Well gee golly gosh, its been a while since I put up a post on here, and I can't even entirely blame the army for my lack of blogging.
Well it has been a roller coaster of of ride these past few months, I think space mountain would be the best analogy for the roller coaster metaphor. Because the army loves to keep you in the dark and guessing at when the next turn might hit you.
Well lets see what can I say about the past 8 months, yikes has it really been that long. Here is a quick run down of the timeline.
April 18 - July 1 I ship out to basic training Fort Sill Oklahoma, my first taste of the army life taught to me by a Nigerian drill Sgt. I am taught the basics of being a soldier, shooting, marching, push ups, and most importantly actively waiting (its just like passively waiting but with an army twist). Doing all this in about 110 degree temp. For this segment of the ride we had some decent twist and turns but nothing too extreme.
July 8 - July 24 I am transferred to Golf Company at Fort Sam Houston in the middle of San Antonio TX. For this part the roller coast has come to a complete stop and the announcer is apologizing about technical difficulties. Golf is a reception company where the rest of the battalion comes for their manual labor needs. Very few kind words are spoken of this company, ok no one has a kind work for it. Time passes slowly and the days somehow added a few extra hours to the clock just to spite us.
July 25 - Nov 18 We move up the hill a few buildings to our new home, alpha company. Here the ride starts back up again. Our next 16 weeks will be spent here honing our drinkin..... i mean medical skills. The coarse is divide up into two sections. The first half is the civilian EMT basic certification. Unknown to us, we were selected to try out a new version of the chapter test. It didn't go very well the majority of the company was placed in mandatory study hall. Worked out great for me, much easier to do laundry when 60+% of the soldiers are gone. Overall one might call this the mandatory sobrity half of the coarse since so many folks were struggling very few were allowed to go out on the weekends. After a stessful nailbiting day, most people past the national registery test and become EMT's. In otherwords commence with the mass intoxication.
We now transition to the second half of the coarse, the army medic side. This is where we get to learn nifty little things like how to place a tube down your throat and other methods of hydration that don't require your mouth. Our class time is split between the classroom and the outdoors where we practice our new skills on eachother. It is here I learn something else about TX, flashflood. We didn't have one while i was here but i did notice during a down pour how it could very easily occur and how quickly. It also made me aware that our outdoor practice area was the low point in the drainage of the area and that you never saw the air force or navy practice anywhere close to the area.
As the weeks come and go we come to the end of our medic side of the training, culminating in 10 days spent in the field at the off site training groups called Camp Bullis. Here we rough it in climiate controled tents and hot chow shipped in to us. Here we both froze and sizzled all in the same day, wake up to 30 degree mornings and train in 80 degree afternoons. My favortie part was waving bye as we drove off in our bus.
At this point we are all but done, just waiting for the formality of graduation. Which turns out to be an over-hypte lack luster event. The ride comes to a halt and we unload just to get in line for the next one. And now here i sit waiting (a common theme in military life) for my next trasition, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes just to see if gravity still works. Sorry for the lack of pictures but everything is in camo so it all blends together anyways.
