Just the beginning.

 This past week we had a break for Thanksgiving. I spent the day with some old and new freinds that I have made since I've been here. As you can see from the pictures the dining facility had a pretty good spread for lunch. These are your tax payer dollars at work. After lunch we went back to one of the guy's hotel room to watch movies and use the internet. He is here supporting our training, but is not part of the group deploying to Afghanistan.

We have had some down time here and there which does not sit well with some of the guys I hang out with. Rather than spreading the training out over 21 days with large training gaps, we would prefer to go hard for about 14 days, doing physical training during the day and classroom training in the evenings. The heart burn comes from having less time to spend with family prior to the actual deployment. Much of the training we are doing here is very basic and repetative based on what we already know or have recently trained. It is basically a basic training refresher for senior NCOs and officers. Nothing specific to the job we will actually be doing once we land in country which is very frustrating for many.

As I think I have mentioned before, the task force I am on is comprised of individuals from all over the cournty. Because of this, our time here has been getting to know each other even though we will most likely be split up to fill various postions once we reach our posts in Afgahanistan. Stepping back and watching the dynamic of ther past 2 week I now see personalities starting to come out. I myself have finally figured out who I can best relate to and hang out with.  In the team development process (forming, strorming, norming and preforming) we've just barely gotten through the forming phase and are now entering the storming phase. Because we will all go our seperate ways in 6 days, I don't see us going any further. When we retrun in January, we will be divided into two large classes instead of four and shuffled up once again, starting the entire process all over. This is a bit frustrating as we don't really know who to invest in to build relationships right now becuase we don't really know what we will ultimatly be doing and who we will be doing it with.

The rest of the week will be very physically demanding to a point. We will be training on react to direct fire or ambush, which means a lot of running and getting up and down with our equipment using squad tactics. Then it is on to clearing buildings, convoy operations, and the roll over training. The roll over trainer is used to disorient you like and IED would do. Since our vehicles have been up armoured and made more IED resistant, the enemy now attempts to flip the vehicles over with the explosives to cause casulties. We have to learn how to orient our selves, and get out of the vehicle as quickly as possible. All very good training, but basic for the most part as we won't really be doing these actions on a daily basis as part of our overall mission. However this type of training is extremely important for survivability. It needs to be instinctive as there is no time to think in those types of situations.

That is all for now, until next time TTFN!