A Short Week and a Shorter Weekend

Sorry for the long delay!! I keep promising myself that I’ll be better at regular posting, but general exhaustion and procrastination generally combine to thwart even the best of my intentions. So, either way, I’ll spend my last few moments of this wonderful weekend (Jaguars AND Spurs won! Hooray!) going over some of the events of last week, both mundane and humorous. 

First, a humorous little Hawk Troop anecdote: Last Friday, the day before the three day Labor Day weekend, we were cut loose at 3pm at which point everyone scattered to the four winds, intent on enjoying their three days to the fullest after the 12 day week. However, as soon as I arrived home, I got a call from my student Platoon Leader telling me that I needed to be back at the office for a ‘meeting.’ I was literally just about to get into the best shower of my life and the prospect of getting back into my uniform and driving the half hour back to work was daunting to say the least. Luckily, I got another call about 15 minutes later saying I didn’t need to go in. The shower was fantastic. BUT the student PL and Platoon Sergeant did have to go in and they were treated to an absolute corker of a class, one hour on how to read a training schedule. Apparently people have been confused about when and where to be causing lateness and LTs showing up in the improper uniform. Of course, a training schedule, just like any schedule, really, is incredibly easy to read. It has a column for date, time, event description, uniform, location, and who the information pertains to. So, an hour long class on how to read it was a painful and insulting way to deal with a situation that has literally nothing to do with LTs being unable to read the schedule but rather that the schedule is more often than not, dead wrong. 

This point was not lost on one of the LTs who had sacrificed two hours of his weekend to receive instruction on what location means. The very next day of work, Tuesday, he decided to follow the training schedule to the letter. Of course, the very first event on Tuesday, PT, was scheduled for 0630. Now, PT is never at 0630. It’s always at 6am and no matter what the training schedule says, everyone showed up at 6. Except LT Shortt. He bravely took the lessons from Friday on board and strode up confidently at 6:30. Of course, he’s getting in a fair bit of trouble because, “LT Shortt, you know that PT is at 0600 no matter what the training schedule says.” Oh the irony…

Anyway, the other major events of last week were the Land Navigation test and, at long last, our introduction to the M1A2 CEP Abrams tank! The land nav test was pretty rough. We were dropped at 4am in the middle of the woods with a map and a set of points and a red flashlight and given 5 hours to find 6 of 8 points in the woods. Now, I was pretty confident in my land navigation skills after bossing all the land nav West Point could throw at me, but I was in for a pretty rude shock. It turns out that land navigation in the pitch black of a Georgia night in terrain that you’ve never even seen during the day is rather difficult. Despite all that, I managed to cover about 8km and find 5 points before the sun came up. I was sauntering towards a 6^th point when I was dissuaded from that course of action by multiple boar attacks on rather panicked classmates. It doesn’t take very many terrified, sprinting, knife wielding LTs coming bursting from the forest that you’re about to enter to persuade you to find some other point. No one wants a boar tusk in the kidney… to make a long story short, I had two and a half hours to find my last point and get back to the start point. My confidence was very nearly my undoing because it took me roughly 2 hours and 20 minutes to find my last point, leaving a rather ill-tempered Chris to sprint the last kilometer back to the start point just as time expired. I passed, but it was not an enjoyable experience…

Well, sorry for the rather mundane post. I’ll go into the tank stuff at a later date, as we still have nearly two weeks left of Abrams gunnery. This next week is another super week, so goodbye to the weekend for another 12 days!