A month down (almost)

I think I have been here about four days shy of a full month. It’s gone by pretty fast when I think about it that way. I last left off my narrative before the road march. The march was about 4 miles on the road, two columns of USAF personnel in full battle rattle (I forgot my camera, but there wasn’t much to see anyway). We did the four miles in a touch over one hour. No one fell out and no one complained, but the next day about five or six people were limping from muscle pain and/or blisters. In the afternoon we completed HEAT training. HEAT stands for HMMWV Egress Assistance Trainer, or, how to get out of an upside down Humvee. They wouldn’t let me take pictures but it is basically a Humvee cab that rotates 360 degrees. They strap four people in, spin you around several times and finish it up at 180 degrees. You have to egress (milspeak for “get out”; also “utilize” = use, “secure” = get, “personnel” = people, “ya trackin’ = do you understand, and I still don’t know what “hooah” means) from the cab as quickly as possible, making sure you quickly collect all four crew members and all of your rubber possessions, like a rubber laptop, rubber M16s, and rubber ammo cans. In real life you would be knocked unconscious by the real laptop, the real M16s, and the real ammo cans and you would burn to death, so the training seems pointless, but they claimed (and I quote) that it “increases your chance of surviving a Humvee rollover by 250%.” I’m not sure where they got that statistic, but I like it.