I'M BACK

I got back last night from a 3 day joint FTX at Ft. Knox. I got in at around 2400, took a shower, pulled 4 ticks off of me, checked my email (I had 98 unread messages), and then went to bed around 0100. I woke up today at around 1400 (that's 13 hours of sleep). Needless to say, this weekend has been rough

We got to Ft. Knox on Thursday, early in the afternoon. There were 4 other schools there for the FTX as we formed up, and they called off the list of who was in what platoon and squad. I ended up in 2 PL, 2 SQD. As it turned out, I was the only person from my battalion that was in 2nd PL; the other 8 from central were in first and had at least one person in their SQD from school as well. But not me, I was all alone. It turn out ok, I mad friends fast and had a good time without my Cedarville people. Anyway, we got there and went to day land nav almost immediately. I found 5 points, but they only counted 2 of them, so I got a no go. Then we did night land nav at the same spot. It started raining, and it was pitch back outside, it started getting cold and there was mud everywhere, it was miserable. I found 1 of 2 points, so I got a go on that. We were suppose to be done at 2300, but one of the cadets ended up breaking her compass and got lost, with no way of shooting a panic azimuth. She eventually just went with what she knew and ended up on the parameter of the training area, where the cadre picked her up. We got back to the biv whack site at 0200, had to set up 33% security for the night, so my tent mate and I ended up not getting to bed until 0330. First call was 0530 the next morning. We had a slow start to say the least. We did STX lanes all day on Friday, from 0630 to 2030. We ended up running 8 lanes, and I got be SL for the movement to contact. I didn't do so well on the OPORD, but the execution of the mission went off decently well. We finally got done, bruised, broken and in pain. I got to bed at around 2300, pulled fireguard from 0230 to 0430, and got up at 0530. We did to patrolling lanes on Saturday morning. I ended up being the PL for the first mission. Patrolling is something that we haven't even talked about in class, and as I quickly learned, it’s really hard. The planning was not the best, but I worked out all right, the execution pretty much sucked. The SQD's ended up getting separated and attacked from the front, left side, and rear. My SQD leaders didn't give me the reports to send to higher, everyone was yelling, I couldn’t even figure out haw many people were dead. It was a real learning experience for me. We did 2 patrolling lanes, and then we went to the indoor BRM range. Only one platoon could go in at a time, so we sat around for a while, filled out peer evaluations, and took a land nav test. We finally got to go shoot at the computer range. I got 30 out of 40, which wasn't too bad for me. After that, we went back to the biv whack site, packed up, ate, and left Ft. Knox.

I've got a huge cut on my left hand, both my shins are bruised up badly, my knees are red and cut up, my lower back hurts like heck, and I have bug bites all over me and a sun burn on my neck and hands. 3 days in the field will really pull a number on you. I learned a lot, but it was a long 3 days.