10/28/2014 "A Good Day- Talk with the Sarge"

I’ll start with a funny story which proves I am doing good. Everyone tells you when you go into Basic Training that you want to blend in. Work hard, don’t screw up, keep your head down, and don’t volunteer. Although my physical fitness tests puts me at the top, that doesn’t make me stand out. I make mistakes and get smoked for it, but not bad enough for the Drill Sergeants to remember me by. Out cool DS has staff duty tonight which means he answers the main company phone in the office. Also 4 of us rotate every hour to help him. I was walking in to do the shift change when the sergeant started laughing and pointed at me and said “That’s him.” I thought I screwed up. He was telling the guys before us that there were about two of us that he still didn’t know. Never sees us do anything wrong or cause a reason to stick out. Even to the point that he forgets we are part of the platoon. I laughed and told him I was the point. For my staff shift I started sweeping and he stopped me, told me the next crew could handle it and just wanted to talk, but now I can’t slide by anymore.

Now back to today. This morning Senior DS walked in at 0400 with yesterday’s fitness test scores. As a platoon we did horrible. Only 22 of the 57 soldiers in my platoon passed the test. I ended up as #2 with the scores I wrote about yesterday. Sarge doesn’t think I should have an issue hitting a perfect score. We talked about how to help the others improve but our training schedule is so packed that it is tough to put more time aside for fitness improvement.

Today we took the transit to a different part of Fort Benning. This is a pretty big training base. Today was all about IED’s. Improvised Explosive Devices cause the most damage to the troops. It was an eye opener. There are so many different forms, kinds, uses and ways to hide them. The damage they can cause is devastating and because they have been in constant war, the enemy is only evolving. Pretty scary stuff. We had a training village with different IED’s set up that we had to patrol and try to spot the different setups. Self awareness and almost being to the point of paranoid is a huge defense for us. Sure we have signal jammers and radar equipment to aid the soldiers but with the evolving devices…human awareness is the key to keeping everyone alive and safe.

Tomorrow we are getting fitted for our ASU or dress uniforms, so should be a long boring day.

Thinking about everyone at home. J

My updated picture. at least my hair grew some.