Army Day

Army Day

Me inside the turret of an armored Hummer

Today was another “Good Army Day”. I’d claim that saying as my own, but it’s not, as a person far better than me and who has more good “Army Days” than I came up with it while they were deployed. What it means is a day where you're not all distraught with the military and you could actually enjoyed being a soldier. Today was one of those days. What started off as a slow morning of vehicle equipment training and more basic training skills turned into a day of driving armored vehicles and excitement on the range at night. This afternoon, we did a combat HMMWV (Hummers to you civilian types) course. Granted, it really wasn’t much of a combat course as we didn’t do any shooting and moving, nor did we do any Bo and Luke Duke jumps over the local creek. It was more of a familiarization of the new HMMWVs the military has in service. From the outside, it looks pretty similar to the vehicles I use to drive when I was in a while back, but looks are deceiving. They cram a lot into this new truck and it’s decked out with a lot of survivability bells and whistles that make me feel pretty confident in it’s ability to keep me relatively safe in a war zone (plus it has air conditioning, which works sometimes to drop the temp inside from 140 to 120!). Now, nothing is every 100% and this truck is definitely not an armored tank, but it is an Up-Armored HMMWV and it is designed to help keep more Joes coming home in one piece, which is always a good thing. It’s much heavier than the old HMMWVs and we had to learn how it handled on and off the road. Plus, just for giggles, they threw in some complex obstacles that we had to maneuver to simulate driving in Iraq. Not only was it very cool, it was also very surprising how this heavier truck handled. One would expect it to be slow, but if you mash the gas, it’s a lot more nimble than I expected. I was punching it through sloppy melt water puddles and slaloming through burnt out vehicle obstacles like it was a Jeep Wrangler, only my jeep had armor and guns on it.

View from the turret

My commander pretending that he has something to shoot

Training continued after lunch with a ride in the HEAT (Hummer Egress Action Trainer). It’s basically a Hummer shell that is put on an actuator that rotates the vehicle to simulate a roll over. They do this so you can learn how to get yourself out of a situation where you could be upside down or on your side due to your vehicle rolling over from an IED or an accident. After three trips of being rolled around in this thing, our team got the hang of it, even with all of our gear on and boxes of MRE’s and such in the cabin smashing into us to emphasis the importance of strapping your gear down. I hope I never have egress a burning or damaged vehicle, but at least I know now the actions to take in case I do (which is the purpose of training).

The HEAT

After dinner at the chow hall, we waited for it to get dark and commenced on our night driving course. This is where we drive on the roads and trails with no lights on and use our night vision equipment to navigate. If you want to get the feel of how to do this, try driving your car at night while looking through a 4 inch pipe. It’s a little difficult because the goggles tend to distort things a little, plus you only get a small view of the world through the lenses. We had a thunderstorm/tornado/blizzard warning tonight which made the sky dance with an eerie green lightning in the distance through the goggles. A little excitement was had when one of trucks in front of us on the course burst into flames because the operator forgot to disengage the parking brake and caught the back of the brakes on fire. My track ended up running up and helping them out and the flames were eventually put out. A little crazy, but even crazier when it’s pitch black and you don’t have the luxury of lights. Of course we ended up pulling out the flashlights and turning on the white headlights to make sure everything and everyone were okay, but soon we were on our way to do some more combat night driving. It was fun and I have to say that I did pretty well. In fact, I felt like I had to do well to disprove the myth that all Asians are bad drivers.

So, after an exhausting day of Army training, I’m off to get some sleep. Tomorrow is suppose to be full of fun stuff like snow, wind, and obstacle courses. The combination of them should make for an interesting day.

