I am back after my vacation with Mickey. We finished up our training by learning how to ener and clear a building and convy operations. The urban ops was fun. I "killed" 10 terrorists, 3 children and a pregnant woman, not sure if that counts twice. It has certainly brought in to focus what dangers our men and women face every day.
The Ground Assault course was fun too. We drove around in HMMWVs with loaded guns. I got to drive, so I didn't get to shoot much. It was scary when the "bad guys" were on the driver's side because the passenger gets out and shoots over the hood. That means I am stuck behind the wheel and can see down the barrel of a firing gun. I'm just glad LTC R didn't shoot the lifting rings! I am wheels up Friday.

Here is a video of the hard core training the Army has me doing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uld5DW9tH4o&NR

And here are some pictures of me preparing for deployment. I woke up a bit fuzzy and decided to shave:















It was good enough for Honest Abe...
















Apparently this does not meet Army standards.















Neither does this:















This is my favorite, apparently a rule exists for this look as well.

Am taking combatives training. It starts at 0500 and ends at 0700. The Army is much mure serious about this stuff since I attended basic training. It is Brazilian Jujitsu and it stresses grapelling with a choke hold or an arm bar as the coup. It is fairly exhausting, but I am learning a lot. Mostly that I had better not run out of bullets. Tomorrow I will follow that up with some urban ops training. Busting in doors and clearing rooms with a buch of docs and nurses. Hooah! At least the mercury dropped.

Fort McCoy is very hot today. About 100 degrees today (July 31). It was 87 degrees in our barracks last night at 0200. Had a busy weekend. Yesterday we went to FOB Freedom and did the high crawl, low crawl, and the 3-5 second rush stuff. It was exhausting because we had done a five mile march in full kit the previous day and had taken a PT test the day before that. We also learned how to exit a vehicle under fire. It rained during the morning so the temperature was quite pleasant. Then we did a detainee ops class in an air conditioned room, where we froze our keesters off. The lunch hour finally arrived, but the G staff hijacked our bus so they could eat lunch (they were in a class all day & weren't wet, cold, &c.). So we sat in the mud and ate MREs while the sun came out and baked the mud into our clothes, armor, weapons, &c. Then it was off to the grenade range where we threw little bombs at fake people. We wrapped up the day at about 1600.