My Plans Change Overnight
It’s been a while since I’ve written and I don’t have much of an excuse. The last four weeks of BOLC II just flew by. We spent weeks 4-6 at FOB Kelly, a Neighborhood of Make-Believe version of Iraq on Fort Sill. While there, we spent a week practicing individual movement techniques and Squad Live-Fire drills, followed by two weeks of convoy and FOB operations. We concluded the training with a 10-mile ruck march out of the field and back to the barracks. My ill-fitting boots made the ruck march painful and I spent the next week of BOLC II hobbling around on badly-blistered feet. The final week was spent cleaning our weapons and our barracks. Those five days seemed to pass more slowly than the rest of BOLC II combined. At last, after a quick recognition ceremony and a final barracks inspection, we were given our graduation certificates and set loose. I wasted no time in getting out of there. I grabbed my certificate, said a few hasty good-byes and hopped into my already-loaded car for the drive to Tulsa. At Tulsa, I parked my car in long-term parking and flew home to spend four days with Rachel before heading up to Fort Leonard Wood, MO for my Engineer BOLC course.
The Trouble with Useless Organs
I only spent two days at Fort Leonard Wood before our class was released for a four-day 4th of July holiday pass. I drove to St. Louis and spent a wonderful evening with Dave and Yumiko before flying back to San Antonio once again.
I woke up early on my penultimate day in Texas to a burning stomach ache. I suspected acid reflux but since I hadn’t eaten much the night before, I figured that I was having hunger pangs. I went to a local Mexican food joint and had some breakfast tacos, hoping that would clear things up. Unfortunately, my stomach began to hurt more and more. I tried Maalox, then Pepto Bismol and finally, Alka-Seltzer. The situation only seemed to get worse. The pain increased and I began vomiting until there was nothing left to get rid of. At this point, I suspected that something was seriously wrong. I told Rachel that I needed to go to the Emergency Room and drove myself to Brooke Army Medical Center, where I waited–moaning and doubled-over in pain–in the waiting room for two and a half hours.
After what seemed like an eternity, they finally brought me back into the E.R.. Within minutes, they had me on a morphine drip and were giving me an ultrasound. That proved inconclusive so they had me drink a half-gallon of foul-tasting contrast fluid and eventually sent me in for a CT scan. An hour later, the doctors had diagnosed me: acute appendicitis. As it turns out, appendicitis often manifests itself as a sharp pain in the upper stomach before migrating down to your lower-right gut. The diagnosis was made at 11:00PM and by 11:45, I was being wheeled into surgery.
The anesthesiologist administered a sedative in my IV drip and I almost immediately lost consciousness. I awoke seconds later (but, in actuality, an hour and a half later) in the ICU, surrounded by nurses and my fiancee, Rachel. By 5:00AM, I was walking laps around the post-surgery ward and was released from the hospital the next afternoon.
Plans Change
This little bout of appendicitis led to major changes in my plans for the next year and a half. The doctors at BAMC wanted to give me time to recover from the surgery, so they put me on three weeks of convalescent leave from my Army duties. Because I would be gone so long, I couldn’t continue with my classmates back at Fort Leonard Wood. School regulations don’t permit students to miss more than 24 hours of training. In light of this, the school commander opted to “recycle” me to the August class, which meant that I would have three weeks of rest in San Antonio. Because of the shifted timeline, I would no longer be able to marry Rachel on October 24th as planned. Dates became uncertain and we realized that the only guaranteed free time that I’d have was these next three weeks. So, we made a hasty but necessary change of plans: we will be married at Rachel’s parents’ house in Charleston, South Carolina this Saturday, July 18th. It’s totally last-minute–so much, in fact, that my parents will probably not be able to attend–but necessary.
Off to War…but when?
Sadly, there was one other casualty as a result of my delayed school date: my deployment. I had planned on going to Iraq with my Army Reserve unit after my Engineer BOLC course concluded. Now, it appears that this will not be the case. Because Army regulations require that units deploy in a high state of readiness, my unit was not able to accommodate my delayed graduation date and was forced to replace me with another officer. This is a huge bummer for me, because I was looking forward to deploying with one of my best friends, who is also a member of my unit.
As it stands, I will not be deploying to Iraq in October with this unit. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be going, however. There’s a high likelyhood that I will be picked up for another deployment. Where and what that is, I don’t yet know. Stay tuned!
