Day 23

Our day started at 4:30am again, because I don't know what we'd do without an hour of darkness before we can do anything.  Of course, it was a chilly morning, exacerbated by the constant rain.  I was to be a gunner, so I suspected I'd be soaked by the end of the day.

I wore my normal camouflage, but also wore an outer layer of waterproof camouflage too.  I was a little uncomfortable on the hour bus ride, but it was well worth it!

Picture, if you can, five vehicles in a row.  All sand colored and pretty high off the ground.  We had three Humvee's and two personnel transport vehicles, alternated.  Each Humvee had a gunner that sat up in the turret and manned the M240 machine gun.  Thankfully we only had blanks today, but that was my job!  So instead of sticking my head out of a limo driving down the street, I got to handle the machine gun sticking out of an all terrain vehicle bumping down a sand/dirt path through the woods.  Pretty crazy, if you think about it.  I got pretty good at swinging the turret around and manipulating my rifle at the same time as the machine gun.

The first exercises were strictly IED training.  While both exercises were scripted, we knew the plan for the first operation.  The second operation was more of a surprise.  We had a mission to head into a village and gather intelligence.  Unfortunately, when the locals started brandishing RPG's, we had to shoot them with the blanks!  It was pretty much chaos, but we didn't lose anybody in our convoy.  So that was definitely good news.

But we came back once all the groups had finished, and we cleaned guns for 4 hours.  We are turning in the loaner weapons tomorrow and they have to be clean.  So it took a while.  The M4 has some hard to reach nooks and crannies!  But then we had dinner and some downtime.

Tomorrow we should be done by early afternoon, which will be a nice change.  A group of us may head out for a sushi dinner.  On a completely side note, Verizon is hooking me up.  Since my number is the primary line on the account, while my service is suspended we'll only have to pay the secondary fee for Emili's line, $9.99. So that's quite nice.  But I think that's all for now!