Another Long Jump Into the Future

My week off passed pretty uneventfully. Charles was busy with school, it was still cold outside, and I really wasn't interested in doing a lot. Just relaxing for a week without having to think about the Army was a good time. I did spend one day at work. I went to lunch with a couple of friends and caught up with happenings there. I spent close to three hours in a brainstorming session with one of them. I think we could go into business together some day. Between us, we have solved every problem we have run across with the hardware we use at work.

My last day at home, I got a call from ECRC who pointed out that my travel itinerary had me going back to Ft Bragg instead of Ft Dix. It got fixed, but it meant arriving at the Philidelphia airport close to midnight. I didn't actually get to Dix until after one AM. That was an appropriate start to this part of my training. Some of it has been interesting. Over the last two days, we have been doing driver training. I now have a military license to drive Hummvees. Tomorrow, we are drawing weapons and going to the range for the first time. I think that all this week will be in weapons qualifications. I will qualify with the M4 (M16 carbine) and M9 Baretta pistol. I will get to shoot the squad automatic weapon, the M240 machinegun, and the M203 grenade laucher too, although I wont get to qualify on them.

Most of my time here has been spent waiting. I live in a twelve man barracks room with nine Navy officers from my last course and two Army officers, who by now have been mostly converted into to the Navy. We have a lot of fun, but mostly we complain about the Army. We get up early every morning and then wait for transportation to wherever we are having our training. Then we wait for everyone to arrive, then for the training to start, then for transportation to our next stop. Today, we finished the training evolution in about an hour, then waited for almost three more hours to find out what we were doing next.

All of us Navy types have a hard time believing that it is even possible to be so unorganized. The Navy mentality would not allow this kind of time wasting to occur. Long days aren't so bad if you are actually doing something. If there isn't anything to do, let your people take care of their own business. Nothing will change, so all we can do is complain among ourselves.

Internet is very slow here, but I will try to post a little more about my current training.

I Survived

I just got back from a week in the field, where we put our theory and doctrine into practice. USACAPOC cleared an small area of forest and built a forward operating base where CA and PSYOP students can live and work for a week or so at a time. I checked Google Earth and the imagery isn't new enough to show it, but I have some pictures.

Anyway, we started with a long walk, 19 miles in 23 hours, with 7 scenarios to play along the way. It was a demonstration of negotiation, mediation, and culture built into a story line simulating civil military operations after a short war. The introduction to the arab culture was very eyeopening. The seven days that followed gave us all a chance to try to figure out what the story was and work together to bring it to a happy end. There wasn't much sleep, and there was a lot of work to do. It has been a long time since I was that physically tired. Usually, it takes me as much as an hour to fall asleep after I go to bed, but every night on the FOB, I was asleep in just minutes. Unfortunately for my tent mates, that didn't leave them much time to get to sleep themselves before the snoring started. The last night there, the next tent over said they could hear me, so it must have been bad in my own tent.

Its over now. I get to go home for a week, then to Fort Dix in New Jersey for two months. Its hard to believe that I have been on active duty for more than two months now. I still have more than a year left, though. More later.

Interior of my tent (GP medium with HVAC)



This is the FOB from one of the guard towers. It can hold up classes up to 2-3 hundred students. Ours was only 52, so it was pretty empty.

There were just barely enough of us to man all of the fighting positions for base defense.

You Can Always Learn Something From Your Leaders

I passed my APFT retest today. The run was easy. Apparantly, running twice a week and going for a multi-mile ruck march can get you into shape.
It wasn't all good though. Unfortunately, one of the more senior Navy types really didn't want to do the APFT again. He puts way to much stock into doing well in this course. I'm not saying that you shouldn't always try to do well, but this one was willing to screw his shipmates to avoid anything appearing to be adverse.
To start with, no one in the Navy is ever going to see the course OER (Army Officer Efficiency Report) or, if they did, care one whit about it. We are going to Iraq, and even failing this course wont change that. So passing or failing the APFT means NOTHING to us. It does matter to the Army types, though. The Army will see and care about their OERs. Anyway, this Navy type new he wasn't going to pass the APFT, and he didn't want that negative statement on his MEANINGLESS course OER. So he went snivelling to the cadre, and essentially refused to take the APFT again, using the excuse that he had a temporary profile (medical restriction on physical activity). The profile would let him run. It was the sit-ups he couldn't complete, but the profile didn't say that he couldn't do sit-ups. The cadre couldn't just let him go. They had to be consistant across the board, so everyone with a profile was excused. That meant that several Army types would get an adverse statement on their course OER for not being able to complete a course requirement. This mattered to them.
Sometimes, your leaders are examples of what not to be. Dont screw your juniors, especially over something that means NOTHING.

