Drill #3

Blogger is misbehaving and I can't figure out how to fix this so it has paragraphs again. Still working on that: My third RSP drill was this last weekend. I was very proud of myself this month because I weighed in 13 lbs. heavier than last, which is above my ship weight, and I also increased my PT scores a little bit. I have 7 lbs. left to go before I'm where I want to be before I ship. I feel like I need to add a little bit more extra just so I have a some reserves in case they work a bunch of weight off of me at basic. We only had to run one mile on Saturday because it was freezing cold outside with kind of a crazy wind. SFC Dixon is in charge of drill, and after one mile he called it and had us all run back to the armory to get on with the rest of the day. There is a freeze on enlistments right now, so we had no new soldiers this month and that being the case they decided to have us do field exercises all day instead of classroom stuff. It's better in that it's much more fun and interesting, it's worse in that it's also a bit more tiring. We did a lot of marching around in the mud outside with our fake weapons pretending to annihilate our enemies. They also handed out MRE's for lunch, and then took away the heaters, so we ate them cold, and we only got 15 minutes or so to eat them. I'm glad we did it though, because from now on I know to start with the thing in there that has the most calories and just start shovelling it down as fast as possible. Sunday morning we did the "warm up exercises" and then SFC Dixon made us run the full two miles as a company. I will never love running, I'm certain of this, but I think I may have hit a little break through. Let's just say that towards the end of the run a few of the guys started walking, and I really wanted to be one of them. I had pretty much made up my mind that I would be one of them, when SFC Dixon started yelling at all the guys who were walking to get in the van and ride back to the armory. I had to abandoned all plans to stop running right there because I'd rather run until I collapsed then quit and get in that van. I finished the run, I was at the back of the company, but I didn't stop, and I'm glad because I wasn't at all certain I was capable until I had actually done it. So I give myself a little pat on the back for seeing that one through to the end. After that we had to play some game of tag inside that was fun until my leg muscles couldn't keep up with my head anymore, and I bit it on the gym floor, which I believe to be cement. It happened so fast that there wasn't much time to feel much pain. I did wind up with bloody knees and today they have also turned very unattractive shades of black and blue, but other than that I seem to have escaped unscathed. We had MRE's for lunch again, and spent a good portion of the day learning how to clear a room, and then went back outside for more field exercises. Here are a couple of pictures from the event: This is a picture of my group getting ready to try yet again to successfully clear a room. We kind of sucked at it if the truth be told.

This is a picture of me, (only you can't see my face) trying to figure out how I'm supposed to roll over this guy to try and do a dead search. After a lot of tugging I finally got him rolled over but by then even my dead person was laughing.

This one was taken during our field exercises, and although I don't look like I know what's going on, I am fairly certain that in this particular instance that I actually did know what was happening.