SATURDAY, JUNE 3rd

Well, I finally made it to the hospital. I’m sitting here in the waiting room right now. Nothing serious, just a little torn up from our last FTX. On Thursday, we returned from our 5 day FTX that marks the official end of the Basic Training portion of OSUT.

The FTX involved the most complicated and challenging training we’ve done. I exhausted myself more than I have in years. Here’s how it worked: each squad (18 or so people) in our company had 4 different missions to complete over the course of 3 days. When you weren’t completing missions, you were playing insurgent, trying to foil the plans of the other squads.

We did everything, and I mean everything, that we’ve trained on in the last 9 weeks during these missions. We would receive our mission about an hour before execution, load our equipment, and move out. We responded to helicopter crashes in urban terrain, ambushes on resupply routes, convoy security, and even interviews with pushy reporters during classified missions. And, of course, the missions never went as planned. Bad intelligence, false and betraying informants, routes changing, communications messed up or going down, etc. Not that we didn’t cause problems of our own. We cleared the wrong buildings, walked around in circles in the woods, and got in a crossfire with our own troops.

And though we didn’t want our fellow squads to fail the missions, we gave ‘em hell when we were the insurgents. One squad burned up over 1,000 rounds in one firefight. The exchanges only last about 60-90 seconds, and typically, the winner can be predicted after the first 20-30 seconds of the fight. Drill sergeants, as well as other range sergeants, acted as judges on the mission to determine who died or who got wounded. My favorite mission, and the longest, was our last mission.

We received a report from a “trusted” informant that one of our helicopters went down containing both civilians and soldiers. The helicopter crash was confirmed outside of a city and the survivors were reportedly surrounded. We were to meet the informant on the other side of a bridge when we entered the town so he could guide us to the crash. Uh huh, sure.

We left our base on foot and made our way to the city through the heavily wooded area surrounding it. We were careful not to be spotted. We crossed roads quickly, setting up security and moving in teams.

After arriving at the entrance to the city, one of our point men spotted an IED on the bridge. We took another back road into the city and found our informant. He agreed to guide us, but he was hesitant to do so. While making our way through the city, a news crew spotted us and approached our formation for questioning. Another good test. It was so tempting just to tell them to “kindly leave us alone” off. But we were polite and stupid, saying that we were on a classified mission, the purpose of which was known by someone higher up on the pay scale.

Long story short, we approached the crash site, go ambushed, took two casualties in the firefight. When we reached the site, we had a total of 6 wounded, whom we had to carry back to our base (about ½ mile away). We spotted and marked two more IEDs on the trail back to base. But after ¼ mile, our drill sergeants decided she wanted to have more fun with us. She told the acting casualties to go away, so it was just our squad left. Now, by this time, everyone is exhausted. We’ve all taken turns carrying casualties and equipment. It’s hot. I’m thirsty and lying in the dirt with my M16 covering the 2 to 4 o’clock of our perimeter. My feet are killing me when our drill sergeant yells “Incoming!” (the signal for us to get up and run) and we began the sprint through heavily wooded area back to base. People were tripping over rocks, trees, each other and running smack into the same. But, what the hell, this was our last mission in Basic.

Needless to say, we arrived at the base in a near crawl. Later one, we would march 15 km (9.3 miles) with full rucksacks (80 lbs) back to our barracks. We arrived at midnight and by that time, even our drill sergeants were limping. We dropped our gear and prepared to move out to our “values tag” ceremony, which was considered our graduation from Basic.

We marched out and arrived at a large bonfire in the middle of a field. Good thing, because we were all soaked through with sweat and the wind was a’blowin’. I actually got to be part of the ceremony, reciting the Army’s definition of selfless-service, which is one of the seven Army values listed on our values tags. We were all called up one at a time and received our tag, shook our drill sergeants hand (!), as well as the 1st Sergeant’s, captain’s, and command sergeant major’s.

We marched back at about 0130. As we marched through the barracks of all the other companies, we sang cadence (marching songs). Actually, yelled cadence. Hm, or screamed maybe. Whatever, we woke everybody up. We were done with Army Basic Training. We went to bed around 0200 and wake up was, as usual, at 0430.

Alright, so the doctor just looked at my feet and decided to remove an ingrown toenail that’s become very infected. He cut about half of my toenail off, ouch damnit. Free (*cough*communist*cough*) medical care. Hillary in 2008!

Anyways, I have a slight limp, but I should be better soon.

Oh, also… I got Top Gun in my company again, but this time it was for the 9mm pistol. Sixteen other shot 50 out of 50 like me, but all of my shots were within 8 inches of each other. I’m hoping they’ll let me take the silhouette target back home so I can put it in my classroom. It might save me from assigning a few more detentions.

Anyways, more soon. On to AIT!

Benjamin