Training III

Yesterday: Pistol Sharpshooter (a middling score)
Today: Rifle Range, Intro to Combat Tactics. Fun.
This Afternoon: Gas Chamber. Not fun.

Oh, and two more shots yesterday.

Training II

Ran through a CFT and the rollover trainer today and I am a beat puppy. (A CFT is a Combat Fitness Test: a half mile run in boots and cammies [you'll notice I said 'run' and not 'comfortable jog'], lifting a 30 pound ammo can over your head as many times as possible, and a crazy 'maneuver under fire' course.) I got through the run with ten seconds to spare. (Hey, if the minimum wasn't good enough it wouldn't be the minimum.) Then we went to the ammo can lift. I'm thinking that 30-35 lifts would be good enough to score well and still not pull a muscle and screw up the next event. So I'm counting the lifts for this willowy female Lance Corporal and she pumps out 60. Oy. Then she counts for me. I quickly change my plans and do a face saving 63 lifts. The next event is fun but exhausting. Here at the DPC they use a permanent CFT course with lanes already marked out. Of course, that means that the grass has been worn away and we're crawling in mud. But you sprint, low crawl, high crawl, zigzag through cones, grab a wounded buddy and drag him back through some zigzags, transfer him up to a fireman's carry, drop him back at the start line, pick up two ammo cans, run (or walk in my case) back down the course, throw a dummy grenade, do some push ups, then pick up the ammo cans again and run (or walk quickly in my case) back to the start line. Like I said, crazy. And to make it even more fun I had to carry a bigger guy than me. But at my age I get about 6 minute to pass with the barest minimum points. I did it in 3:30. So that was successful.

Then there's the rollover trainer. Hmmm... I have to take back my Disneyland comment. First you buckle yourself in to the seats of the interior mock up HMMWV. This thing rests in a gimbal that spins it around at a decent but unhurried pace. They spin you two or three times and you end up hanging upside down in your seat belt or scrunched up against the door or something. Let me tell you, this is a very disorienting position no matter how Joe Cool you thought you were before. The light's at a different angle, the shapes of ordinary things are not like your brain thinks they should be, blood is rushing to your head, and you're probably carrying your full body weight on the top of your helmet. Oh, and you have a rifle to maintain control of. You find the latches of your seat belt, which never seemed to be where they were supposed to be, and unbuckle while unsuccessfully trying to prevent yourself from becoming a completely discombobulated lump of humanity on the roof of the vehicle. Then you have to manhandle yourself into a logical position, keep in mind that there are three other people trying to do the same thing, and figure out which door can open. Then you unglamorously haul yourself out and set up security positions. Repeat seven or eight times.

Tomorrow: Pistol Range. Even if it rains that should be an easy day.

Training

Now we enter the training phase of my time here at the DPC. This afternoon we had a familiarization class on crew served weapons and and introductory class on the rollover vehicle trainer. Tomorrow we get into a mock up of a tactical vehicle and sit in it while it gets rolled a few times. Then we get out of it without killing each other. Sounds like a good candidate for a new ride at Disneyland.

Oh, and more shots today. Yea.

More Handy Tips

1. Don't bother bringing an empty seabag to Supply. They're very good at arranging the gear you get by stuffing it into other things.

2. If at all possible, stay at the Lejeune Inn. It's right in the middle of mainside and the BOQ is quite a ways away. Getting a non-availability statement is easier if you don't make a reservation at the BOQ and go there to check in after a few days have gone by and everyone else has taken up the rooms.

3. Take a contrarian view of standard Marine thinking and don't do complicated things like Supply and Medical 'first thing' in the morning. Everyone is doing them first thing in the morning. Save your mornings for checking into the B.S. stuff like MCCS and PMO. Do the major muscle movements later when the lines have drawn down.

Supply

Went to Supply (Sorry, 'Central Issue Facility'. Who comes up with these stupid names?) today and got all the gear that they said I was supposed to have. It is an insane amount of stuff. I brought an extra seabag just to hold gear and I don't think it will be big enough. The main problem is that if I use my seabag and the huge pack I was issued I'll be going over the baggage limit to fly commercial. Since it seems like I got the complete combat load for Afghanistan. I'm getting in touch with the people I'm going to be working for and double checking on what I need. Djibouti is supposed to be a permissive environment after all...

Medical II

Here are some handy tips:

1. If you are a Marine reservist deploying overseas then you need to do whatever it takes to get your medical records in your hands before you leave. Don't listen to anyone who says they will be transferred "automatically." In fact, when you mention this at the DPC, be prepared for the room to burst out in a healthy chuckle.

2. If you know you haven't had very many shots then do whatever you can to get some of the live viruses administered before you report to the DPC. There's a 28 day wait between them and if you need more than two, you're screwed.