BOLC, Week 2 and 3: Hot, Long Days
Good morning, everybody. It’s been two tough weeks since I last posted but I’m hanging in here. Since my last post, we’ve zeroed and qualified on our primary weapon system (M4 rifle), done a 5-mile ruck march, learned a little about first aid and learned the basics of Army Combatives.
Week 2: Rifle Range
We spent all of week three on a hot, dusty rifle range, getting qualified on our M4 rifles, the Army’s standard light infantry weapon. This is the same weapon that I will take to Iraq, so it made good sense to get some skillz. Now, in my prior civilian life, a day at the rifle range was a fun activity. I’d sleep in on a Saturday morning and then my buddies and I would head out for some firing, leaving when we’d exhausted our ammo. Afterwards, we’d stop for some good food before returning home to clean weapons in front of the TV and call it a day. Not so in the Army. The Army, I’m quickly learning, can take any fun activity and make it suck. Royally. When we go to the range, we wake up at 0400. Each day, we headed out at this ridiculous hour and started our day with “Range PT”, AKA combining your daily exercise with the rifle range. This means wearing a full combat uniform and doing various calisthenics, distance runs and sprints until you are soaked with sweat. After that’s all done, we put on our Interceptor Body Armor (IBA) and prepare for shooting. The IBA and associated accessories is very, very heavy and ridiculously uncomfortable. It doesn’t breathe at all and you are instantly soaked in sweat, even with temperatures in the 70s. Imagine wearing a lead-filled rubber wetsuit on a hot day and that’s pretty much what the IBA feels like. Halfway through the first day, every muscle in my neck and back was killing me. I can’t comprehend how soldiers in Iraq do it. They’re wearing the same gear as me, but they’re doing it in temperatures nearly 60 degrees warmer than what I experienced.
In spite of the discomfort, I managed to qualify on my weapon on my first attempt, hitting 31 out of 40 targets. This is not as good as what I used to shoot but given the gear that I wore, I’m amazed that I qualified at all.
Carson City
After a long week at the rifle range, I was granted a pass to leave for the weekend and fly out to Carson City, NV to spend Memorial Day with Rachel. She was out there to visit her sister and brother-in-law and their new baby. We had a relaxing weekend mostly spent hanging around the house, although we did take a nice hike down to Lake Tahoe on Saturday.
Week 3: First Aid, Combatives
Last week was a welcome relief from the rifle range. It was a short week and we were in garrison, which means that we got to sleep in until 0600, luxurious by our standards. We spent the first two days getting Death by PowerPoint, aka sitting in a classroom and watching slideshows all day. We “learned” about first aid by watching videos of Army medics patching up pigs with sucking chest wounds. I’m not sure that I learned anything but there was enough pig-gore to make me eat only vegetarian meals at the DFAC for the rest of the week. On Thursday, we started Army Combatives, which is the Army’s way of teaching mano a mano fighting. Clumsy as I am, I struggled terribly with this course. There were about ten different basic moves that we were expected to learn and I think that I may remember one or two of them. Let’s hope that I don’t get into a fistfight with an Iraqi because I suck at this stuff.
OKC Weekend
I’m back in OKC this weekend, getting some rest and eating good food. The next three weeks of this course are going to be tough. We’re heading to the field, to “FOB Kelly”, which is designed to simulate conditions at a Forward Operating Base in Iraq or Afghanistan. See you next week!
BOLC II, Week One
Well, week one is finally over. I’ve been at the BOLC II course at Fort Sill, OK since last Sunday and I’m finally starting to get into the groove. I came into this course as a direct commission Reservist, straight from the civilian world. It was quite a transition: one week I was sitting at my desk at Rackspace and the next, I’m in the Army.
Arrival
After a long drive from San Antonio and a night at the Fort Sill Lodge, I dropped Rachel off at the Lawton Airport. I was in tears as I pulled away from the drop-off, looking back at her in my rearview mirror. This wasn’t the first time we’d been apart–she did a clinical internship at Fort Bliss last summer–but it still broke my heart to leave her. Two weeks earlier, she and I had gotten engaged while on vacation in southern Colorado and now I was leaving my new fiancée for five months of Army schools and a subsequent Iraq deployment. On the road out of the airport, I pulled over to the shoulder and cried aloud for a minute before pulling myself together and driving back to Fort Sill for inprocessing.
