A Year In The Sandbox

We have been so busy the last couple weeks it’s ridiculous.  Since we moved out to the tent city we’ve been training pretty much non-stop.  Some of the training has been pretty fun and some of it has sucked balls, but it’s definitely not been boring.  Right now we’re back in the WWII barracks for a couple days because tropical storm Hannah is supposed to hit Fayetteville tomorrow and the tents wouldn’t be the best place to ride it out.  I know I bitched about how crappy these barracks are when I first got here but now they feel like the Hilton!

A few days ago we had land navigation training.  We learned how to find our way from one point to another over land using a map, compass and protractor.  It was actually a lot of fun, the only thing that sucked is that we had to do it in full battle rattle.  We paired up in teams of two and they gave us a list of coordinates and a starting point and we had to find 3 of the 5 locations and make it back to the start in 3 hours.  The locations were about 1km apart on average and were marked with an orange and white sign with a number on it.  We had to write down the number on the sign at each point we went to and that’s how they knew we found the correct spot or not.  Then that night we had to come back and do it again in the dark.  It’s a little harder to keep your heading in the dark because you can’t see very far to pick out a waypoint, but the locations were close together and we only had to find 2 out of 3 to pass.

We’ve also started our combat patrol training learning how to conduct convoys.  It was pretty fun training too, mostly focusing on how to spot and avoid IEDs.  The first part of it was classroom, then we went out and walked a road pretending we were in vehicles.  We got blew up a couple times, some of the IEDs were really hard to see.  The next day we did it again but in real vehicles.  We spotted all the IEDs but they still told us we got blown up so we could practice towing a disabled vehicle out of the kill zone.

The other interesting training we had was Army combatives training.  We had 8 hours of it out in a pit filled with rubber mulch.  They taught us different takedowns and holds, but if it gets to the point we have to use it we’re already in big trouble.  It was fun though, we got to do some live sparring too.  We couldn’t punch or kick or anything, only submissions and chokes.  And we couldn’t stand up farther than our knees just to keep people from getting hurt.

Now we’ll be in these barracks for a couple days then we’ll head back to the tent city.  Today and tomorrow are supposed to be easy days with no training scheduled which will be really nice.  For the last couple weeks our days started before 6am and ended around 10:30 or 11pm.  That doesn’t leave much time for any personal stuff at all so I’m really looking forward to taking it easy today and tomorrow!

I’ve been putting up pictures at www.picasaweb.com/mbrameld/CST