Training in Ft Jackson...where it all began in June

From my blog June 17:

Currently I am at Ft Jackson, SC at an Army training base undergoing basic deployment training, aka ECRC. There is, of course, an acronymn for everything. The Navy and the Army sure do operate differently, and I am amazed how many minutes we spend daily just waiting around for the next evolution....time that could be spent reading, sleeping, texting, or some other form of fast and dirty entertainment.

Our drill sergant not only has a mild speech impediment, he speaks with such a draw of the deepest south that his dialogue is often unintelligible. He is, however, a nice guy...though what many would refer to as a 'spaz' Our other drill sergeant acts like he would rather be somewhere else; though the feeling is mutual, the lackluster leadership and discombobulated communication is exasperating at times...most of the time, actually.

Each day we wake up about 345 am and our training officially stops at 700pm. We waste a lot of time in the morning 'mustering' in formation, which would be fine if we were new recruits; most of us, however, have been in the Navy quite a while. There are about 250 of us here. I am the only doctor, and about half of the guys and gals are going to Djibouti. So far, we have received our M16s, M9mm pistols, body armor, uniforms, gas masks, and an assortment of goodies designed to make our life miserable in the desert, but keep us alive. Fortunately I do not have to carry a firearm where I am going, because it is relatively safe.

Naturally you might be asking why I wouldn't at least want to carry a 9mm with me in theatre, and the answer to that is accountability. As it is now, the rifle and sidearm have to go EVERYWHERE with us...to the mess hall, to excerise, to walk around, to muster, to evolutions, etc... In fact, the only place we cannot have them is the bathroom, because apparently the bathroom suicide rate is high in the military...so we have to find a friend to watch our goods while we do our business. In addition to that, we have to clear both weapons before we enter every building every day..and there are a lot of them. To clear a weapon you have to put the muzzle into a clearing barrel and initiate a series of steps to prove the guns are not loaded. This, my friends, is painful when there are 250 of us and usually only one clearing barrel per building, except the mess hall (or dining facility, or DFAC).

Today we drove our to a remote part of the base and underwent rollover training, apparently a necessity for Humvees that are hit with explosives. They strap you into a rotating humvee simulator (with your helmet and 45lbs of body armor) and roll you every which way. You wind up upside down, and you have to find the door latch, open it, hold yourself up while unlatching your seatbelt, and egress from the vehicle and post security until your other 3 shipmates do the same. It was actually pretty fun, and fortunately for us, today was only 90 degrees ( it is expected to get up to 103 Fri/Sat) but still very, very muggy and humid). We also all had a chance to ride and drive in a military armored humvee, which is always good times on backroads and mudpuddles, the classic army base canvas. We then went to another simulator and learned range procedures for our rifles...we were able to group and zero (set the sights) on our M16s at an indoor electronic range (no bullets). Let's just say that if this doctor thing doesn't work out I can moonlight as a sniper :)

We also had a class on the 9mm today--how to break it down, clean it, and reassemble it. The same was done for the M16 yesterday, and we had a competition to see who could do it the fastest.

The food here has a lot of room for improvement, but my biggest complaint regarding the cuisine is timing. It is hard to eat lunch when all 250 of us try to squeeze into a small cafeteria...usually we have about 5-10 min to eat, and worst of all, we eat at different times every day...I am not used to that, and don't care much for it. In Dj, we should have access to round the clock top of the line food access, one of the few perks of being downrange (i.e. deployed--trying to get you up to speed on the vocabulary).