Hooah

Okay, so after the week in Virginia I got to take a fun Greyhound bus ride to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. Above is a picture from the "barracks" I am staying in (there will be a picture of those below). What I was talking about in the Charleston post earlier today - "Wait, I thought you were busy? How do you have time to do two posts in one day?" That's exactly what I was talking about. Today is Presidents Day and instead of honoring a select few of our presidents who appear on currency, I got to be at work. I didn't actually do much work, but I had to be back last night. Since the beginning this has been a huge problem. There are some terrible schedulers working here I think. For example we had a 25 minute class period shoved into a three hour block on Saturday so we didn't get out of here until noon. Adding an extra half hour another day would have been totally possible, there aren't any contracts being violated or anything. For those of you who are not and have never been in the military it isn't like a normal job, no contracts or overtime or anything like that. Really you just do what you're told for as late as you're told to do it. The same with this stupendously patriotic holiday, the amount of things we actually did involved no outside coordination (it couldn't all those people had the day off), it could have easily been folded into the entire week that we had already had inefficiently spent. Back to the beginning though... we arrived on Sunday afternoon and checked in with the drill instructors, really just signed some forms and got sheets. They are called drill instructors though, like on TV, and they have the mountie hats. Actually here's a picture of one. Okay I don't have any pictures of drill instructor hats but you know them, like the drill instructors you've seen whittling Private Pyle to his eventual self-termination. So we check into our room, here's that picture. I have a top bunk, there is a snorer next to me and a way louder on down the way (see Kent's blog for the video).

The training group here is composed of people going to IA (Individual Augmentee) assignments all over, that just means that they take someone from the Navy and send him to go do a job to support someone else, as in he or she is an "individual", and they are going to "augment" elsewhere because there are not enough people available to do the job otherwise. I think the reason for that is that we apparently are at war for some reason. By send them "all over" I pretty much mean Iraq or Afghanistan. There are some going to Djibouti also.

Mostly what we are here to do is learn non-Navy things that the Army does, like shoot guns at things besides the water, do first responder style first aid, learn land navigation, and learn about moving in convoys (of armored vehicles through Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.). Usually the day involves getting up early, sometimes exercising and sometimes not depending on the planned schedule, and then going to a range to shoot or learning some classroom things. On the left is the body armor we have to wear. We get to take it off a lot, but this stuff is heavy.

The uniform we wear is the same as the helmet, called "DCU's" for desert combat uniform, where the old-school green camouflage is called BDU (battle dress uniform). Now that they have all the crazy digital camouflage and stuff they feel the need to come up with fun new acronyms to name them, for example the Army one is called the ACU (Army combat uniform). The Air Force has a few versions of it too, but I don't know the name. So we wear the DCU but have body armor that looks like the ACU, and the camelbacks are the ACU print (the same print as the body armor under the tan helmets above). This is what the uniform I will be wearing for the next year looks like, minus the body armor, which I won't have to wear much anyway.

So everyone gets guns here and people that are going over to Iraq of Afghanistan are all required to take one with them and have it the whole time they're there. Everyone gets an M16 (that will be in a later picture), just those that are not taking an M16 with them get a "loaner." This means they are nice enough to let you carry it around all week, clean it, not lose, it, shoot it, etc. but then they take it back. People who are taking a 9mm pistol with them get one of these too. I take one of those with me so I carry that around as well which isn't bad, it's on a belt so not really any trouble. The M16, however, is a bit more cumbersome and tends to get in the way a lot, especially when trying to get food at mealtime and in the shower. Just kidding we don't have to take them in the shower, we aren't even allowed to take them in the bathroom because apparently at one time someone Private Pyled themselves. We got a whole lot of stuff here, and it's about 50/50 for usefulness to not-so-much. Sam is seen here modeling a lovely pair of heavy weight fleece wading pants we are required to take:

That's about all for the first week. There are some more good pictures I've seen floating around that I need to get a hold of. By good I mean funny. These Navy people love taking pictures, it'll be a classroom with a drill instructor teaching you about IED's or something (those are bombs, improvised explosive devices, for those of you who have not seen CNN in the past several years) and some Navy person will whip out a camera and take a picture of the drill instructor giving the lesson. Someone asked one day how much realism they incorporated into the convoy and medevac training, as in did they ever get real helicopters to come to train on setting up a medevac site. The answer was that they did, but the Navy people were so busy taking pictures when the helos got there that it made the training worthless because no one was paying attention. Go figure, but thanks to the picture-takers you have pictures to view. More later... if you have questions you can ask them on the comments (and I will answer them on the comments) or e-mail me. Oh and I almost forgot, "Hooah" is an Army thing, like in the movie Blackhawk Down. They say it so much though it's ridiculous. It's like every other word out of everyone's mouth. Crazy. Hooah.