A Year In The Sandbox

Finally I have orders in my hands and have completed outprocessing! No more checklists to complete or appointments to attend. Well, I have to go to immunizations tomorrow for my 3rd Anthrax and 2nd Hep B vaccine, but that’s it for real. I had a going-away Friday night out at The Place. It was karaoke [...]

Monday was M4 qualification. I wasn’t too worried about it since I had already qualified expert on the M16 and there’s not too much difference between the two weapons. They threw in a curve though, we had to qualify wearing a bullet-proof vest, Kevlar helmet and web gear. The vest alone weighs close to 50 [...]

The Air Force makes you jump through a lot of hoops for the privilege of going to Afghanistan. I’ve had to go to more places, see more people, and get stuck with more needles than you could imagine. I finally got my leave approved and got my combat arms training date, I talk about that [...]

I went today to knock out as much of my pre-deployment checklist as I could. My first stop was deployment health in the basement of the hospital. There they looked up my records to figure out what medical processing needed to be done before I left. With that list in hand I headed upstairs to [...]

It’s hurry up and wait time now. I have a checklist I have to finish that I’m going to take care of tomorrow. It’s mostly medical stuff. After that I just have to wait until the rest of my equipment is here and get my travel arrangements. I’m planning on coming home on the 28th [...]