So, the big news of this week (as I’m sure you all know by now) is that Amy had her baby, and I am now a proud Aunt! I now have a picture of Judah posted by my desk here in my office, and my screensaver scrolls through what pictures I have of him. I wish I could be in Oregon right now, but I am getting by with pictures.
Probably the largest sacrifice that Marines (or anyone in the armed forces) makes is their time with their families. (The second-largest one is sleep…but sleep can be caught up on. At least in my job.) I know several Marines that are on their fifth deployment, each spanning at least 7 months. These Marines have spent more time away from their families than with their families in the past few years. One of my Marines’ wives will give birth to their first child while we are here, and I know there are more in our Battalion in that situation. Some Marines receive “Dear John” letters from their girlfriends (I hated that movie), others will come home to find their spouses have left them for someone else. (Very sad, but I personally know Marines this has happened to.) The old joke that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife it would issue one is just that—a joke—but there is that nugget of truth hidden in it. The Marine Corps is very hard on families and relationships.
Depressed enough yet? Makes my whining about not being there for the first days of my nephew seem paltry. Overall I’m doing well, though. I’ve gotten plenty of pictures e-mailed, just got a letter in the mail, and am anticipating a couple of packages in the next few days.
Our pace has slowed down slightly since the first month and a half that we were here, but we still have missions here and there. Last weekend the news of the weekend was the river reconnaissance we did. I took a couple of Marines that are familiar with military bridging (from a different platoon in my company), and we went to a few locations on the Helmand River to determine suitability for bridging. The river was actually fairly nice, if fairly and fast-flowing. Before we went out there we were worried about how clean it would be, but it looked as clean (possibly cleaner) than any river in the US. And certainly cleaner than some of the beaches in LA.
Once I got back, I got to sit down and fill out all of the river and ford reconnaissance forms, and put together a brief for the unit that requested the recon. It was actually kind of fun, once I got started, figuring out the way to best brief it. Most of the briefs I do follow a pretty standard format and are designed to brief what will happen, not what has happened. This was just different enough to be fun, and by the time I delivered the brief I had gotten comfortable enough with the people I was briefing so as not to be nervous.
A logistics officer recently mentioned to me his observation that engineer school seemed to prepare its students well for briefing. I would have to agree; we did at least four formal briefs, and a couple of other informal briefs. When I got here, I actually went back to some of those briefs I did at school to figure out how best to brief my actual missions.
I hope that’s a random enough collection of thoughts for tonight. I do actually think about posting more often, but nothing I do seems interesting enough to talk about. And I can never say much about the things that are interesting.
Until next time.
Showing posts with label mces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mces. Show all posts
15 July 2010
22 February 2010
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!
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!
14 January 2010
Ordnance
I received a question regarding my previous post asking if we knew what the ordnance looked like beforehand, or if we were looking for pressure plates. For this particular scenario, we were looking for a pressure plate because we knew there would be wires that would lead us back to the ordnance (which would be partially buried and thus difficult to find).
We didn't know exactly which ordnance we would find in this scenario, but we had a week or two of ordnance identification training before we did this ordnance reduction class. That class went something like this: we'd get there in the morning, and the Gunny would have ten pieces of ordnance lying out on the table. We'd walk around the room, classifying every piece of ordnance on the tables, and identifying the fuze, which you need to know to know which types of safeties to associate with the round. Once everyone was done, we'd go over the ordnance, talk about the characteristics of each piece, and what characteristics would make us give it the classification it had.
After a few days of that, we moved into the classroom, where we'd be given a picture of a piece of ordnance and have to find it in a computer program. Then we had to find the physical ordnance in the computer program. Once we'd completed each of those steps, then we started trying to identify the ordnance by looking at it via a low-quality camera mounted on a robot. Crawl, walk, run--the Marine Corps' favorite teaching method, and fairly effective.
I've opened comments up so that you don't need an account anywhere to leave a comment, so I hope that will facilitate more questions and comments. If you can, though, please leave me some way to identify who you are--your full name certainly isn't necessary due to privacy concerns, but a first name or first name/last initial would help. I'm 100% more likely to answer a question from someone I know than from some random person on the web that I've never met before. Thanks!
We didn't know exactly which ordnance we would find in this scenario, but we had a week or two of ordnance identification training before we did this ordnance reduction class. That class went something like this: we'd get there in the morning, and the Gunny would have ten pieces of ordnance lying out on the table. We'd walk around the room, classifying every piece of ordnance on the tables, and identifying the fuze, which you need to know to know which types of safeties to associate with the round. Once everyone was done, we'd go over the ordnance, talk about the characteristics of each piece, and what characteristics would make us give it the classification it had.
After a few days of that, we moved into the classroom, where we'd be given a picture of a piece of ordnance and have to find it in a computer program. Then we had to find the physical ordnance in the computer program. Once we'd completed each of those steps, then we started trying to identify the ordnance by looking at it via a low-quality camera mounted on a robot. Crawl, walk, run--the Marine Corps' favorite teaching method, and fairly effective.
I've opened comments up so that you don't need an account anywhere to leave a comment, so I hope that will facilitate more questions and comments. If you can, though, please leave me some way to identify who you are--your full name certainly isn't necessary due to privacy concerns, but a first name or first name/last initial would help. I'm 100% more likely to answer a question from someone I know than from some random person on the web that I've never met before. Thanks!
10 December 2009
Welcome!
I've never really seen the point in getting a blog before, but with the impending deployment, I knew I wanted one place where I could keep all of my family and friends informed on how it was going instead of having a giant e-mail list. I also had a chance to follow Lt G's blog, Kaboom, before it got yanked, (maybe that's another post to explain...) and was hoping to provide the same sort of experience for people who read this blog. Lt G led an Army platoon in Iraq a couple of years ago and had a way of making the most mundane stories about patrolling and working in his AO seem interesting. I happen to fancy myself a writer, so maybe if I work hard I can make the mundane things about the Marine Corps and Afganistan seem interesting.
I'm hoping that I'll have the ability to post after I deploy, but I don't actually know if that will be the case. At a minimum, it will require semi-regular internet access and approval from my chain of command.
I haven't really done much yet to get ready for the deployment except that I finally got to meet my Marines this past weekend. (Yay!!!) I have an awesome platoon, awesome NCOs, and an awesome platoon sergeant. I'm really looking forward to the chance to lead them in Afghanistan next year. I have a tentative schedule, and it goes something like this: graduate from Engineer School in late February, go to Mojave Viper to train with the platoon, and continue training with them for a couple of months before we deploy.
I think that's enough for a first post. I'll try to keep this blog up to date as I finish school and train for deployment.
I'm hoping that I'll have the ability to post after I deploy, but I don't actually know if that will be the case. At a minimum, it will require semi-regular internet access and approval from my chain of command.
I haven't really done much yet to get ready for the deployment except that I finally got to meet my Marines this past weekend. (Yay!!!) I have an awesome platoon, awesome NCOs, and an awesome platoon sergeant. I'm really looking forward to the chance to lead them in Afghanistan next year. I have a tentative schedule, and it goes something like this: graduate from Engineer School in late February, go to Mojave Viper to train with the platoon, and continue training with them for a couple of months before we deploy.
I think that's enough for a first post. I'll try to keep this blog up to date as I finish school and train for deployment.
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