My pile 'o gear

Driving Ms. Hummer

Driving Ms. Hummer

The other day we got our official driver’s license to drive tactical vehicles. Today we kicked it up a notch and did a combat convoy. Actually, they aren’t called “convoys” anymore because the powers that be didn’t like the sounds of it. So they call them something else now, and for the life of me, I don’t know what. For some reason my thought process is being interrupted by C.W. Mcall’s song... “…Pig Pen this here’s the Rubber Duck and I’m ‘bout to put the hammer down, 10-4!” Anyway, we drove around and trained on scenarios of what it would be like to drive in Iraq. For what we’ve learned, driving in Iraq is much like driving in New York, but instead of beggers running up to your car at a red light with Windex and paper towels to wash your windows, people in Iraq run up to your Hummer with machine guns and rocket launchers, especially after an IED goes off. This was the reason we put our resident driving expert at the wheel of my track (it’s a hummer, a truck with wheels, so why we call it a track is beyond me). His name is Pete and he’s from Baaaaahhhston. Yes, his accent is that bad, but he’s a good guy and we like having him around to keep us straight, not to mention the fact that he knows how to drive aggressively. We did a lot of training prior to the convoy run with 2 other vehicles filled with members of my team and headed out to “lanes” to see how much of the training we learned. I won’t go into the details of it, but let’s just say that it was a good day of training. The OCs taught us things that were very applicable to our future situation and they helped us learn a thing or two from guys who have been there and know what it’s like. Today was a breath of fresh air compared to the last few weeks and it reassured me that all this training wasn’t a bunch of malarkey. We actually got our uniforms dirty and used our weapons for something other than a hat holder when we go through the line at the chow hall! I’m sure I’ll be sore tonight after trying to pick up a few reserve lieutenant colonels whose weight would suggest that they haven’t skipped too many desserts in their lifetime, but it will be worth it if I can learn a skill or two that will save my hide later on.

Driving a HMMWV is difficult, but as you can see, it can tackle the
toughest
terrain

Here's the mighty gang road marching back from training. This begs the question, why are we walking if we have a bunch of high speed trucks?

Hi Ho Silver

Hi Ho Silver!

Last night after training (and pulling fire guard) we decided to try and scout out the local town of Manhattan to see what was there. For those who remember last week’s fiasco, that recon adventure ended with me cleaning frozen chicken off the side of the truck. Not this time though. I took the “captain mafia” out just for some dinner at a local steak place called Whiskey Creek. The atmosphere was similar to a Logans or Texas Road House, complete with the peanuts that you throw the shells on the floor. The meal was nothing to write home about (yet I’m writing about it in a blog now) and the service was horrible. What started out as a night to get a decent meal turned into a just a night to drink and complain about where we are and what we’re doing. Nothing that would warrant sympathy from anyone, but just a bunch of guys lamenting about our current place in life and crying in our beers, well, not literally, because Army Captains don’t cry, but you get the picture.

Oh, and there was horse riding that needed to be done by a member of the gang.

Pete after a few beers


For some reason I find myself taking pictures of people on mechanical horses.

Gary a few months back in Dallas

Flood

Flood

When I found out that I was coming to Kansas for a few months, I tried to mentally prepare myself for the change in geography. I expected lots of open plains, maybe some rolling hills, some cold wind and possibly even a tornado or two. If I was a bet’n man, I’d say that say that the chance of witnessing a flood while I was here was slim to none. Today, I would have had to pay big dividends on that bet, for I not only saw that flood, I was almost swept away in the raging waters. Was it because I was training in a dry creekbed that was suddenly filled with melt water from the receding snow? Nope. Was it due to a torrential downpour from a freak storm? Not that either. Was it because a senior NCO hung his clothes on the sprinkler system on the second floor of my building which set off the fire alarm and a shower of water the flooded most of the second floor and part of the first? Bingo!

Of course this is a freak thing, but I thought it was common sense not to do stuff like that. Sprinkler heads are for putting out fires, not hanging your jacket on. Everyone received a briefing when we first got these barracks to leave the sprinkler heads alone, plus I thought it was just common knowledge not to be stupid. I must be mistaken. All I know is that I came back from doing PT in the morning and my personal hygiene time was interrupted by alarms, sirens and a muddy river flowing down the hall. Next thing I knew I was scurrying out the door to a muster point with most of my uniform on and weapons in tow to stand out in the cold waiting for the fire truck to show. Luckily, I didn’t get much damage. Most of my stuff is put away and for the most part, the water stayed on the south end of the building and I’m on the north end. We’re not sure what is going to happen to that individual who flooded our building due to negligence, but I can tell you that there are a lot of people, especially those with rooms under him and those who have to pull fire guard detail while they fix the system, that would like to have a private word or two with him behind the wood shed.

