Day 27

I woke up around 5:15am and got started.  I showered, because I won't get another for a couple days.  After I was dressed in my Army costume, I tossed the towel in the dryer, so I could pack it dry.  And we should all know the virtues of a traveler having a suitable towel (if not, ask Douglas Adams).

I went to breakfast, and it appeared that they had not expected us.  The waffles were the broken and leftover pieces, and the bacon was not so appealing.  But it was food.

After breakfast, we had to turn in our sheets.  No real loss there.  I've been sleeping on top of the sheets in my sweats for the last couple weeks.

The weather here is beautiful again.  Norfolk shouldn't be much warmer or cooler than here, but some of the other locations are going to be interesting.  Germany is around 45 degrees, and Kuwait is around 104.  Of course, Afghanistan is sitting around 72, which seems quite comfortable comparatively.  So hopefully I'll stay warm and cool enough in transit!

Lunch was uneventful and then back to the barracks we went.  After a while, we took all of our bags outside and put them on a couple military cargo trucks.  The trucks left for the airport, and hopefully the bags will make it on the correct plane.  I think when we get to Kuwait we have to move the bags ourselves, so it's nice that someone else is doing the loading for us.

After that, the new class started showing up in the barracks, making it a bit awkward for us.  But we chatted with them for a bit and shared how the training goes here.  Then a couple of us came over to an open classroom and used our computers for a while.  Aaron was watching tv or movies he had downloaded and I played Civilization 5 for a bit.  I'm playing as the Iroquois nation, and I think I'm doing alright.

Dinner was again uneventful.  I'm starting to get tired, and it's only 7:15pm!  I hope that this is a sign that I'll have no problems sleeping on the plane.  I have my nice sound-cancelling headphones, and they definitely work well.  I plan to sleep as much as I can.

So we'll be off to the airport around 9pm, and our flight takes off 10 minutes after midnight.  If all goes according to plan, I think we're supposed to arrive in Kuwait around 2am on Monday (Kuwait time).  It will be quite an exhausting trip, I have no doubt.  But at least it's not as long as a trip across the Atlantic a couple hundred years ago.

I will try to remember the next couple days, but I don't think I'll be able to write anything immediately upon arrival in Kuwait.  So hopefully I'll be able to catch up.  Wish me luck, and we'll try to be safe.

Day 26

Another lazy day, and it was fantastic.  I slept in until 7:30am, had some pop tarts for breakfast, and then I sat outside in the sun and read for a while.  It's an absolutely beautiful day here, completely sunny skies, a slight breeze, and about 65 degrees.  Perfect.

I packed a little more this morning, and I'm slowly working my way into the seabags.  It looks like I'll have the ruck sack, 2 seabags, my flight bag, and my backpack. I think that's 1 bag more than others, but I don't feel like throwing things away.  So we'll see.

I took the shuttle over to the PX and then walked to a military store.  I got an extra belt and a decent flashlight, but they didn't have any black Navy wings.  Go figure.

Then I walked back to the PX and got an international power adapter set.  I think most people yesterday bought the wrong product.  I think most people got a plug adapter.  So while their plugs will fit, the 240V will still blow out their electronics.  My product converts the voltage appropriately, which will be good.

So I overheard a conversation in the barracks today.  The SWO named Miguel Charles was telling someone else how he was going to get a dog.  The other guy pointed out that it's hard for single guys to have dogs, and what was he going to do when he had to deploy again?  Charles said he didn't know, probably put it up for adoption.  It was here that I had to step in.

He said he'd either put it up for adoption or put it down, so I told him that I would put him down if I ever heard of him doing this.  He just thinks it'd be fine to have a dog for a couple years and then take it to the shelter.  I was infuriated!!  I don't believe he was serious about euthanizing the dog, but I fear he might be serious about giving it up.  So let's all cross our fingers that he doesn't get a dog anytime soon.  Grrrrrrr.

Dinner was uneventful, but it was ended with a fire alarm.  It's so hard to eat with that noise!  But I went for a short walk after dinner and took a few pictures.

School bus Farm

Port-a-potty Farm

Pretty Treeline

Day 25

Today was a nice change of pace.  I still woke up early to eat breakfast, but then it was pretty leisurely after that.  We theoretically had someone that was going to inspect our barracks, and then we'd be free to leave on liberty, but I don't think anyone ever stopped by.

I spent the morning working on my MPH application questions and I filled out a great deal of the Army's Health Profession's Scholarship worksheet.  It seems to be very similar to an SF-86 for the security clearance, but this is specific to the Army Medical world.  I still need to look up old addresses, social security numbers, and addresses for references and whatnot.  But anything I do now should help the process later.