3. Learn to like waiting rooms.

Deployment Processing Center

Other than being next to impossible to find in the gloom of early morning, with little to no signage and an unmarked S-1 entrance that's hidden under a stairwell, things are running fairly smoothly here at the DPC. They have their check-in procedures down and you finish with S-1 to walk across the parking lot and sign up for training events through the S-3. Then you get your billeting arranged while here at CLNC. I'm sitting down with the MarForAf LNO after lunch and then starting my run through medical. Medical should take most of the week and all my field training will take most of next week. There's also a list, much longer than I had previously thought, of online courses you have to run through. Those can be done on my laptop at my own pace and they have printers in order to print off certificates. They also have a bank of unclassified computers that we can use.

There's a large group of Marines, mostly going to a new Brigade HQ that CENTCOM is standing up, and they are sort of clogging the system this week. No worries though, I'm pretty sure I'll be here for a month anyway. Another friendly LtCol pointed to my check-in sheet and said that it's basically a scavenger hunt. You finally figure out exactly what building and room you have to go to only to find that the person is out until tomorrow. That sort of thing. Really, the big hold up for most people seems to be medical and that's probably how it will be with me, waiting for all the live vaccines I have to get.

So it's been an interesting day one and it's only noon chow.

Here We Go

The journey has now taken a huge leap forward. This morning at zero dark thirty I made my way to the airport and flew in to Jacksonville, NC. One of my bags didn't make it on the little puddle jumper that I hopped on in Atlanta so I have to go back and get it from the airport tonight. It's annoying because that bag has a couple of crucial uniform items that I could not replace by the time I got on base. If it doesn't come in tonight, I'll have to report in civvies tomorrow. Great.

Anyhow, for those of you who are Marines and may end up following this same path, let me tell you about the J-Actionville airport. When you get your rental car and drive off you will get to a T that has no street signs, no directional markers, no nothing. I figured it would be easier to find Camp Lejeune. It wasn't. (Hint: go right.)

Eritrea: A Puzzlement On Purpose

Eritrea can pretty much be summed up by the fact that even North Korea has more of a free press than they do. If it wasn't so completely dirt poor it would be declared a rogue nation by the State Department and we'd isolate it diplomatically. They are about as closed a society as you can get, without a single foreign journalist in the entire country. Not one. It seems to me that they're so bats**t crazy they're likely to start sponsoring terrorism just for the notoriety. I mean, they fight for independence from Ethiopia for years and years, get their independence, and then instead of working with their now landlocked southern neighbor they get all spiteful and close off all Ethiopia's access to the sea. I'm sure they were sitting back and thinking, "We showed them!" but then a funny thing happened. Little Djibouti raised a hand and said, "We'll be your port of entry." Now Ethiopia and Djibouti are relatively prosperous and Eritrea is poorer and poorer. Smooth move, guys.

Kenya: We Know What We're Doing. Wait, Was That a Gunshot?

All observable evidence shows that Kenya has their crap in one seabag. They have a relatively stable economy, decent education, and they can generally feed themselves. This was the common perception amongst the world powers for much of the last decade or so. Then came the elections of 2007 where the ruling party was way behind in the vote count before they seemed to mysteriously discover more ballots to count and that put them over the top. Riots, explosions, and murder in the streets followed. A thousand dead Kenyans later the rest of the world paused from their morning coffee with a seriously upturned eyebrow.

"Great," thought the world. "We thought we had that one handled. It's hard enough helping Africa without the success stories sliding backward."

Of course, what the election violence pointed out was that the rest of the world really doesn't understand Africa as well as they think they do. So now Kenya has held a national vote on a new constitution and things are moving along nicely. Since the U.S. really needs them as a regional partner in both the War on Terror and our anti-piracy operations, hopefully Kenya will continue to hold it together and move into the promising future that everyone expects of them.

Ethiopia: How Ya Like Me Now?

It's an odd thing, especially for people my age who grew up in the 80's watching Live Aid on MTV, to have Ethiopia as the local model of 'not too bad.' The electoral shenanigans there don't really seem that much worse than Cook County, Illinois. The general economy seems better than Detroit's, which really ain't saying much but you get my drift. Also they're only down to the occasional drought, which makes them a bit like central California. When you look at the positives-- host country for the African Union, plenty of water and arable land, reasonable lack of genocide and ethno-religious warfare-- you could almost say it looks kinda like the Garden of Eden. (Of course if you did say that, you'd probably spark a healthy round of ethno-religious warfare.) It seems to me that their biggest problem is an ornery neighbor to the north and a peasantry twisting to the whims of governmental cronyism. Not all that different from Philadelphia when you think about it.

Uganda: Punching Above Their Weight

Interesting things happen when bombs explode. Not only do you have general carnage but you also tend to register some altered motivations. Back in July the entire world, give or take a few billion, was watching the FIFA World Cup. So were a few hundred Ugandan Joe Sixpacks when bombs went off in their pubs and killed 76 of them. Then your not-so-friendly neighborhood terrorist group Al Shabaab claims responsibility and things get a little more dicey in East Africa. I mentioned before what a walking disaster Somalia is. That's mainly because of Al Shabaab.