Of course I didn’t get a picture of it happening because we weren’t allowed in the building for a long time, and I also didn’t get a picture of the giant dehumidifiers that were placed in the rooms of the people who had 4 inches of water on their floor. That must be fun to have in the room. Kind of like sleeping in a sauna, inside a jumbo jet engine.

Ate up

Ate up

“Ate Up” is a term I first heard when I was in college. It was a common phrase that was used to describe someone who was not performing well. It is not a very pleasant description of someone, and it usually had a few expletives added to it to emphasize its meaning (ate the f*** up!). Even the creative types used the phrase, but said it in a way that made you have to think about it for a while until you realized that they were insulting you (you’re 10 up and 2 down!). I heard this phrase many times during my career in the Army and even used it a few times myself on some choice individuals. It was also a regular part of my friends’ vocabulary, at least those in the military. They all had stories of their “joes” doing stupid things and being “ate up like a soup sandwich” was a very colorful way to describe how really messed up they were. Then a funny thing happened... I got out of the military. It took some time, but eventually I started cursing less, dressing myself for work, and quit using the lively phrases of my Army days. I became a civilian, and I got soft (not that cursing and wearing the same thing every day made you any harder). The longer I stayed out, I realized that I never heard the expression “ate up” used very much in the real world, and in the rare times that I tried to use it, most civilians just kind of looked at me the way a pig might look at a Timex. They didn’t appreciate the saying, so I in turn just stopped using it.

Jump to today...

I have rediscovered my old military phrases. I say this because some of the instructors I have are ate up, some of the instruction we have received has been really ate up, and sometimes I wonder if anyone not in our unit knows what it means NOT to be ate up. I’m trying hard here to keep a positive attitude. For this first full week of training I have been trying to give the cadre, being the trainers, the benefit of the doubt since I know that it must be tough to take a large group of people and get them through the aggressive training schedule of skills needed before they deploy. I want to believe that they will fix their broken system and each night before I lay my head on my pillow, I pray that the next day will be better and free from the frustrations of the previous day. Time and time again, they have failed me, and my team, and I can feel the frustration growing in the folks around me. Some have already thrown in the towel and have succumbed to just being bounced around like a pinball. Their reasoning is that they are getting paid to sit and wait for busses that never show and for instructors who don’t know what they are teaching. Others of us have taken on to training ourselves by hijacking the instruction material from the OCs (Observer Controller – aka the teachers here) and teaching ourselves. There are days that I don't think I belong here and hope for some admin person at headquarters to suddenly realize that they made a mistake and send me someplace else. Enough about that though because I don’t want to rant too much. I have to check myself now and then so I can not slip off the cliff of cynicism that is so easy to do when one works for Uncle Sam.

Each day for accountability, we have to give an “up”. Here is a better explanation of what that means:

“Team 19, are you up?” – Are all of Team 19's members present?
“Bravo company, give me an up on your weapons.” - Let me know if all your weapons are there.
“Dude, that class was ate up.” - Man, that class was not satisfactory.
“Johnson, you up?” – Has Johnson got his lazy butt out of the rack?

We give “ups” a lot within the unit and especially within our team. To make it easier to keep accountability of our people and our gear, we have all been assigned numbers. When the team leader wants to know if he has everyone, he just screams out “Team 19, give me an up” in which we respond by sequentially shouting out our assigned number followed by “up”; “One’s up”, “Two’s up” etc. It’s a very good system, especially when things can get chaotic for movement from one location to the next and we are battling for transportation assets. You don’t want to lose your buddy and you definitely don’t want to lose any of your weapons.

By the way, my assigned number is 8, so most days, I’m “eight up”.

Maybe I do belong here.

Army Training

Army Training


Long day of training, or more specifically, tactical vehicle drivers training, so not much to write. Just a picture of me in part of my "battle rattle". I'm missing a few things, like my gloves, elbow and knee pads, and my helmet is a little crooked, but behind those glasses is the cold stare of a slanty eyed killer!