Rough Beginnings
I spent that Sunday and the following Monday completely depressed. I shuffled between inprocessing stations and commander’s briefings in auditoriums like a dead man walking. I was pretty sure that I had made a really, really bad decision when I took the direct commission. I missed my girl terribly and I felt really out of place in the stark confines of my Army barracks. Everybody seemed nice enough but it was so awkward for me, not knowing anybody and being unfamiliar with my surroundings. I wanted so bad to be back in San Antonio with Rachel and my family and friends. Fortunately, quitting is not an option in the military, so I stuck it out. Things began to get better.
APFT
Early Wednesday morning, we woke up at 0400 to take the Army Physical Fitness Test, AKA the APFT. This is something that all soldiers take periodically throughout the year and it is a ritual for students of any Army training school. Whether you’re a student at the Army’s notorious Ranger school or an eighteen year-old Private in your first week of Army Basic Combat Training, you’re going to take the APFT.
I had been dreading it for months, but my dread was unfounded. I did alright. While my score was still nowhere near what an officer is expected to score (i.e., near-perfection), it went well. I set a personal record for number of push-ups in two minutes, doing four more than I ever did back home. Because of the test, my spirits were buoyed and things began to get a lot better for me at BOLC II.
I Hate Needles
After the APFT, they bussed us over to the Fort Sill inprocessing area for more shots and dental exams. The Army is seemingly obsessed with immunizations. Despite getting shots (and requisite documentation) at Fort Sam before I left, the Fort Sill people gave me the shots all over again. By now, I must have enough influenza antibodies to last me a decade. Still, I was riding high from the APFT and as I sat on the bleachers in the sun outside the Immunizations clinic, I was very happy.
2LT Snell Gets a Root Canal
The dental exam didn’t go very well. I’ve had a bit of a jacked-up grill for some time now and I was overdue for a root canal in a molar. I had run out of civilian dental insurance benefits and was hoping that the Army would pull through for me and hook me up with some proper dental care before my Iraq deployment. Fortunately, they did. Early Thursday morning, I went to dental sick call and was ferried over to the dental clinic, where the friendly staff had me in and out in a couple of hours. Root canals are nowhere near as painful as people make them out to be and it didn’t dampen my day in the least. Instead of bed rest, I caught up with my company out in the training area for our Land Navigation practice.
Land Nav
One of my favorite parts of Army Officer training is land navigation. This is where they take you out in the woods and give you a compass and a map and leave it to you to find a set of points that are scattered around a roughly three square mile training area. The points are not always obvious; they consist of a t-post (fence post) with a small metal sign on the top with an identification code. We do both day and night land navigation, so we started our course in the dark at 0400. When you do land nav in the dark, you’re not walking around with a flashlight. You’re only allowed to use light to look at your map or compass and even then, you can only use a red-lensed flashlight. This means that you must be very precise in your walking, taking great care to stay on your heading and carefully measuring your distance by counting your paces. For our course, they gave us the coordinates of our start point, along with the coordinates of the subsequent point. We navigate individually (no talking!!!) to our first point and if we successfully make it there, we get coordinates for the next point and so on. You continue this until you reach the finish point. You don’t know how many points you’ll have to find; you only know that you have five hours to complete the course. My “lane” took me across 6.2 kilometers of terrain, including rock-strewn slopes, streams, oak scrub and dense forests. It was hilly and it took me until 0800 to finish. I found all my points without incident and made it back in time to relax in the sun and eat an vegetable cannelloni MRE for breakfast. One more BOLC II graduation requirement out of the way!
OKC is OK
After my first weekend in Army training, I decided that I wanted a little break so I drove to Oklahoma City and got a nice room at the Colcord, a swank hotel in the Bricktown district. I had a nice meal at a mexican restaurant and now I sit here blogging from my king-sized bed with the A/C cranked down.
Well, it’s past midnight and it’s time for me to get to bed!
Next week is Basic Rifle Marksmanship. Stay tuned.
Hi
Hi everybody and thanks for visiting the new blog. OPSEC-permitting, I will be telling you about all of my Army adventures over the next year and a half. I leave for my Basic Officer Leadership Course Two (BOLC II) at cosmopolitan Fort Sill, Oklahoma on the 7th of May. After that, I head to lovely Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for the Engineer Officer Basic Course, a seemingly self-conflicted three-month lesson in both building and destroying stuff. Finally, after all of the training is done, it’s off to Iraq. I’ll be deploying in October with my Army Reserve unit.
The content will be varied. There will be Army posts for those curious, nerdy high-tech babbling for the technocracy, and–this being my blog–some complaining, too.