Good-bye, Courthouse Bay

I have been preparing for this for two and a half years. Yes, that's right, two and a half years. That's about how long ago it was that I started thinking about joining the Marine Corps. Today we graduated from the Basic Officer Course at Marine Corps Engineer School. Tomorrow I will get on a plane, fly to Oregon, and check into my unit. Within a week I hope to be training with my unit in California.

It's been a busy week. This past week we had our final and largest planning exercise--designing a base for about 2000 Marines. We of course packed most of the planning into the night before the presentation. Really, most of our time was spent going through the mind-numbing details of how much water/power/fuel we would need to construct the base, and when are we going to we build these tents, and we're running out of space for this other building...not exactly interesting stuff to put on a blog! We actually did a pretty good job, but we only got about an hour and a half of sleep that night. Fun!

On Friday (and Saturday morning) we had our field exercise. Normally this is a 28-hour event, but we got lucky and our last two events got canceled, so we ended up with a 23-hour exercise. We were told multiple times how painful and miserable the FEX was going to be, but I actually had a lot of fun. (Probably because I didn't spend an extra five hours walking around in wet boots!) It started out cold but warmed up after the first exercise, and there was enough downtime between the exercises to attend to personal needs.

My two favorite parts of the FEX. The first one was the order that I gave. I actually got to brief my order to a class of enlisted Marines. Lieutenants are accustomed to giving and receiving orders, since that's about all we did at TBS. But most of the enlisted Marines hadn't seen an order before, or if they had it was only one. So I really enjoyed standing in front of them and explaining what the afternoon's project was going to be.

My other favorite part of the FEX was the covert breach. An obstacle lane had been set up with all sorts of wire entanglements and other obstacles for us to get through--in the dark. Fortunately, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so even the tiny sliver of moon we had that night was enough that I didn't need my night vision goggles. We started out a bit noisy, and then got bunched up between two obstacles. Communication was difficult, and we only got noisier as Lieutenants started getting frustrated with each other. I was holding security as my teammates worked on the next obstacle, but as I listened to the class, I was thinking about how ticked off at us our class adviser probably was--he and two other instructors were standing next to the lane, watching us go through.

Sure enough, a minute later, someone threw an artillery simulation round. We all hit the deck and waited for it to go off. For several seconds after the round went off, the night was dead quiet. Then, my class adviser, sounding as ticked as I've ever heard him--"You hear how quiet that is? It's a lot better than it was two minutes, or even thirty seconds ago. That's how quiet it should be from here on."

We were quiet for the rest of the breach.

We actually got through the breaching exercise very quickly; the instructors joked that they thought we'd skipped an obstacle or two. Chalk it up to some awesome classmates.

I'm actually almost going to miss Courthouse Bay--it's been the most pleasant training environment I've had so far. However, I'm very excited to move on to the next stage.

Internet might get a little spotty from here on out, but I'll try to post as often as I can. Semper Fi!