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…