From my blog June 24, 2009:
Days roll on here at Ft Jackson. There are days that I wonder why I am here: why I lug around an M16, an M9, and usually a 45 pound kevlar jacket when I won't be taking these things to Djibouti. Why I have to sit through a first aid class, or any classes that I alreay completed online, for that matter. It is fun shooting guns, but it is frustrating to be responsible for something you only fire 15-20 min on the range when you are there in the hot southern sun for 10-12 hours. I have earned a sense of empathy and respect for those who do this all the time, but now that I have, I would rather be excercising the training I have toiled through for the past eight years: helping others in my clinic.
This past weekend we were alloted a day of liberty. I decided to venture into Columbia, SC with a friend named Dave, who is a physician's assistant at the naval base in Sicily (nice). We rented a car and treated ourself to a room with our own bed, shower, and TV. It was nice to be away from an open barrack situation and its orchestra of snores and other fine noises and scents, if only for a few hours. We watch two movies (don't go see 'Year One' by the way, it stunk), ate ice cream and drank Starbucks to our hearts content. We also visited the downtown areas: Five Points, the Capital, and the Vista...sworn to sobriety by our employer, it made that pedestrian adventure less enjoyable. I was impressed with the Capital grounds and garden at night, and was amazed at the memorial to Strom Thurman, particularly what was said about him. He lived many years, but also accomplished so much in his lifetime that deserves recognition...if you don't know know what I am talking about, look him up.
We shot at the range with M16s yesterday to prequalify. It was about 110 on the hydrometer at its peak, and shooting in the sun demanded about 3 refills from my 100 oz Camelback and the unfortanate side effects that led me to the disgusting latrine, i.e. porta potie (think hot sunny weather), time and time again. We go to qualify today. I admit I am anxious; though it is not mandatory, I shot terrible yesterday after a week of shooting in the top 10%. In typical army fashion, we were involved in a dozen formations, ate MREs outside, and had to hurry up and wait...a lot. I again question the resource management of sending a physician to do this, for later this week we are focusing on firing tens of thousands of rounds from heavy caliber machine guns we are actually not qualified for (your tax dollars hard at work). Don't get me wrong, the firing part is fun and people pay to do this, but I cannot help but feel guilty when I could be seeing 25 patients a day in my clinic, not pretending to be Rambo, as it were.
I am taking it day by day, however, and know that things will improve once we deploy to theatre and get settled in. I miss my wife terribly, who is living it up in Argentina and having a great time with her family. I miss my ferrets too..one of them, Wolverine, who has apparently been sick and in pain with a UTI and has been to the vet twice this week, requring two rounds of antibiotics and painkillers (poor lil' poot).
We have a day of liberty again this Saturday. Though many choose to lounge around the barracks, Dave and I made a pact to get as far away from this place as we are allowed: Charleston. I look forward to what may be my last day of true freedom in the USA for the next ten months, which is overcast with the gloomy doubt that Dafne and I will be able to see each other one more time after she returns from South America.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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).
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).
Dafne's Birthday
Today is my lovely wife's 28th birthday. It is hard for me to be here, in Africa, so far away from her, especially knowing that she is buried in literature from her orthodontics residency with only a furry ferret to give her company.
For the past few years we have traveled to some very wild locations to celebrate both her birthday and mine, such as Las Vegas, Zion National Park, and the Grand Canyon. I have deduced from these adventures that I have the best woman in the world for me, one who is not afraid to get dirty in the bottom of a dusty desert, then party until the wee hours at a club atop the Palms hotel only hours after climbing out of said canyon.
This year, she has to celebrate without me...at the beach in Ft Myers with a convertible, some sushi, and a margarita. As I develop this post, I wish her a happy birthday, proud of her accomplishments as a doctor, and her support of my misadventures here in Africa....feliz cumpleanos mariposita....
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
