For the past week I’ve been living off of MRE’s, sleeping in a tent that more resembled holes-held-together-by-some-fabric than than a tent, and walking up/down/over/around some of southeastern Arizona’s finest desert terrain. And I loved it! Well, “it” being everything except for being cold at night.
This was our week in the field, in which we ran five different land nav lanes (three day, two night), STX lanes where we rotated squad leaders and achieved different objectives, small unit tactics, some classes … and lots and lots of dust, wind, sun, cold but thankfully, no bugs.
The land nav was pretty easy and straight forward, even the nighttime land nav portions. I used to be pretty nervous doing land nav, but after a few years of running lanes, it’s pretty much a basic science now. All in all, it was a great week. My squad really bonded as we all slept in the same tent, shared meals, jokes, clothes, and other essentials. We really came together and started looking out for each other.
We had some of the best TAC NCO’s I could have asked for. Everyone one of our squad walkers had more than 36 months deployed … which makes for some great experience. These are guys who need to be worked into our program throughout its entirety and not just in the first 8 or 9 days. We can learn so much from these NCO’s who’ve deployed, not just about what it takes to be an MI officer, but about how the unit runs and the job itself.
SFC Warner, and SFC Andrew I’ll keep in touch with for years! These guys have more knowledge than most people I’ve met in the military. It’s because of guys like this, that NCO’s are ‘the backbone of the Army’.
I’ll post some pictures later on once they’re developed.
My first ‘official’ order as an LT happened yesterday and was pretty funny actually. I was running the lead vehicle on the convoy from our FOB back to base and one of our trucks carrying about 20 LT’s broke down on the dirt road. The NCO’s were making suggestions about what to do and suddenly I found everyone looking at me for the decision … ‘leave them here, we’ll roll with the vehicles that work, download all of the gear, and come back and transfer the men and material to the truck that worked, and call a tow truck for the broken down vehicle’ … and just like that men started moving and the convoy rolled out (I heard someone even say, ‘finally, someone made a decision’). It was pretty cool.
There really is a lot of responsibility placed on officers, especially front line officers. Despite being surrounded by 3 or 4 senior NCO’s with a combined 30+ years of experience in the Army, they looked at me to make the decision.
This weekend hopefully will be a lot of relaxing/recovering. We’ve got a bit of homework due on Monday, but it should be interesting reading.
More next time …