... or maybe just a tuckered out Korean.

I saw a funny thing at church today...

Saw a funny thing at church...

Life is slowly getting into a routine, which has it’s pluses and negatives. We get up, do PT, go to breakfast, train all day, have dinner, have a nightly meeting, get ready for the next day, and go to bed only to start it all again. It’s only the first week of real training, yet it feels like I’ve been here for months. It reminds me of being in college, when life was so full of stuff and your mind was on autopilot until you could preoccupy it with something that broke the norm. And although it is difficult now to get out of this rut, I can’t ignore the fact that in few months I will be deploying. Part of me wants to absorb as much information and training that I can so that I can go fully prepared to do what I have to do and do it well. The impatient side of me wants to just get over there and get it all over with so I can get back sooner. I’m torn, but dwelling on it doesn’t do much good.

I saw this in the church that I had a briefing in today. Since there really wasn’t much that happened in the last few days, seeing this at least got a chuckle out of me. I’m sure that there is a real reason for these things and it probably has to do with safety and such, but ya think they could have come up with a better name.

Ammo

Ammo

The chain of command has issued us ammo today. Granted, it’s only about 3 magazines of blanks, but it is suppose to help us get use to walking around with live rounds in our weapons. In some respects, it is more trouble than its worth as we have to worry about inexperienced soldiers doing stupid things with ammunition, plus we have to keep accountability of the rounds. On the other hand it helps us to “train to fight”. That means that we need to practice here stateside exactly what we are going to do overseas in theater, and blanks are kind of “baby steps” to going to war with live ammo. Chambering rounds for movement between areas and clearing our weapons at every checkpoint is suppose to get us in the habit of being safe with our rifles and pistols, and while we might think it is a pain, I think it’s a good idea. Plus, if someone was to “accidentally” shoot their weapon at me, I’d much rather it be a blank than the real thing.

I found out today that my position for the task force has changed (again). I’m tempted not to even post what it is because there is part of me that is sure it will jinx me and it will change again. I’m still sticking to my original plan of “preparing for the worse, hoping for the best” but hope can be a fading thing at times, especially when I’m not really sure what kind of job I’m preparing for.

I saw something tonight that disturbed me on someone else’s blog. This individual is apparently deployed to Iraq right now doing a similar job to what the Task Force is training to do. They were blogging about the life over there and what they are doing day to day, much like you’d find in any blog. The disturbing part was that this individual started talking about the security of his FOB (forward operations base) and how they don’t pull security on one area because they don’t think that the will be hit from that area. What in the heck is he thinking? I group this guy in with the likes of Geraldo who stood in front of a camera on national TV and told the world what unit he was with and where they were at right before a major battle. People, don’t put things on the internet that could get you or your buddies killed. That just doesn’t make sense!

On a good note to end today’s short blog, I did receive a box of goodies and became instantly popular with my team and with the folks on my floor. Most of them probably could go without the cookies or candy, but I’m glad that they could share in my little box of sunshine, because there’s no way in the world I’d be able to eat that much food! If I keep getting boxes like this, I’m liable to have to get a bigger ACU size to grow into before I deploy!

Respect

Respect

I already have a great deal of respect for our soldiers, but today they earned even more respect from a lowly non-infantry Captain like myself. Today, President’s Day, a day where most government employees get the day off, was our first official day of training. To simulate conditions in theater, we wore our “battle rattle”, which is something that our men and women in the military wear all the time when they are in a war zone, and in much greater temperatures than those found in Kansas in the middle of February. “Battle rattle” in Army speak means all of our issued gear, to include armor, helmet, weapons, and all the other whiz-bang gear that we get issued. Let’s just say that it’s a lot heavier than the polo shirt and khaki pants that I’m use to wearing to the office every day. The only thing we didn’t get issued today was ammo, which will add another, say, 5 to 6 lbs for a full combat load to the already 45 to 55 lbs of gear that we are carrying. Ugh! Even for those who are in shape, it takes some getting use to, but for the vast majority of the folks here, standing still with everything on was a challenge. We even had one person go to the hospital for heat exhaustion after walking only 1 mile in the stuff (mind you it only got up to 49 F today). We’ll get use to it though, as we start acclimating to it by wearing all of our gear from place to place. One thing is for sure, I will definitely have a stronger back after this experience. Either that or I will be two inches shorter.

