Following is Christopher's update from this past week. Ironically, because he couldn't get an internet connection while at base, he sent this from the internet connection AT HOME, just hours after he got home for Christmas. He got in at about 1300 yesterday, and will be home until January 4th!!! Some pics included in this posting of his arrival home.By the way, he sprung another TLA (Three Letter Acronym) on us yesterday. He talked about soldiers being at training more than 25 weeks having the right to a POV. POV? Come to find out that's Personally Operated Vehicle. I kinda think "car" would have sufficed. :-)
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Dear Fam, (December 12, 2009)
Well, made it through another week unscathed and I’m that much closer to getting home!
It’s been a pretty good week here at Fort Eustis. Our room finally got a newbie to fill the last bed. He’s on day shift so I hadn’t met him until yesterday but he seems alright. He’s 29, married and has kids. He’s a really small guy though and he’s got a baby face so he doesn’t look 29 at all. To be honest we aren’t all that kind to him. We aren’t mean to him at all but we didn’t change the way we do things at all. 1am we come in, flip the lights on, and do our thing the same as always. We’re really loud. He’s new though, that’s just how it works. He’s a real heavy sleeper anyways though. He only wakes up for like 5 minutes if that. I don’t know how he makes it out to formation in the morning. He doesn’t say much but seems decently happy. We’ll see what happens with him.Tuesday we had a fun little incident. The second guy that gave me trouble in the chow hall tried to jump his squad leader while we were standing out in formation. Other guys jumped in and grabbed him before he even got to the guy but it’s caused a lot of paperwork and lectures around here. They still won’t kick him out despite how long he’s been a problem for because that’s what he wants but they’re “dealing” with him supposedly. People are kinda mad at my APS though because after they threw him off he yelled “bet you won’t hit him!” Not necessarily a good idea but he was right. Plus if he had hit him he could have pressed charges and really hit him where it hurt. After he got thrown off the guy went and started smoking a cigarette in the gazebo and when our sergeant came out and told him to get in formation he totally blew him off. He told him to get in formation multiple times then just told him to go in and see the commander. The next day he did the same thing. Now he’s trying to file an EO complaint saying that the sergeant that’s dealing with him is racist. We’ll have to see what happens with him too. Hopefully it’s bad, that kid needs to be seriously corrected.
Things in the hangar have been pretty fun. We continue to practice doing MOCs and FIPs and ripping boxes and lights and stuff off of the bird. It’s a pretty good time. Our instructors have come to trust my partner and I so they let us actually tear apart some of the boxes and pull out the Circuit Card Assemblies and stuff. It’s pretty cool. The amount of processing capacity in that bird is ridiculous, and the new model is even more computerized.We only had PT twice this week by the way. The day after Rivera flipped out on his squad leader we got an hour lecture about the whole thing. Then we had a 3 hour safety briefing one morning that took up our PT and personal time (it was good though). And we spent one morning getting vaccinated for H1N1. So, I’ve taken to doing supine bicycles in bed before going to sleep. I’m certainly going downhill physically being here at AIT though. PT sucks and the whole things kinda draining so it’s hard to get myself to PT myself. It’ll be good to come home and work out with the people from my unit and stuff.
Then Friday we had a half day for school. They had a Christmas party for the instructors and in order to get the day and night instructors together they had it take the second half of first shift and the first half of our shift. The material we were supposed to go over that day wasn’t really applicable to our MOS so we had a really laidback day. It was pretty good.
Then we had our gold pass weekend for the whole company which was pretty awesome. In order to let the rest of the company go for the weekend they had student leadership pull CQ. I took one of the other guy’s shifts so he could hang out with his brother who’s stationed in Oceana which is near here. So I had CQ from 0500-0600 and 0700-0800. Normally weekend CQ shifts go for $40-60 but since he was hanging out with his brother I did it for him for $20. Between the two CQ shifts I did my laundry and took a shower and I accidentally washed my cell phone since I was in a hurry. It still works though which is pretty cool. Then on Saturday Stock and I hung out all day. We got bus passes and went down to the mall and hit the Verizon store to see what my options were for my phone (turns out there kinda aren’t any). After that we went down to Buffalo Wild Wings and had a lot of wings. I had like 30 wings while we were there. It was awesome. I’m excited to go there with you guys.
