A Year In The Sandbox

We’ve been super busy since my last post, we haven’t had much free time at all and what we did have we used to get our gear squared away.  Today was much better though.  Yesterday we were busy from 0600 until almost 2100, just in time to get to sleep and do it again.  The whole team is here now except for our security guards, a National Guard infantry platoon we’ll pick up next week.  Everybody on the team is cool, I get along with all of them.  Out of the 30 or so enlisted we have there are only 5 or 6 airmen, all but one of which are E-4s, the rest are all NCOs so the random acts of window licking are pretty much non-existent.  Our team only has 2 senior NCOs, both E-8s, one Army and one Air Force.  The Army First Sergeant is the ranking one and pretty much runs the show, so we’re having to learn how to do everything the Army way.  It’s not bad, just different.

We have a chow hall about a 5 minute walk away from the barracks and the food is pretty darn good.  I’d always heard that Army chow halls sucked but it’s just as good as any AF chow hall I’ve eaten in.  Food’s free while we’re in training and while we’re deployed, so that makes it taste that much better.  We’re moving out to a mock Forward Operating Base (FOB) in a week or so and the food situation will be a little different there.  We’ll get hot food for breakfast and dinner, but lunch will be MREs which I haven’t had since basic.  Supposedly they’ve improved a ton since back then, but I’ll let you know after I’ve had a few.

We’ve been issued a ton of equipment and I have a whole box of crap that I brought from Lackland that I don’t need that I’ll be sending home.  We’re getting all Army gear and it’s all brand new, top of the line stuff.  It’s way better than what the Air Force is using.  I’m not sure how much of it we’ll get to keep, but I’m going to keep as much as I can.  Friday is our final equipment issue, we get our body armor (brand new stuff) and our weapons.  It’ll be nice to get our weapons but it adds an extra layer of ass-pain to the daily routine.  We can’t take our weapons anywhere until we get out to the FOB, so whenever we’re not in the barracks (which is the majority of the day) we have to leave our weapons and a guard.

The weather’s been about as great as I could hope for.  It’s been pretty cool with a couple of mornings that were down right chilly.  It was rainy all day today, but I’ll take that over 90 – 100 degree days any time.

I uploaded a few more pictures to the CST album too.