Last post for 8 days

Tomorrow night we head out to one of the FOBs here at Ft McCoy. We are slated to do IED and convoy training, urban ops, sniper defense, base defense, and entry control point exercises. We will also do several live-fire exercises on the final two days-- mostly convoy stuff with live ammo. That should be exciting, as long as no one shoots someone else. I will be careful-- Sounds like we will be living in bunkbeds in tents, cold showers, porta-potties, all that good stuff... today I had a free morning and went to the gym to run a bunch of miles. I listened to music and watched CNN, reading the closed captioning. I had a moment on the treadmill where I almost starting crying, a story concerning several young boys who were accidentally killed by a US airstrike in Sadr City. One part of the story showed a crying man who's son was killed, and his older son was just killed 40 days before that. He didn't know where his third son was, alive or dead. His face about broke my heart, as he was lying in the dirt by his 10 yr old son's dead body. I could vividily imagine his grief and anger. What a freaking mess.

The laser range

Practicing our M16 fundamentals on the indoor laser range.

Today's class

M16 familiarization class, the Army version. There were only nine of us in the class so that was kind of cool.

The Cafeteria

Everyone kicked in a few bucks for a microwave, a coffee maker and a variety of snack foods. People also put rejected MRE's on this table. The veggie burgerMREs aren't very popular here.

The "chili with beans" MRE

Here's a pic of someone's lunch-in-a-bag