I caught the shuttle over to the PX (Post Exchange) around 11am.  It took about 30 minutes to get to the other side of the base, but I don't have much else to do!  I got a few odds and ends, like a set of locks, a set of sheets, a head light, etc.  These are all recommended things to have for arriving in Kuwait, mostly.  I'm not sure I mentioned this before, but there is no power or AC in the bathroom trailer.  Fun times.

But I got a couple pieces of pizza for lunch, which tasted pretty good.  Right after I had finished eating, I heard from Emili.  She had safely arrived in Minnesota for the conference.  But then I came back and packed up some more stuff.  It's hard to believe they've given us this much junk!

After an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, I went to dinner here.  Nothing very exciting: chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, broccoli with cheese, a salad, and some banana pudding.  While not remarkable, it was free.  So that's always a good thing.  After dinner I went for a walk around the paved track.  The lights do not work, so it was getting dark.  But I clearly saw a couple bats flying around which was neat.  Then, I almost stepped on a large frog hopping across the path.  I picked him up, checked him out, and then I let him go.  Hopefully he doesn't get stepped on!

Currently I'm checking out some powerpoint presentations on veterinary histology from Virginia Tech's vet program.  I came across it one day online, so I downloaded it all for later viewing.  Don't you just love wget?

In other news today, Dennis Ritchie died.  For those of you who don't know that name, he was the creator of the C programming language and an early, key contributor to the Unix operating system.  While you may not know how to program in C, chances are that much of the software on your computer was written in C.  I think it would be fantastic to make such a mark on the world...but instead, here's another picture of our frog buddy.

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!

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!

Day 22

Today we started off in the classroom, which was nice because it was raining.  I got to try out my issued rain parks, which isn't too bad apart from being camouflaged.

The first lesson of the day was basic map reading.  They had definitions for things like hills, ridges, saddles, depressions, etc.  I had a good definition for depression, but I wasn't called on to answer.

Depression: Army training in the middle of a Navy career.

We then went to lunch: beef stew over rice.  Not the best, but it hasn't killed me yet.  Then we headed back to the classroom for some convoy operations stuff.  We ironed out the duties, and our convoy will be humvee, ILAV, humvee, ILAV, humvee.  I will be the gunner in the last humvee, covering the rear.  An ILAV seems to be a really well armored troop transport vehicle.  It seats 8 in the back, plus a driver and passenger up front.  Still not as many as my helicopter can seat though...

But we walked around outside, as a convoy without vehicles, for practice.  Tomorrow we get blanks, so it should be somewhat interesting.  I suppose we shall see.

We had our transportation brief this evening as well. Reality is starting to set in, which is scary. We're going to be leaving here on Saturday night. We'll fly out of Columbia airport, have a layover in Norfolk while we pick up people, a short layover in Germany, and then we'll arrive in Kuwait. It feels a little surreal and as if it should be someone else's reality.  In Kuwait we sleep in a big barn-like structure with lots of cots.  No lockers, so all our bags will have to sit there on the floor next to us.  And the toilet buildings don't even have power.  Kind of weird, if you ask me, because there is a McDonald's and many other chain restaurants.  I think I know where I'll be going to the bathroom!  The showers are in a separate building, but that is supposedly powered so there will be air conditioning.  It looks like we'll have anywhere between 3-5 days in Kuwait before we depart for our various locations.  So we'll see.  It's starting to feel real, which I don't like.

Day 21

Today was a nice leisurely day.  I slept in until about 7am, and then had a complementary breakfast.  Hampton Inns do a great job with breakfasts.  I had a nice fresh waffle, some peach yogurt, some fruit salad, and a pastry.  I also had two hot chocolates.  I was using the system to the maximum extent possible!

After breakfast, Jon and I walked around.  We went over to what looked like a statehouse and chatted about medical and environmental things.  I took the picture below while walking around.  It was quite disappointing to see the confederate flag.flying there, though.

We ended up eating lunch at a sports bar, which was fine.  However, we started watching the Steeler game, and didn't want to sit there for 3 hours.  So the group split up for a while.  Jon and I went to a different sports bar and probably annoyed the bartender by only ordering sodas and a batch of fries for the 2.5 hours we sat there.  But it was good Steeler football for the most part, which made us happy. 

Then we decided to go see a movie.  We decided on Moneyball and it was ok.  Not my favorite, but certainly not the worst.  Then I got Subway for dinner and brought it back to the base to eat it. 

We got our weapons back, then went to muster.  All in all, a pretty good day.