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| Addressing the families who came out to say goodbye |
After six months of anticipation, the day finally arrived. I got to spend a few days with friends and family, and had a great time getting in last visits and fun things - golf, beer, cornhole, and home-cooked meals.
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| Getting ready to head out |
After an 0400 wake up, I (and my small entourage of supportive family) headed to the 911th Pittsburgh Air Reserve base to say our goodbyes and board a C-130 bound for Fort Bliss, TX.
The flight was good, except for some bad weather in Missouri where we stopped to get the other half of our team. A 2 hr flight turned into 4 hrs while the flight crew circled MO waiting to land. We finally ran too low on fuel and stopped at Scott AFB, IL to refuel and wait out the storm. After picking up the rest of our team, we finally made it to TX about 8 hrs later than planned. Not bad for the Air Force.
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| Boarding the plane for the 3rd time |
We have a pretty large team of 200 going through Combat Skills Training, so feeding, bedding down, and transporting that many people is a slow process. We left Ft Bliss today to come out to Camp McGregor, which is actually in New Mexico. Its basically a huge compound in the middle of nowhere that trains soldiers, airmen, and sailors the basic skills needed to go to war. We're training Army style, so we're organized as a Battalion, with five companies of about 40 people each. Those companies are broken into two Platoons of 20 people. I'm a Platoon leader and its going great so far, I have a really motivated and solid group of folks. We have death-by-powerpoint for the first couple days, then a massive equipment issue before our real training begins later this week. So no real fun stories to share yet, except that I saw a huge tarantula today, apparently its mating season and they're out. It was massive and I'm not lookng forward to coming across any more of those guys.
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| 911 CES |
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| The Massive Tarantula |
That's about all for now, we have an early wake up for PT at 0500, and so it begins..
