Changes Come

All the names, call signs, and unit names are completely made-up to protect the individuals involved and maintain security of possibly sensitive military information.

-Thursday, June 11, 2009

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any dumber; that the level of retardation here at Camp Atterbury had reached its breaking point, 1st Army and the other groups here managed to stretch the barrier just a little bit further and claim a new, previously unchartered, realm of stupidity in the name of military training.
First off, I have to say that I’ve considered the Navy as a whole to be a pretty decent branch. Yeah, they’re all sea-faring raging homosexuals but they generally seem to be equipped with a few more chromosomes than the army. It’s not the case here. The Navy teams (there are two of them here) have single-handedly managed to jack-up almost every bit of training that we’ve done with them. It took them 7 hours to sight in their rifles when we first got here. They managed to break some of the training equipment we were supposed to use so we had to reschedule for another day. The icing on the cake happened two nights ago while I was on night shift:

“Lancer main, this is Navy1. Over”
“Go ahead Navy1.”
“Umm… yeah, we were calling to see if you were hot-micing, over” (Hot micing in the radio world means that someone has the push to talk button pressed down so nobody else can communicate over the net.)
“Say again, over?”
“yeah, we were calling to see if you were hot-micing, over.”
“Well, seeing as I’m talking to you right now I’m pretty sure there isn’t a hot mic. Over.”
“Ok, well we were having trouble getting a hold of anyone and we thought that maybe our antenna was causing a hot mic, over.”
-Now, I will tell you that there is no possible way an antenna could cause a hot mic at all. Even if you have ZERO radio or comm experience you know that there is no way an antenna, responsible for transmitting and receiving signal, can cause a jam over the entire frequency.
“Yeah, there is no hot mic. Lancer main out.”
Earlier this morning I was outside my command post smoking when a Navy female said “Did anything happen last night?” (I’m on night shifts for a while) “I didn’t hear anything after 10pm.”

Me: “Uh… yeah. A few things happened. Do you want me to take a look at your radio?” Come to find out she didn’t make the 10 o’clock radio freq change and it was a simple correction. After I corrected the problem she says to me “Maybe they shouldn’t have put a cook in here to manage the radios all by herself.” Umm yeah, just maybe.

Today we got word that we are supposed to man an entry control point (ECP). That would be cool but we also have two missions to do over the course of the day and only have 6 personnel left over. So we have to figure out how we’re going to cover a 4-man position for 24 hours with only 6 people.
I watched a guy, totally sober, take a piss in public on a military installation.
One of the teams decided to close up shop halfway through the night and just go home. It took Brigade 2.5 hours to figure out that they had just left. Well, actually it took the 2 hours to get off their collective asses and send a runner over to their trailer to figure out why they weren’t answering the radio.

Did you know:

In Navy dorms/command centers where there is an ECP, you have to salute the colors, salute the officer “on deck,” and ask for permission to “come aboard,” even if you are nowhere near a boat?

On army posts the reflective belt is worn as a sash and not as a belt?
You only need 3 hours of training prior to instructing a full team of soldiers and airman for a week on a military tracking system?

Update 12 June 2009:

So last night I was manning the radio and one of the groups out in the field called in to brigade to have an ambulance come pick up one of their soldiers because he was bitten by a spider and was having a reaction. I’ve spent quite some time trying to determine which surprises me more: the fact that it took brigade one and a half hours to react and get somebody out there (roughly 2 miles away from the main post) or the fact that the cavalry unit that was out there waited an hour and a half for them to come. They would have had 20 minutes before I said “screw it” and called a van or something from the barracks to come get him and take him to the hospital.
I’ve noticed that I’m starting to reach my breaking point already. I’m snapping at people I shouldn’t snap at. I’m getting upset over stupid things, and I’m smoking WAY more that I usually do. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of sleep from having to work nights and people being loud during the day or if the constant barrage of idiocy has eroded down my composure. Either way, I’m afraid the wrong person is going to set me off and I’m going to react in a less than favorable way and get myself into trouble. It’s easy for someone to say “Dude, you just need to calm down and unwind” but there’s no time for that.
(*Just heard my commander say something that pretty much sums up this training: “It’s like watching old people die over there” in reference to the Brigade trying to conduct a training mission.)
I can already tell I’m not the same person I was when I left 3 months ago. I’m kind of afraid that I’m going to go back to my friends and family next week and they’re going to wonder who the hell I am. I guess that’s probably on everyone’s mind that leaves for an extended period of time but I never really thought it would happen to me. I’m not changed so drastically that I’m a completely new person but it’s a lot of small things. I have less tolerance for certain personality traits that I would otherwise ignore. My spectrum of emotions is Angry, Sad, Happy, or apathetic. I feel almost manic-depressive. When I find that I can muster up the energy to care about something it has to be at one extreme or another, else I tune it out.
There’s a lot of things I miss about not being here but it’s hard to define one I miss the most at any given moment. Sometimes I’ll be sitting outside and night and miss going on walks and discussing sports and movies and women with Andrew. Other times I just miss the freedom to go where I want when I want, even though most of the time when I was at home I just stayed at home as opposed to going out. I think I’ll be able to determine what thing I’ve missed the most one I go home on leave. On second thought, after typing that out, I just miss home.