Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Graduating the Armor course

My apologies to anyone who still reads my blog. I haven't had a whole lot of time to post about life in general or any of the cool/lame/fun/miserable things that we've been up to.

As I type these words, I'm currently back at my civilian job - a somewhat surreal experience, since I've been gone for so long and yet I feel as though I never left.

As far as the Armor BOLC course is concerned, it was an amazing experience that I wouldn't care to repeat anytime in the next few months :-)



Over the last 2 months of the course, we spent 50% of our time freezing our butts off in the mud, rain, and snow. There is nothing like waking up on the back deck of a tank in subfreezing temps at 3:00 in the morning and fumbling to get your boots on as quickly as possible before you fingers get too numb to tie your laces. I actually prayed for subfreezing temps however, as this eliminated our "mud problem" - Kentucky clay defies physics and disproportionately large clumps of it will stick to any surface: the bottom of your boots, the track that just broke on your tank, the floor of the humvee that you are riding in, etc...

That said, we had a LOT of fun - it was very stressful, we didn't get much sleep, but we basically "played Army" with real tanks, humvees, machine guns, paint ball guns, etc...


I won't bore you with the details - IE the names and focuses of each phase of the course. I'm glad to be home for a while before I head back to Fort Knox for another month of training. We've enjoyed spending Christmas and New Years with our family and have enjoyed being able to spend time with each other (me, Becca, and Eli that is).