A Piece of History

I wanted to do something today, besides the usual lounging around, so I drove to Wilmington and walked through the Battleship North Carolina Memorial. I thought that it would only take a couple of hours, but I spent the better part of four hours walking her decks. I have been to the Missouri memorial in Pearl Harbor, but this ship is the better of the two museums. The NC Memorial has more of the ship open to the public than Missouri, including two of the main gun turrets and one of the five inch gun turrets.

USS North Carolina had a short career. It was commissioned in 1942 and retired in 1947, but it was involved in every campaign in the Pacific theater. I wont try to write any more about that.

What I still find most interesting, when I tour museums like this one, is how little things have changed at the most basic levels. The individual pieces and parts that made up the ship are the very same pieces and parts that make up my old boat. Electrical panels, valves, guages, etc are all exactly the same, and probably made by the same manufacturer. A sailor from WWII may not know what something on my old boat does, but he wouldn't have any trouble knowing how to operate it. We are slowly shifting in the direction of electronic and computer control systems, but the most fundamental parts probably wont ever change.

There are a lot of memorial and museum ships. I will have to have to take greater care to see them when I am nearby.

Number Three turret looking forward from the aft deck. The bell from the armored cruiser North Carolina, commissioned in 1908, is in the foreground.

The view from the Captain's chair on the bridge. I didn't sit in the chair. Even though she hasn't had a Captain for more than 60 years, I couldn't sit there. Some things you just dont do, even when no one is looking. One of them is sitting in the Captain's seat. I am probably just a bit superstitious, but most sailors are like that. I think it has something to do with how important customs and traditions are to us. Some of them go back nearly to Noah. Maybe this would make another good post someday.

There's Something About government Service

We had a guest instructor today. He is replacing another one who left for greener pastures, but he probably wasn't vetted very well by the cadre. He knows his stuff. He has had a lot of experience in the national security arena, but he spent too much time in one or more federal bureaucracies, and obviously went native. It doesn't take much digging to find that there are a number of bureaucracies that, for one reason or another, absolutely hate the current Executive. Some dont even try very hard to hide it. The cadre didn't give him any ground rules or expectations for the class, and right out of the gate, he decided that we really needed to know just how screwed up the White House was. The tenor of his opinion would be welcome at any Code Pink rally, only slightly less crude. He was brought into line, and ended up teaching a pretty good class, but he probably wont be invited back once he finishes this course of instruction.
It is really a sad thing that otherwise rational people can let differences of opinion, whether it is religion or science or politics, turn into hate like that. There are a number of different religions represented in my class. My roommate is a very devout Catholic. There are Republicans and Democrats, and every other kind of division, but no one ever talks about another one in that way.
I think this is a topic that needs some additional exploration, but it will have to wait for another day.

If They Weren't Good Enough...

they wouldn't call them minimum requirements.
On my first day, I took the Army physical fitness test and didn't do very well. Army sit-ups are a lot harder than Navy sit-ups. Today, after six weeks of twice weekly PT, I had another (unofficial) go at it. My run was about 30 seconds faster and I did twice as many sit-ups as before. It looks like I wont wash out over physical fitness. Actually, in this course it isn't possible to wash out over anything except legal or medical problems.

Sometimes Bad Things Happen for Good Reasons

That may be a bit of an exageration, and it is certainly more than a bit of justification by hind sight. I had planned to visit the Fugals in Lebanon, KY this weekend. I didn't notice until I reached the airport that I hadn't been paying attention when I booked the flight. I had made the reservations for 7 April instead of 7 March, but it was probably a good thing anyway. Annette said that they were expecting a foot of snow today and tomorrow. I might not have returned in time for class on Monday if I had made it. I still have one more opportunity before I ship out, though, so I will get to see them in the next couple of months. Instead, I think that I will go to Wilmington tomorrow. The battleship North Carolina is a museum ship there. It is probably a two hour drive so it isn't bad for a day trip.