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!