Too Much Fun!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've gotten your "what the hell, when are you going to update the blog?" emails.  Seriously, I've just been having too much damned fun to sit down long enough to write about it.

First a few corrections from previous posts.  There are 114 members of the 182nd JAOBC class.  21 of those are women (~18%).   Less than half of the 114 are Regular Army/Active Duty (RA).  The rest are Reserve or National Guard.  Of the 114 total, probably 20 have prior service, both as enlisted personnel and officers, from all branches and services.  The class runs the entire spectrum:  from the 25 year old, just out of law school, deer-in-the-headlights types; to "Grandpa Rambo", a 51 year old former SF guy from the NM National Guard; and everything (and I mean everything) inbetween.  Stellar people-watching opportunities every day.

We spent the first few days starting at 0530 with PT, and then the rest of the day in the classroom. IMO, the classes were awesome (OK, maybe not so much the Composite Risk Management class ..... could have died happily having never lived those 60 minutes).  Not all of my comrades found things as interesting apparently, because there were quite a few sleepers who met the wrath of 1SGT.  As far as PT goes, two thoughts:  (i) who in their right mind shows up at OBC having never done a pushup and unable to run 2 miles?  Seriously??? (we actually had a puker on the very first day ..... after running less than a mile!); and (ii) if the PT intensity doesn't pick up, I'm going to be the first person on earth who gains weight after joining the Army.  I'm thinking/hoping the "least common denominator" school of thought will die a timely death once we move on to Charlottesville.

Now the fun stuff.  Saturday was the dreaded Gas Chamber event.  Every single person who joins the Army goes through this rite of passage (and they all live to tell about it.)  IMO, it is less about teaching a soldier how to handle gas exposure, and more of a psychological "you can do this thing that you never thought you could do" event.  Anyway, wee spent the morning learning all about CS gas (a/k/a tear gas), and the proper course of action if there was a gas attack in our area of operation (AO).  Then the scare tactics started.  Everybody had a story ("when I was enlisted, our commander made us drink milk for a whole week before the gas chamber and everybody threw up!" or "when I was cadre at Benning, one of the Privates tried to claw his way out of the chamber and I had to pull him back by his ankles, with his fingernails digging into the ground).
Blah blah blah.  Even the Commander said things like "you WILL cry.  It's OK.  You don't get any 'man points' for holding it in - just cry."  All morning, all we heard was how bad this was going to hurt, how scary it was going to be .... blah blah freaking blah.   I'm listening to this thinking:  (a.) nobody is going to get hurt -- none of the cadre is willing to risk their career by doing something to us during a training exercise that is going to cause permanent damage; (b.) this whole scare tactic thing is all part of the psychological game of the exercise .... and all these people are actually falling for it; and (c.) its not like I have a choice ... when the Army says I have to go into a gas chamber, I'm going into a gas chamber .... you can try to scare me all you want, but at the end of the day, I still have to go, so why should I waste energy getting scared about it?  The morning was entertaining, to say the least.

Then, group by eight-person group, we put on gas masks, got them checked by 2 different cadre to make sure they were functioning properly, and then sent into the chamber.  The Chief Warrant Officer ("Chief") was in there in a full chem suit, yelling PT commands at us.  We ran around, did pushups & jumping jacks - with the goal of getting us breathing heavy.  Then we were ordered to break the seal on our mask, letting some of the gas inside.  That was like swallowing fire.  Burned all the way down to my stomach.  Then we cleared & resealed the mask, did some more pushups (with burning lungs - fun stuff!) and then formed a line in front of Chief.  One by one, we had to completely remove our mask, state our full names and where we were from, and then we were allowed to exit the chamber.  (Where am I from?  "DC" of course ... short and sweet .... I was NOT going to try to spit out "New Hampshire").  Once you exited, everyone had a different reaction.  Some people had gobs of mucus spewing from every orafice.  (I just blew a double snot rocket and cleared it all in one shot .... just like mtn biking!).  There were the select few (men in their mid 20's) who exited the chamber screaming "hooah" at the top of their lungs and flexed their muscles in a bodybuilder pose. (really, I'm serious).  I just kinda walked out like, "checked that block, what's next?"   The worst of it set in about 20 seconds after exiting - eyes, nose, throat, all on fire (and for the brief moment when I thought I really might permanently loose my eyesight, I rememberd that cadre would never intentionally expose us to something in a training exercise that would cause permanent harm).  Gradually the burning stopped, I could breathe, I stopped sweating, my eyes opened, and all was right with the world again.  In the end, we all survived, nobody puked (not even the PT puker) and everyone has some great (likely exaggerated) stories to tell their friends at home.   I'm still stuck on the psychological process of the exercise - I'd love to know more about the effect the lead-up "scare tactics" have on individual reactions.

That's it for this post.  I still need to tell you about my first experience firing a weapon, and lots of other random thoughts rolling around in my head, but its time for bed.  0630 formation tomorrow for field training exercises all day.  Woo hoooo!