Recap of the week

Recap of the week

Okay, so I haven’t updated much (which Brendan's mom conveniently pointed out to her son). I have an excuse though. I had a busy week. Here is a brief list of my many accomplishments which prevented me from updating my blog:

1. On Monday I stayed awake for the first day of training of BI-LAT training (bilateral negations). Oh this might not seem like a notable achievement, but if you sat in this class listening to the soft mono-toned ramblings of a self proclaimed negotiation expert, I challenge that you too would have succumbed to the ether-like fumes emitting from his motionless mouth.

2. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I helped to successfully negotiate the building of a power plant in the Iraqi village of Al-Hurriya with the local Sheik and his cousin the contractor. I learned that haggling is a favorite pastime for most Middle Easterners and if you are not good at it, then they will make you stay longer in country until you get better. Plus, I drank some official Iraqi tea, although I later found out that the tea was from India. Does the fact that it was made by an Iraqi make it “Iraqi tea”? I guess under that logic, every time I make Pop Tarts they could be considered Korean Toaster Treats.

3. Thursday I was the passenger of a notional mounted combat patrol where I got to dodge notional IEDs, shoot at notional bad guys with notional ammunition in notional villages and throw not so light dead people, err, notional dead people, into the back of my notional gun truck. Notionally, it was a good day of training.

This is my nap defilade position

4. Friday I was the commander of the lead truck of the notional (you get the idea) mounted combat patrol and dodged the same IEDs and maneuver around role playing civilians who threw tennis balls (notional rocks) at my truck. Later that day, my truck was blown up and me and my gunner played dead while the rest of the team got to do a MEDEVAC for two other casualties. Both days were very long with highlights including lots of cat naps and book reading.

Dueling Rat Faces

5. Saturday I cleaned weapons and spend a lot of hours taking online computer courses in Microsoft Office. Normally this would be something that could be looked at as a good thing, but after the first few hours of watching demos and examples on my monitor while listening to the canned computer voices tell of the joys of making justified spacing with style changes in PowerPoint, I wanted to punch myself in my groin to make the pain go away.

Today was spent recovering from last night. We shed the chains once again and went out for a bite to eat and somehow ended up at the local dive where MSG Tim was accosted by the local bar fly’s sister. I successfully avoided being squirted in the eye by MSG Tim, however CPT Brendan wasn’t so lucky and spent the rest of the night with a halitosis free eyeball. I played the role of taxi and dropped the gang off at the drinking establishments in the next town where they proceeded to almost get beat up by a fat guy. Overall, a good weekend, for any time spend away from Riley is usually a good time. Granted, it wasn’t as good of a weekend as last weekend, but to actually be considered a weekend I feel that it should consist of two full days and two full nights where we aren’t tethered to the base. I know that there will be a time in the near future where we will long to have these 24 hour liberties away from the base (although we might not want to leave the safety of said bases overseas), we should enjoy every second of freedom while we can.

MSG Tim getting to know the locals

Here’s to a short week for our 4 day pass looms in the near future. Using Kevin’s logic, which has been proven to be sound, these next 4 days will be the longest ever. Let’s hope he’s wrong.