wow!

Busy.

My how the time flies by? I finished up for bolc 2 last month and have since moved on to ibolc. I know what you're thinking, but Ben, what does that actually mean? It means I have moved on to another course in my professional officer development, this one is specific to the infantry.

Today (or tuesday morning) I was suppose to have land navigation but it got canceled on the account of the weather. We don't really have snow in georgia (yet?) but what we do have is lots and lots of rain, and dense London fog.

This is one of the better courses I have been to. The cadre (instructors) are really amazing. I'm only on week two and have already done one all-nighter for an order I had to write and brief.

I should be back in ohio around the 22-27 of december.

My computer died last week. More specifically my operating system died. I went ahead and bought windows 7. It works great. It has a very different feel from windows xp.

Going to take my car into the shop this friday, something about smoking coming out from under the hood.

Got to get some sleep, this time not in a poncho hooch in the middle of the woods

you stay classy!

10/22

Bolc 2.

So far its been a busy day, a busy couple of days. I haven't made a post in a while because I haven't just haven't had time to even hit the on button to my computer. Bolc 2 is going great, I just finished basic rifle marksmanship with my m4 with the close quarters optic (red dot sight), peq-15 (visible and infrared laser), and night vision. Today I got to wear my full kit around (helmet, body armor, loading bearing equipment, rifle, pack), I really felt like a real soldier. We have done all sorts of m4 marksmanship this week which included some day-time and night-time shooting. All really great. I can't believe I get paid to do this.

land nav

Howdy,

What a week(end)! Two weddings (3 if you count the one on the office), a trip to tennessee, and a membership to gold's gym. That has been my weekend, a lot of fun, a lot of driving (mostly on my roommate, mark), and equipment prep for tomorrow. I have to go to bed,...like an hour ago because I have to wake up at 1am to go into work and do duty, then its out to the land navigation course no later than 3 am and I should get home wednesday night or so.

Hope everyone is doing well.

-Ben

more training

So I thought I'd have some time off from training but boy was I wrong. Monday rolls around and I walked on to my next mandatory school. What fun, right? Week one is about over, I got some time off today to go see my buddy get married. Tomorrow I'm planning on driving up to cincinnati to see another one of my buddies get married.

The school I am in is bolc 2, stands for basic officer leadership course 2 (bolc 1 = rotc). It is a course designed to teach war fighting skills (warrior skills) to those leaders not in a combat arms branch, but just the same they send us combat guys too. It is seven weeks long, two of which are in the field. We get most nights off and weekends. Some tasks we will accomplish are land navigation, combat life saver certification, platoon patrolling, and m4 qualification (rifle) with a red dot sight.

We went to the central issuing facility on wednesday. I received all my equipment for my training here at ft. benning (finally!). I even got my own body armor with sapi plates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPI_plates) and mich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICH_TC-2000_Combat_Helmet). Very expensive stuff.

Time to go back to work.

End of mech leader

I graduated Mechanized Leader today. It was a really good six weeks and I learned a whole lot about the Bradley fighting vehicle.

I should be getting my new graphics card today, it should be sweet!

Got a phone call from my holding company, I am going to try and walk onto the BOLC2 class a month early, cross my fingers and hope so. I will try and report in this monday at 0545.

My favorite show The Office has started their new season. It is quite hiliarious if I do say so.

Lunch time! (more to follow later)

mech leader a3

So this week has been all about the blue force tracker (fbcb2; force 21 battle command brigade and below) and the a3 simulator. Once again that is a giant computer that recreates the gunner and driver compartments on the bradley. Pretty amazing stuff. We're doing our gunnery tables in the simulator for the rest of the week (translation: shooting targets). Apparently you aren't suppose to use armor piercing rounds for engage troop targets because some guys in geneva a while ago thought it wasn't fair. Well I say shucks to that, and I did. Headshot! @ 900 meters. Yay for me. My instructor scolded me and quoted the geneva convention..then congratulated me on the great shot.

My buddies Payne and Peck finished Ranger school and are graduating on friday. They are a first time go through the school which means they passed everything the first time (no simple task).

Everything is going great. I am thinking about spending x on a new video card, where x is >$70 and <$180. I have found that the performance on my computer is started to show. Early this week I have overclocked the cpu and the video card and was able to squeeze out a good 10-20% boost in performance. See, that degree is paying for itself now.

Stay classy.

btw congratulations our newest members, todd and josh!

Josh's blog is hilarious and much better than mine: http://josheastofcenter.wordpress.com/
please feel free to check it out two other members (dad and todd)

welcome to the a3 course

This week I started the bradley leader's course. I know what you are thinking, didn't he already...yes, this is the A3 course, the last one was the A2 course. Apparently the A3 is the best new thing in the mechanized infantry world. They pretty much turned the Bradley from a car with armor and a gun into a computer (with armor and a gun). Everything has a overlord type computer monitoring it. This has some really great benefits but as we all know computers break more than anything and I'm sure this is no exception (at least this might allow me to fix bigger computers than I've tangled with in the past).

Last week I did successfully graduate the A2 course. We spent two days in the simulator doing missions (think giant video game) and one day on the range shooting actual bradleys. Good stuff.

This week has been slightly different but a lot of the same routine. Think groundhog's day but instead of a day, its been three weeks. We don't use the bus anymore, we drive. We still have pt and we have tests everyday this week.

My roommate zwirgzdas has been gone all this week and last. Lucky for him I got some sort of flu/infection. It's not too bad really, just irritating.

I'm really looking forward to the weekend. This might be the first weekend that I can remember where I'll get to sleep in. So far every weekend I have had to wake up really early to do something or another for somebody. I normally start my saturday mornings driving to atlanta's airport, then turning around and driving back (2 hours each way). Seems there is always somebody I know that needs to get to the airport for one reason or another.

Stay Classy.

pictures of a bradley

We did 25 mm assembly today. Pictures above.

m242 25 mm bushmaster

Today we went over gunnery for the bradley fighting vehicle. I have some pictures of a round that it fires. Tomorrow is hump day for me, that is the midpoint between my days off.

bus ride back

My school is just like your school except we learn military tactics and operations.

Pictures from class

Here are some pictures. The bradley pictures are from my dad. The rest our from my classroom session today, seven hours of powerpoint about defensive and offensive operations.

mech leader

So today was my second day of mechanized leader course. So far so good. I got to get hands-on training on the M2A2 ODS Bradley. I also drove it around for a couple minutes. I am working on getting into the M2A3 Bradley school directly after this one, if so I can try and stay at the Bradley school for 6 weeks. That would take me to october and give me a month to try and fit another school in before bolc 2.

Benning is fine. It has been pretty tolerable weather-wise.

I saw some of my rotc friends that had some time off from ranger school.

I am not sure if this is a sign but I have been getting mass-emails from someone in 4ID. The 4th infantry division used to be at fort hood but have since moved to fort carson in colorado. I guess I may get to texas and be sent to carson instead, we'll just have to see.

I have to work through this weekend, but I get a four day weekend next next week, hooray!