I’d post pictures of me in my turtle outfit, but I didn’t bring my camera to training today and I wasn’t about to put it all back on since I know there will be plenty of photo ops in the future to see me in all of my gear.

Drunkards and Chicken

Drunkards and Chicken

Sometimes I wish I was a drunkard; to be able to release my inhibitions through liquid courage and give up my worries and troubles. It’s not like I don’t drink. I’ll have the occasional beer now and then, and even if coaxed into it, I might even do a shot (or two), but I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had more than a beer at a social gathering. I’m not sure why I don’t drink and sometime I feel like I’m missing out on something when I see the vast majority of people around me getting plastered and I’m sipping a Coke wondering what I’m suppose to be missing. I guess I just don’t need a beer in my hand in order to relax or have a good time. I don’t frown on folks who drink because they sure do appear like they are having a good time. In fact, ask any drunk if he’s having fun and I’ll bet that 95% of the time, they will say “yes”. The other 5% of the time they are upset because the bartender hasn’t brought them their next drink. Of course ask that same drunk later that night when they are dry heaving the contents of their stomach or the next day when they don’t want to talk to anyone if they are having fun, and I’m sure you’ll get a much different response. I get a chuckle out of the same comments every temporary recovering drunk says, and they always say the same things;

“Why did I drink so much?”
“Why did you let me drink so much?”
“I’m never going to drink again.”
“I’m sorry about your truck.”

One of the reasons that I wish I could drink myself into oblivion is that I would be relieved of my duties of taking care of those who do drink themselves into a staggering mess. Now, I don’t mind being the only sober person at a group gathering, especially if I’m responsible for getting my friends back safely to their respective beds. In fact, it’s pretty funny to watch my normally sober friends act the fool and have a good time, but its troubling at times to have to play the “parent” and try to convince them that no, they do not look good with their coat on backwards and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to poop on the bar because the bar made didn’t smile at you. Trying to reason with a drunk is like trying to walk a cat on a leash. By far the worse part is cleaning up the mess afterwards, especially if their drinks (and dinner) make a sudden appearance in the front seat of your vehicle, which was happened last night. The powers that be here at the unit decided to give us a pass to go into the local town outside the gate and relax. What started off as an innocent shopping trip with dinner at BW3s turned into a semi-bar crawl and me cleaning chicken and Yeager off the passenger side of my truck last night at 2am. Normally, I would have left it for the offending person to clean up this morning, but since the temps are falling below freezing, I figured I’d best take care of it right away or else I’d have frozen chicken chunks stuck to everything inside and outside the truck. Again, I have pictures (as I always do) so please refrain from reading further if you don’t want to see. Regardless of cleaning up barf and carrying the barffer back to his room for his driver’s training on the toilet bus, it was a good time to be out of the barracks and off of post.





Today is probably the last free day we’re going to get in a while. Our training schedule is pretty aggressive but we usually have most of our Sundays off. I plan on doing some laundry today (most of my stuff stinks like smoke from the bar last night), I’m due for a haircut and I’m going try and see if I can’t get to a computer terminal and check on my ever growing email inbox. Usually I would be able to check my email from my fancy internet accessible phone, but cell phone reception here is the worse and I can’t get through most phone conversations let alone uplink to a data connection and check my mail. I’m still trying to get internet piped into my room, however I will have to wait until next week to try and make that happen. I say “try” because I might not have time to wait for the internet guy to show up and hook the system up due to training. So, if you are reading this and emailing me, please don’t get frustrated if I don’t respond right away. The 5 minutes that I can get on the internet at the company area are rushed because the line for an open machine can sometimes take up to an hour. I’m again surprised that they wouldn’t provide us more access seeing as the world (and the Army) loves to use the internet to disseminate information (and go shopping). Uncle Sam is fairly technical savvy and takes advantage of the web in a lot of ways. Unfortunately for us Army folk, Uncle Sam is also very cheap.