23-24, A Year Like No Other

Well folks, I turned 23 on tuesday. I had wanted to at least go out to dinner that night to celebrate, but training didn't allow us the luxery to. We had Humvee night training where we drove with the lights off and wore night vision goggles. However, I did have a great suprise in store for me. Marcy my wonderful girlfriend, had ordered a cake for me and got a hold of one of the guys down here with me to go pick it up. So, despite not being able to leave, I was still able to celebrate with a good chocolate birthday cake. This picture here is me about to cut the cake with my Ka-bar fighting knife.

Lately, nothing really entertaining has been going on. We typically sit in various classes all day and then work out at night. I believe next week we finally sign for vehicles and start doing field work. Thank God. All of us fall into the combat arms group and all this paper work/power point is slowly and painfully draining the life out of us. Getting out and actually working on weapon systems and tactics will actually be the enjoyable part of our mobilization.

I came to the realization a short while back that I will more than likely be spending not only this birthday, but my 24th also on this deployment. With that being said, the 23rd year of my life is going to be like no other year I will ever have more than likely. I'm dissapointed that I won't be around to share the next year with many of you, but I am proud to be able to come here and to do what few people can and choose to do.

Down here at Camp Funston, it is officer city. You can't walk from the barracks to the chow hall without saluting at least 4-5 officers. This is because the transition teams we are on are typically officer heavy. I'm not just talking LT's, there are a number of Lt. colonols and full bird colonols running around. The officers made a big fuss about saluting at first when we wouldn't, but now I see them do a 90 degree turn to avoid a large group of us to have to salute each individually. Well, that's it for now folks, time to go play some volleyball against some other teams.

too little training, too little time

A number of us have come to the realization that the amount of training up we need to do and the amount of training in reality we're going to do are completely different. I am only down here at Fort Riley for two months before I am sent over to Afghanistan. Much of this time is spent on learning how to be a combat advisor. Therefore, less time is spent learning to perfect the basics of how to shoot, move, and communicate. This is made up for by having people on the team who are all of higher ranking and numerous have combat experience. due the nature of where we're being sent, there are a lot of variables of whether we're staying together as a team or being split up and the ever increasing equipment issues. Because of all this, everybody wants to be well trained in every aspect of our jobs, not just combat advisor roles. As a result, we will probably spend our down time out at the the ranges getting more trigger time in. In a perfect world, I would feel more comfortable probably with 6-7 months of training. I'm sure by that point I'd be begging to go over and get out of the training as it does get boring. Although, in a perfect world, I suppose I wouldn't be doing any of this.

This week has been fairly interesting despite all that. We've been sitting through 8 hour language and culture classes. This has been a neat experience as the language and everything is taught by afghan people. They tell us all about culture like what to expect, how to act, what to do and not to do. This should help us to befriend the people we're going to be living and working with. Classes like these are going to be going on for the whole first month while I'm down here. If anybody has an questions feel free to leave a post and ask me. There is a decent amount of downtime here so I can answer questions to the best of my ability fairly quickly.