After lunch we decided to go down to the movies which was more of an adventure than expected. Turns out there isn’t a bus that runs to the movie theater on the weekends so we decided to walk there. Stock was convinced he knew how to get there but we ended up going the complete opposite direction. We finally turned around and asked for directions when we hit the airport. We misunderstood the directions we were given though because we didn’t realize what overpass we were at and that was the landmark everything was based on (that was the original thing that screwed us too. We knew we had to go over the overpass but didn’t realize there are two that are equidistant from the mall in opposite directions). We couldn’t find it so we went back to the mall and got directions from a bus driver and figured out where we’d gone wrong. We then proceeded to walk down there and got there after about 10 miles of walking around over the course of 3-3.5 hours. We had a good time though. There was one part that was a little more exciting than the rest. The second overpass has no sidewalk on either side. There’s not even a shoulder, just a 2 foot wide gutter thing on either side. The movie theater was right on the other side though so we didn’t want to call a cab or anything just for an overpass even though it was a rather long overpass. So we watched the traffic for a little bit and decided we would just run across during one of the gaps in traffic flow caused by the light on the other side. Of course the gap we picked ended up having cars in it for some reason. So we had about half a dozen cars pass within two feet of us during the couple hundred yard run across the road. It was already dark too and we were both wearing black jackets so I don’t think they noticed us. It was pretty fun.
We then decided to take a cab back because we found enough guys that it only cost us five bucks a piece and decided that doing it at 2200 was probably even less safe than at 1830 due to the proportion of drunk drivers on the road. When we got home we set up our little rucksack home theater system again and watched Gran Torino. They ended up watching some other movies but since I’d been up since 445 and they were iffy movies I just went to bed. It was a good day.Today I went to church and then went down to the PX and took care of getting some stuff with my uniform squared away so it’ll look right when I come home. I was finally able to get my busted boots and screwed up uniforms DXed since I had gotten the paperwork back on Friday. Now I’m just finishing getting this out and then I’ll probably go back to my reading of the Ensign and that book you sent up with me. It’s a really good book. Thank you. Overall it’s been a very good weekend but I’m really excited to get home. It makes being here significantly harder really because you know something better’s coming and you get really antsy. I’m excited to see you guys though. I hope the wedding went well. Have a good week guys. See you soon!!!
Well, lack of internet means that it’s now Tuesday! My buddy’s paying the bill for his internet card today though and then I should be able to send this out.
Yesterday was a good day. Started out with some fairly effective PT by SFC Barrat then sat around and just hung out most of the time until school. School was pretty good. We went over the electrical parts of the engines and the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit). The APU is a 125hp turbine engine that powers all the accessories and stuff as well as starts the main engines. We then had the first half of our test for this block of instruction sprung on us. We were supposed to have it today but the new class made scheduling a problem. I ended up getting a 92% on it though and no one failed so it worked out just fine. We’ll have the written portion today though.
This morning we had some really ridiculous PT. The females had a sexual assault prevention class so they fell out and only the males were doing pt. SSG Cut majorly took advantage of that opportunity. It was kinda retarded but it was good for us. It was very high intensity and constant and he was counting off reps and exercise changes so fast that it wasn’t really even PT. It was just an hour long, mildly-controlled, full-body seizure. It was ridiculous. We ended up not getting screwed with for personal time so far though so it’s a good day. And we have our last test before coming home today and then it’s smooth sailing for the home stretch. I can’t wait to get home. Have a good week.
Ok, it’s now Friday. We’re pretty much sitting around all day waiting to leave. I found out I got an 88% on the portion of the test we had the other day. It’s my lowest test score yet but oh well. They gave us our class GPAs and rankings and I’m still #1 with a score of 96.32% I’m pretty happy about that.
The last couple days of class were pretty ridiculous. We had nothing to do because they didn’t want to start another block of instruction before we leave. So we just sat around and talked about random crap. It was kinda boring but it was alright.
Nothing really to report for these last couple days. Just waiting to come home. See you soon!!!
Christopher