So then you get Uganda ramping up the rhetoric as well as offering more 'peacekeeping troops' to 'assist with stability operations' within Somalia. Not only does 'stability operations' sound so much nicer than 'bloodthirsty revenge', it's also more likely to get you special funding from the United States. Now while the U.S. is plenty willing to give money and guns to whoever lines up to fight terrorists, Uganda has a bit of an image problem. Sure, they go after the gang of murdering thugs known as the Lord's Resistance Army and they've offered their courts for trying captured pirates (Who are mostly Somali. Hmmmm...), but when you've got a leader with a less-than-stellar human rights record and who likes to wipe out opposition parties and ignore his own constitution so he can run for office again and again, getting assistance from Uncle Sam is difficult at best.

In fact, in my completely unofficial and nowhere near expert opinion, Uganda, small as they are, encapsulates most of the problems with U.S. policy towards African states. (Ed. Note: I was going to call this post The Mouse That Roared but decided to be polite.) We want terrorists to die (sorry, 'come to justice') but we know we need to operate through other nations because we just can't be everywhere at once. We look around the world chess board and the only people we see with the capacity to kill bad guys are not all that good themselves. That, as we say in the English speaking world, is a bit of a pickle.

Sudan: Train Wreck's A'Coming, Let's Make Popcorn

I've been paying a lot of attention to the international and local news agencies reporting on East Africa. The situation in Sudan is puzzling and would be laughable if it wasn't so unavoidably tragic. Sudan has been wracked with civil war for decades, mostly between the north (where the national government is) and the south. They've got a peace agreement that calls for a vote on southern secession and that vote is scheduled for Jan 9th, 2011. Not even Vegas bookmakers are taking bets against the vote going in favor of secession. The south has all the oil. The north has all the guns. The south is a combination of animist religions and Christianity. The north is predominantly Muslim. The south is ready to secede even if there's no vote. The north is dragging its feet in preparing for the vote.

This is not going to end well. It's a train wreck that everyone can see coming down the track.

Throw into this mix a province that straddles the north-south line having its own vote over which side to join, the Darfur region of west Sudan where genocide has become so regular its practically written on everyone's daily 'to do' list, and that Sudan's ruling head of state has been indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity or some such. Folks, this recipe for disaster is coming out of the oven whether we're ready for it or not and its not going to be a pretty mixed metaphor. Sure would be nice if someone could, I don't know, do something about it.

Somalia: Let's Do the Time Warp Again

I know people who've been to Somalia. I know people who've fired several rounds into a darkened cityscape in an attempt to force their way out of an ambush. I know people who watched as warlords waited for U.S. forces to fly away after delivering relief supplies so they could go in, shoot the starving people, and steal the food for themselves. Somalia was a geographic fiction back in the early 90's and it is pretty much the same now; only with international terrorists and pirates competing for space against the average run of the mill thuglord.

There's a reason CJTF-HOA doesn't engage in cooperative military operations within Somalia: There is no functional state to deal with. The 'Transitional Federal Government' measures their control over the the country by single digits of city blocks. Most of the northern parts of the country are made up of the soon-to-be-officially-recognized regions called Somaliland and Puntland. In the casual observations of this Marine, Somalia has about six more months before it completely falls apart. (And I realize that the word 'completely' suggests that it has far to fall. It doesn't.)

What makes this time different from the 90's is that there is a relatively strong desire amongst the rest of East Africa to see that some kind of stability rules the place. The African Union has 'peacekeeping' troops there and is trying to get UN support for thousands more. The U.S. has watched Black Hawk Down enough times to realize that another round of American forces in Mogudishu is a very bad idea. Also, there is a general movement among the U.S. government to let African problems be solved by Africans. We'll just have to see how long that sentiment can withstand the inevitable onslaught of internet video showing the misery and starvation that is currently prevalent but not currently seen.

There Are Orders and There Are Orders

Modifications to orders can take on many shapes and sizes. Some can completely change just about everything and some can make just a minor adjustment. My orders to mobilize included a short little line saying that no rental car was authorized while in North Carolina at the Deployment Processing Center. This is irksome.

Camp Lejeune is a very big place. There will be training events all over the base and when I got hold of my contact at the DPC he said they had no drivers and vehicles to spare for carting me around. So I sent of an email to my home unit and asked them to include a rental car.

I know what goes through the mind of the person approving the funding for orders like this. If we authorize a rental car they'll just use it to have an extended vacation at the Marine Corps expense. (Never mind that a taxi from and back to the airport will cost almost the same amount as a couple of weeks rental; those funds come out of a different pot of money.) Plus there is also a general ethos amongst Marines that luxuries are to be avoided. Air Force guys always get rentals and good hotel rooms, they simply won't go on temporary duty without them...

So I got my modification with one little line on it saying rental car authorized. These are some of the steps you have to go through to get anything done. And to enjoy some little trips around North Carolina before heading overseas.