 minutes of anything worthwhile. I’m so frustrated and infuriated that I don’t even think I want to write about it for fear of somehow getting an aneurism. I shouldn’t be this exhausted for how little I’ve done today… But I am. So goodnight! More paperwork tomorrow… I’m truly sorry for anyone who has to read this... I promise this will get more exciting!

So it Begins: ABOLC Day 1

At 9AM this morning, the great adventure that is Armor Basic Officer Leader Course began, really like any other great adventure. With paperwork. Lots of paperwork. Of course, we DID manage to accomplish some other basic tasks during our first 6 hours, such as having to go all the way home to get Phil’s car and sitting around until 2:30PM only to be told that we had to use Tri-care (the Army’s health insurance). I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to stop holding my personal time as a sacred right or the wanton wasting of it that occurs on a daily basis will surely drive me to distraction (or drinking… just kidding mom!).

Our BOLC class is divided into 6 Platoons of 12-13 each for a total of (brief pause while I consult the calculator) about 75 students. From the West Point graduate dominated group of as recently as yesterday, we now have a fascinating blend of USMA, OCS (Officer Candidate School), ROTC, and International Officers (including one, no joke, Saudi Prince. I know there are, like, 500 of them, but still…).  More on personalities, people, etc., at a later date, such as when I actually get to know most of these people!

And hooray! On the domestic front, I just vacuumed my first cockroach off of my bathroom ceiling. What fun…  Well, up in a few hours for the joys of an Army urinalysis exam.