Day 63

Day 58 of BCT

I was up soon after 4am. I think everyone is pretty anxious to get this over with. I'm trying to be as positive as possible, and I hope that it is fun too. I know it will be tough, but knowing this is the last of our training will make it easier to hang in there.
We had motor movement at 0530. Since they didn't have enough buses to take the whole company in one trip, we had to march about 1 mile (maybe more?) to or FOB (Forward Operating Base). The march was dark and it was really sandy. Our DS was walking fast too. Everyone seemed antsy, not know where we were going or how far we had to walk.
Once we got there we did the usual "hurry up and wait" and stood in formation for a long time. Finally they had us download our rucksacks into tents. The FOB was set up with permanent tents that I guess they usually stayed in during Vic Forge, but they quickly let us know that we would be sleeping under the stars. We then had a Hot-A breakfast before they marched us to our training sites for the day.
The area we will be doing training in is large and all of our battalion is here. There are multiple FOBs, and with 5 companies training, lots of traffic in and out of the area. There are 3 entry/exit points and our company was assigned to spend the day guarding these checkpoints, learning how to properly search vehicles and personnel. Our platoon had the closest checkpoint, so our march there was fairly short.
We spent the whole day taking turns at the different points. When we weren't on the checkpoint, they had us in the woods doing "concurrent training" or today it was mostly "try not to fall asleep while you lay in the prone position pulling security."
We had some people acting as OP4, or enemy, throughout the day. They were villagers who didn't speak English and gave us a chance to practice searching and reacting to threats.
We had MREs for lunch and dinner, so I was full. Everyone was hoarding the gum and coffee to use later when we pull 24 hour ops.
Around 1800 we headed back to the FOB and formed up. Our commander wasn't excited to see us not remaining in a tactical mindset so he quickly had us all pulling security in a 360 degree perimeter. They handed out mail, which was a nice surprise. We then went and dug our sleeping bags out of our ruck sacks, got 2 MREs for tomorrow and put them in our assault bags, and were marched through a thick underbrush area in the dark to a clearing (there was a narrow path). There we pulled security again for several hours before they started sending us by squad to get some sleep. I got about 4 hours before being woken up for another hour before wake up. They didn't bother to "attack" us, so it was really boring and difficult to stay awake. My battle buddy has a bad reputation for not staying awake so I was nervous to snooze when she suggested taking turns sleeping, but fatigue won over on that one. It was pretty cold to be sleeping outside, so even with our fancy sleep systems, I didn't sleep well in the cold. The biggest frustration was not really knowing what was going on, but that is the whole point anyway. :-)