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Boots on Ground (BoG)

Everyone's orders are measured by how many days your boots are on ground or BoG. If you have 1 year orders, then you're 365 BoG and the counter doesn't start until you arrive the CENTCOM theater. Welcome to Kuwait. You're BoG counter starts today.

Welcome to the Central Command (CENTCOM) Theater

After about a 20 hour journey we arrived Kuwait via a 3 hour stop-over in Germany. We had a chartered flight with civilian plan/crew, but we shared the flight with about 100 soldiers. All-in-all it was a very nice flight. The seats throughout the plan had enough space as the civilian business class, so we could get somewhat comfy. The fed us very well and quite often and there was always a movie playing. I got enough sleep and felt rather rested when we touched down in Kuwait. We are now staying here for a few days to adjust our sleep. There’s only about 3-4 hours of instruction per day, so we have a lot of time to rest and get ready for our final destinations. I was good on sleep the first night, but last night I wanted to watch the AFC football championship game which came on at 2:30am here. I didn’t get to bed until 6am. Thank god we didn’t have any instruction until 10. Internet on base is slow and there are some sites like Skype that are blocked. It’s quite frustrating especially when I want to upload my photos and blog entries. Oh well, I’ll post them when I can.

Our plane.

Southern Kindness

I have to put out a few words of appreciation to the South Carolinians about how much they appreciate the military. First, we were visited by a 3rd grade class from the local elementary school. These kids put together about 50 care packages which were hand-delivered to ever single enlisted sailor of our NIACT class. If that weren’t enough, the only day our schedule would permit us to all come together was a Monday and it just happened to be a holiday – Martin Luther King day. That means all 30 of these kids came on their day off from school to give hand out the care packages. There were many of us (esp. those with kids) who got a little choked up when they were handing out the boxes.

Also, on our last day in South Carolina, we were given the red carpet treatment. There were some Harley Davidson vetrans who escorted our buses to the airport the entire 45 min drive away. When we arrived the hanger, we were greeted by more vets and volunteers who remained clapping until the very last sailor made it into the hangar. Col Charles P. Murray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_P._Murray,_Jr.) , a Medal of Honor recipient , said a few words of appreciation and there were many others who gave us food & beverages.

Convoy training. There's a lot to remember when running a convoy. I was assigned alternate convoy commander, so I was kept busy.

NIACT Training - Week 3

Training's over. This week was just a short, 3 day wrapup which focused mainly on convoy operations, identifying IEDs and EFPs, and combat tactics to overtake a building. All three weeks of training came together in the final mock missions yesterday. We had two convoy missions and were attacked by "enemy forces" using IEDs, mortor rounds, and small arms fire. I think our platoon did fairly well. Of course, there were many things we could have improved on, but all-in-all, we were happy of the outcome.

Now that training is over, a few of us decided to treat ourselves to stay in a hotel for one last time before we head to Kuwait. We had a nice dinner and a few beers, but the events of the past three weeks overwhelmed me, and I had to turn in early for a nice, quiet (aka no snoring) night. Today I'll head back to the barracks to pack all my gear and get ready for tomorrow's flight to Kuwait.

I found this video of NIACT. It's from a few years ago, but this guy did a great job.

Shooting the .50 cal at NIACT.

NIACT Training - Week 2

Since we had the 2 days off because of the bad weather it's been a quick, cram-packed week. We've been on so many different ranges this week. We had to prequalify on our M16s early Wednesday morning. The qualification was a series of 7 popup targets coming up randomly 40 times. They ranged from 25 meters to 300 meters and stayed up a few seconds (longer for the 300 meter targets). We had to shoot from 3 different positions—laying down with the gun muzzle supported on a sandbag, laying down without the gun muzzle supported, and kneeling. There were two major difficulties with this shoot. It was freak’n cold (still below freezing) and because of the snow, it was difficult to see some of the targets (the longer targets were white, so white on white was kinda hard to see. On Thursday we went to a different range to qualify—same exact process as the prequal, but on a different range. Luckily I qualified sharpshooter on both the M9 pistol and M16 rifle.

