I recently saw this on youtube and thought it was hilarious.
There hasn't been anything exciting going on for me. I will be getting PRK on the 5th of August. PRK is a form of corrective vision surgery. So I am looking forward to that. That's about all I know for now though.
Happy 4th of July to everyone. I hope you all have a great day however you are planning to spend your day. I am just glad I spending it back here in America and not another country who can't even defend themselves and still needs our help.
Anyway, Fort Carson was open for civilians from around Colorado Springs to come on post to a park where they had several things for kids and families to do. They also had fireworks at night.
I watched the fireworks from my Jeep in a parking lot nearby my barracks. They started roughly around 9:45 p.m. At every military post I have been to so far at 10pm Taps is played. So right in the middle of the fireworks tonight Taps starts playing. It's a very weird thing watching fireworks go off and hearing Taps being played. To me fireworks are a celebration of our nations independence, as I'm sure it is for everyone else. On the other hand Taps is a solemn reminder of the price paid of keeping this nation free. For me it was just a strange thing to be happening at the same time.
Once the firework ended and I was headed back to the barracks, Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue by Toby Keith came on the radio. It seemed like a fitting end to the day.
So when we were out at the farp we had a lot of MRE's to eat. I have received some questions about MRE's before so I thought that this would be a perfect time to take some pictures and do a post about the wonderful thing that is a Meal Ready to Eat.
MRE's come in several different menu's with this particular one be meal #17 sloppy joe.
Here is the entire contents of this package. From the top left to right is the MRE bag; baked snack crackers(also known as Cheeze-its); Orange beverage powder(gator-aide); a beverage bag for coffee or the beverage powder; cheese spread with jalapeno's; a spoon; wheat bread(more like cardboard); a heater to eat up your food; the sloppy joe(in a bag in the box); a condiments bag with things like a wet wipe, salt, Tabasco sauce, coffee, matches, and chicklet gum; and another wheat bread.
To eat up your meal you pour a little bit of water into the green bag and stick the meal in then wait about 10 minutes and it will be warm enough to choke down.
Here is the completed meal. Looks delicious doesn't it? No it doesn't I know.
If you're lucky you may get a meal that has M&M's or Skittles in it. Of course everyone knows which meal's those are in so you gotta be quick to get those ones when it's meal time in the field.
I really enjoyed this posting at Scattered Stones about the death of common sense, here is a few examples of no common sense of things that have happened to me lately.
I have not felt like posting much lately. I don't know why, just haven't felt like it lately. Sorry. Anyway's the farp went ok. Could have gone better but the officers in charge of planning it did a poor job of that. Probably due to a lack of common sense. That is going to be the dominant theme in today's posting by the way. Common sense, or lack of. Anyway we would get out to the farp at 6:00 am and the weather would be nice with a clear sky. Clear of clouds and helicopters. By noon the clouds would roll over the mountains but not so bad that the pilots couldn't fly. But they didn't. As we say the Apache is a all weather aircraft with fair weather pilots. By mid afternoon it would be raining and we would go home at 6:00pm. A full day wasted. This went on for two weeks with the random aircraft coming in once in a while. However I did get a army achievement medal for being the best pad chief and working the hardest out on the farp so that kinda made up for some of the crap.
The next thing has to do with my recent status update on facebook. For those of you that didn't see it I posted that I hate my unit and company commander. There are a few reasons for this. The first happened a while back when we had to come in a mothers day Sunday to work because apparently we weren't working hard enough during the week and getting aircraft fixed but there was several other things leading to this that weren't our fault. We were doing the best we could with what the higher ups were giving us. The second reason happened last Thursday when we found out that another company had lost two FCR's which sit above the rotor blades on the Apache and can locate tanks, trucks and other sort of large enemy structures. It's a big radar. Altogether these two components are worth about $15 million. Yes, $15 million. So we spent two hours looking for them after work when we should have been at home. We later found out that they were in the back of a truck the company had sent to get painted. There is much more that I could go on about but that doesn't matter. Just let me ask, do you lose all common sense when you assume command of a military unit, or are some people just not born with it? I personally would go with the second answer. I do feel a little better for venting though.
I had planned on answering these earlier but the gunnery was not going very smoothly and after working from 5:00am to 7:00pm all I felt like doing was sleeping at the end of the day. But I will post about that later.
1. If you were not in the army what would you do for a career? If you had asked me this when I would have said without a doubt be a pilot. Now I would still like to get a pilots license but I think if i wasn't in the military I would probably say be a police officer or something close to that. I will never be able to have a office job.
2a. Do you miss your Mom? of course
b. What things in the army live up to your expectations and what do not? I didn't really have a lot of expectations when I joined. I didn't know what I was getting into. I did expect basic to be hard, and parts of it where. I didn't expect to have to put up with a lot of the politics and other sorts of stupid things that commanders and other higher ranking people can pull.
3. Is it harder than you thought living away from family? In basic and the first few months it was. But it isn't so bad anymore. I am able to call them everyday, talk for as long as I want, plus we can use a webcam whenever. There are still moments though. I think the worst times is the day before and after I leave from being home on leave. I don't like those days.
4. I would like to know what your favorite part of being in the military is? There is a lot of things I enjoy. How many people can say they work on a multimillion dollar flying weapon everyday. Or have done all and seen all the things I have since joining. But I think the best part is the memories I will have. Like getting lost in Korea, or any of the things we did in Korea for that matter. Things like that are what I really enjoy.
5. Are you glad you're not in Korea right now? Yes very. I have heard that the troops there are on high alert which probably isn't very fun. I would really like little Kim to wisen up because I don't want to end up back there.
6. So is Army food as bad as all the "army songs" make it out to be? It depends where you are eating it and what it is. Some things you learn to avoid and other food you get every time you see it. However if you are in the field, you can almost expect to not enjoy the food. But if it's a hot cooked meal you eat it anyway simply because it's not a MRE.
7. Are you looking at the Army as a career, or only short term? That's undecided yet. I planned on becoming an officer and going to flight school but I don't know if I want to do this for the rest of my life. I waiver with that everyday. But I don't have to make that choice for at least another three years.
8. So far how do you like Colorado??? So far it hasn't been bad. The weather could be better but when it is nice it's beautiful. And there are so many places to explore you should never get bored. I kinda sound like a brochure advertising CO. So who wants to come visit now?
Thank you to everybody who asked a question. Here's to (possibly) another 100 posts!
