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Dear Fam,
Well, I’m now quite a bit behind on updates. I have had a busy few weeks and I haven’t gotten around to writing things down. I’m writing this from a bus station in Richmond on my way out to the Detton’s and I’m going to try to be concise.
School-School has gone pretty well lately. We finished the two blocks on the TADS/PNVS system and tested on both of those. I didn’t do quite as well as I would have liked but I’m still top of my class and the gap’s gotten significantly larger which is nice. I think I’ve pretty much got that locked in if I make sure to just keep doing what I’m doing. The coolest thing though is that we’ve now moved on to weapons. We have two blocks left (weapons 1 and weapons 2) and then we’re finished. We have only have three tests left now (weapons 1, weapons 2 and whatever the instructors want). We’re currently in weapons 1 with our test on Wednesday. Weapons 1 is on the AWS (Area Weapons System). The AWS is the 30mm chain gun hanging from the bottom of the aircraft. It’s a pretty intense weapons system. It’s called the AWS because it’s actually the least accurate weapon on the bird, something I wouldn’t have originally guessed considering it’s a gun and your other options are rockets and missiles.
If you watch videos of them using it though you figure out why really quick. The rounds are about a pound a piece and the recoil is enough that the rounds pretty much hit all over the place. It’s a fun gun though. It’s 85 pounds and is mounted upside down underneath the aircraft so it’s a pretty physical block but it’s a fun system to play around with. It’s also the block where most injuries happen since it’s not only heavy but mounted to a turret that is moved very quickly by 3000 psi of hydraulic pressure. The machine used to load the magazine (awesome name-the upper/dupper) is also pretty powerful and has been known to try to load fingers instead of 30mm rounds. It’s fun though. We’ve also been enjoying more and more stories and such from our instructors as we get closer to the end and get to joke around a bit more. We’ve had some pretty entertaining conversations about accidental discharges, camel spiders, strange people in the military, etc. Unfortunately the hangar last week rearranged all of the primary instructors so we lost SSG Dramis to the class after us. His replacement is really cool and certainly knowledgeable but none of us are very happy about it nonetheless. We’ve really enjoyed SSG Dramis and we hope this swap is temporary. We’ll see what happens though. He really got gyped though because the class after us is one block behind and he got screwed out of moving on to the weapons system which is the instructors’ favorite as well.
[Editor's Note: I embedded this fun promo video from the Utah Army National Guard, as it includes some video of the Apache's 30mm gun firing.]
[Editor's Note: NO... this pic here has nothing to do with this paragraph; I just though a picture of the Apache rolling and firing would be a lot more exciting than pics of soldiers scrubbing toilets.] Company-Things at the company have been alright. We’ve had some pretty crazy stuff but it’s been good overall. The first big thing was honor company competition. The honor company competition consists of the Sergeant Major and Lieutenant Colonel coming through and doing Class A, room, and wall locker inspections and testing us on our knowledge of the various things we’re supposed to know. We were the first one to get inspected and we had spent the previous weeks cleaning and inspecting constantly and spent the whole night before the inspection cleaning every surface of the barracks. We even buffed the bathroom floors. At some point I’ll have to post the pictures I took of the urinals. Due to these morons not knowing how to flush we had ridiculous lime scale buildup in the bottoms of the urinals that we managed to clean out. We had about 4 people working on the 4 urinals getting that junk off. I know I put about 4 hours into scraping them with everything we could find-putty knives, screwdrivers, bolts from crutches and wall lockers, etc. The difference is incredible though. One of the things that made cleaning interesting was our lack of proper cleaning supplies that requires us to get creative. Most of the time our cleaning supplies consists of paper towels, glass cleaner and dust mop and mop heads that any other organization would have replaced months before. So we get to have a little fun figuring out ways to get things clean. One of our tasks was getting up the glue and grime that had spilled out from under the baseboards. We ended up taking apart a pair of scissors and my pliers and using those as scrapers when we couldn’t get anything else. We did it for so long my pliers are no longer square on the ends but the floors look great. As much of a pain as all the inspections were it was actually kinda fun in a way. It was nice making the barracks look that good even though it only lasted the length of the inspection. We ended doing really well. Charlie company won as always as they’re the last ones to get inspected but our cadre were pretty happy with how it went as were we.
