Day 24

I woke up this morning and had breakfast: a couple pancakes, a hashbrown thing, some yogurt, and a banana.  Then we showed up for our morning briefs.  However, we were surprised by having to get on a bus in order to travel the 1 mile to the brief location.  This was again puzzling because we traveled to the Marine Corps part of the base and were then briefed by Army personnel.  I sat there scratching my head...

The first brief was about personnel recovery, which is probably a good topic to cover.  However unlikely it would be, people occasionally get separated from their groups.  It's usually their fault for one reason or another, but it still happens.  There are just a few things to keep in mind, and some Do's and Don't for the recovery part.  For instance, don't come running toward the rescue helicopter waving frantically with a gun in your hands (Scott O'Grady).  I had heard it all before at SERE, which is generally hard to forget.

Then we had a lecture on the Law of War and the doctrines that guide our policies in foreign countries.  The JAG officer was extremely boring and dry, so the time dragged.  But he finished early so that was nice.

But then that left us more time to clean our weapons before lunch.  So we took the guns apart and continued to clean them to the best of our ability.  Of course, we don't have actual cleaning kits and we were all using rags and parts we found in a chest at the front of the classroom.

But lunch came and went, can't even remember what we ate.  Must not have been very memorable.  Sigh.  I miss Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

We were instructed that weapon turn-in was to occur at 1300 at the armory.  So my table from lunch went directly to the armory and waited for the doors to open. I had to clean one part of the gun I had missed, but they guy let me use his tool.  It was a great tool!  It was long and had a sharp tip, so it was able to reach all the hard to reach bits.  Apparently, our drill sgt should have known where to get some for us.  Go figure.  But my M4 was successfully returned.  The funny part about this is that the rest of the group went to the classroom first and the drill sgt wouldn't let them depart for the armory until he'd inspected the weapons himself.  I know he was trying to save heartache at the armory, but it got to be a little ridiculous.

I helped other people clean guns after that, hopefully speeding up the process for some.  After that I came back to the room and started packing things up.  I now have a very densely packed ruck-sack.  It has my armor and my helmet in there, plus all the odds and ends I could fit.  The trivia question of the night:

How heavy is my ruck-sack?  Place your guesses in the comments!

At 5:30pm, 4 of us headed out to a Japanese restaurant and we had sushi for dinner.  There weren't any bad choices made, with the exception of one appetizer.  I do not want to ever eat fried tofu again.  I don't care about how special the sauce is.  Tofu is unnatural to start with, so deep frying it doesn't do much for me.  But we came back, and I continued to pack.  What fun I'm having....or as Borat would say, Not!