Well … the past few days have been an exercise in patience if nothing else. The Army may be good at a lot of things, but one thing it’s not very good at is time management and efficiency. Why take two or three people to do a job when you can hire seven?
In a stroke of brilliance, I decided to get my Periodic Health Assessment completed prior to coming out here … so despite wasting almost an entire day in Atlanta, I was saved a solid four hours here because I was ‘green’ on my health and could leave while those who needed updates had to stay and wait. Karma.
Today, was CIF .. or Central Issuing Facility. Those of you with any experience in the Army probably just cringed a bit (ok … a lot). One place where the Army definitely didn’t go overboard on hiring folks was here. Picture a warehouse about the size of your local Wal-Mart … with three employees. Now this facility can only handle about 18 Soldiers at a time … with a class of 45, you do that math. We formed up at 0800 outside of CIF, and around 8:30 or so, the first group entered. Around 11:30, they were finished. Seriously … this long to receive the following items: ruck, sleep system, helmet, gloves, poncho, wet weather gear, etc (pretty much all of your field necessities). It was almost noon and half of our class had yet to enter. Military efficiency at its best I tell you.
I feel like this program is starting to gear up. We got issued most of our gear today, body armor, weapons cleaning kit … tomorrow we get the weapons. Then we’re in the field on Thursday and Friday at the ranges and out all next week. Of course, none of this is the official MI school yet. It’s the condensed version of the Basic Officer Leadership/Officer Basic Course hybrid. What was initially taught in six weeks has now been condensed to one.
We received all of our textbooks yesterday too. 24 ARs, FMs and other texts … of which we’ll probably only realistically use 3 or 4. This is a stack that’s solidly two feet high. And not to mention the CD-ROM we were given that contains almost 2/3 of the texts we just received. It’d have been much easier to just give us all of that info on the one CD, or two if it was needed. Army efficiency.
PT is fun. It really is amazing out here and being outdoors in the environment just makes it even better. I’m usually up at 0430, formation around 0545 and we start at 0600. About the time we start, the sun starts lighting up the horizon and around 0645 or so it breaks over the tops of the mountains and is absolutely amazing. I really need to get a better camera to do this scenery justice.
This weekend I hope to get down to Coronado National Monument and talk about volunteering at the park. It should be a good experience.