We also did some stress qualification for M16 and M9. The goal of these shoots was to simulate shooting during an actual firefight. We first had to get our heart rate up, so we needed to run in place, then run to a bunch of different stations, kneeling, squatting, laying down, and standing shooting a various targets. This was a ton of fun and I really enjoyed it. It was quite tiring since we had to do this with our heavy body armor and afterwards I had to take off a couple layers of clothes. Didn’t even feel the cold.

We finished the week up with shooting the heavy guns. We got to shoot the M240, M249, and finally the .50 cal machine gun. The .50 cal is awesome. As you shoot it you can feel the concussion through your whole body. I’ll upload a video I took. Fun stuff. We also went through a simulator of shooting both the M9 pistol and M16 rifle in low light situations. Again, really fun stuff and I did well in low light.

It’s Sunday now and time to recharge the batteries a little. I’ll need to do a pre-pack for the flight to Kuwait (later this week) to make sure all my stuff will fit into 4 seabags. If not, I’ll need to ship it out this week sometime.

#NIACT #pre-deployment

Today we were on the range again. This is the first time since the bad weather and you can see from the pics that it's still cold. We were out here for about 9 hour trying to get everyone on the range at least once. Some of us (including me) were lucky enought to get out there twice.

This qual is harder. There are many targets that pop up ad varying distances from 50 meters to 300 meters. Shoot them before the go down. All these had to be done lying down, so if you can see in the pictures what's on the ground....yep we were laying in that all day long. The cold weather gear issued to us keep most things warm, but some of us had really cold toes. Gotta do it again tomorrow.

Some unique pics of snow & ice in South Carolina.

Oh the weather outside is ...

We had a terrible winter storm here on Sunday night. Snow and ice shut down the base for two days and we were stuck here without our Drill Instructors. Luckily, the cafeteria staff were able to make it in (they stayed on base instead of trying their luck back home).

This downtime gave us a chance to recharge our batteries, get caught up on odds and ends, and relax a bit.

Me with my newly issued M16 rifle and M9 pistol. Wearing the 50lbs of body armor is tough to get used to, but not as bad as I thought. The other day we had to pick up all our brass cases from shooting on the range. A bunch of us had stiff necks from looking down for such a long time with our heavy helmets.

For the most part, the first week was mostly briefings and powerpoint presentations. Monday we formed up into two companies, then down into 4 squads per company, then down to about 4 platoons per squad. We were told this class is a small class with only 160 people. We have a full range of folks from 06 Captains to E3 Seaman. We were welcomed by the Company Commander, First Sargent, and the Navy Support Liaison chain of command.

Finally we were issued more gear. About 3 and a half seabags worth of gear. Some of it is pretty cool:

- Sleeping system (sleeping bag, foam mat, rainproof bag for sleeping bag

- 7 layers of cold weather gear

- 50lbs of body armor

- Elbow / knew pads

- Military issued Camelbak (http://www.camelbak.com/government-military/hydration-packs/thermobak-3l.aspx)

- Tactical gloves

- Cold weather gloves

- Backpacks

- Waistpack

- Gerber multitool

- And tons more

The barracks aren't that bad, but still it's always better if you have some kind of privacy.

This is my final 300 meters sheet. We "zeroize" our M16. Every person looks through weapons differently. So we tweak the iron sides on the weapon to match it to us. What you want to see is a nice tight group. Mine isn't that bad if I do say so myself.

Oh, after we did this we went to qualify the M9 pistols. I didn't have my camera, so don't have any pics of it, but it was a blast. There were three distances we needed to shoot the target. Each time we had to draw our weapon from our holster (like the wild, wild west). Very fun. I qual'd.

Last medical check before we head out (next week). Only outstanding thing for me is to get some additional inserts for my ballistic eyeware. Oh, by the way, the smallpox is a pretty big pain. This past weekend my arm hurt like hell and swelled up. The injection area blistered up and started oozing. Pretty gross. In this medical check, they looked at it and said it's all normal. It should start to scab in a few days. I'm supposed to keep it uncovered as much as possible. Yeah right. It's freak'n cold outside and the barracks aren't that much better.

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