The next big thing to happen was incessant problems with weather. As most people know, the DC area has been hit abnormally hard this winter which means we’ve had a very snowy winter as well despite being nearly 200 miles south. It certainly hasn’t been as bad but it’s been bad enough to shut down our area a few times since people aren’t used to it here. This has meant a couple of snow days for us and almost no company PT. This was great at first but now that they’ve decided that any days we miss need to be made up no matter how far ahead we are in class we’re not so fond of snow days. Because of the snow problems we’ve had our graduation date possibly bumped back to April 8th and we had to attend school yesterday despite the fact that we were supposed to be off for the President’s Day 4 day weekend. Now normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. I like my training and it’s something that I signed up for so I have no problem doing it. However, problems arose because they had already told people they were clear to purchase tickets to go home or wherever the week prior. So, people had to change tickets which isn’t always an easy thing to do. We ended up tabulating the price of changing the tickets for everyone on nights (days didn’t have to go to school) who had plane tickets. For just the 43 people with plane tickets my company accrued over $27k in charges. Our cadre did what they could for us but in the end we all ended up at school the next morning. So we went to school, got off at 130, went home, had a nice drawn out return, went to bed about 3 then turned around and started over again at 0800. It was a pretty good day though. We spent the whole day in the hangar just removing the gun and related components which was pretty fun. And they let us go about 1800 which wasn’t bad. A bunch of us went out to a place called Quaker Steak and Lube and got dinner. I tried their hottest wings and those things are no joke. They make you sign a waiver before eating them and you have to eat them with gloves. Five of us tried them to varying degrees. One guy dipped the tip of his finger in the sauce, licked some off and decided against it, one dipped a piece of steak in the sauce and changed his mind, alone took a bite and threw it back down and the last of the other guys ate half of the one the other guy had taken a bite out of. I ate three. I picked up some respect but let me tell you, it hurt. I think my nose started running halfway through the first one, my eyes were watering and I was hiccupping and coughing when I started the second and in order to finish the third I had to drink two glasses of lemonade. My lips hurt for a good half hour afterwards. They were actually really good, but they totally set your mouth on fire. We still had two left and we ended up giving them to some mooches in the smoke shack without warning them. That was pretty funny. Mean, but funny.
So, some other little weather related issues. Due to snow, in the last two weeks we’ve done PT twice. It’s been pretty great because personally I hate organized PT. It’s great when we run because it’s really the only chance we get and it’s always better to run with someone. But we rarely run and organized muscle failure is just a pain in the butt and a waste of time. I’ve been doing my own workout so I’m still in better shape than I was two weeks ago and I’m actually in better shape than I would have been if we’d done PT because I’ve been able to focus on my own workout. So I hope the snow continues and we keep up this no-PT streak. We’ve also had some pretty impressive fun playing in the snow [edited for operational security wink wink].
Then this weekend I got to spend time with the Dettons which was really fun. I started my trip with a 2335 bus ride that after two layovers landed me in Springfield at about 0730 the next morning. Then Steve and I headed down to the Fort Belvoir hospital and got me some antibiotics for this sinus infection that I’ve been fighting forever. Hopefully they’ll help; they seem to be so far. It’ll be fun to have clean sinuses and lungs though. I miss that feeling. The rest of the weekend was nice and relaxed and largely just a nice temporary return to reality. We spent Saturday and Sunday just playing with the kids, eating awesome food that Shelly whipped up for us, and going to church. Then Monday we got up early, got a new water-heater, shoveled a path through the snow to get it into the right entrance of the house and went to the temple. I had the opportunity to do temple baptisms which was awesome. Overall, it was a great weekend and we all got along great. And now, I’m heading back to Fort Eustis to finish out me lovely training. :-) I’ll be home soon; I’m excited to see everyone!
Love
Christopher
