For those of you not following Staff Sergeant Big Tobacco as he gets his platoon ready for deployment, follow the link to his most recent post on Job Security then scroll down to the one on the PT Test. His posts are painfully clear about Army life. They also answer a question I got three times yesterday from people I have known for a long time professionally.
In different ways they asked, "How do you get along with the other guys in your unit?" It's not like we are going to hang out together. But in the Army everyone knows who flunked the most recent PT Test, so everyone also knows who passed. And everyone knows their own last and best PT Test score as well as they know their own social security number.
So I get along by a schedule of running, bicycling, walking fast, and working out in the gym an average of two hours per day. And even then, the soldiers that are really in shape in their 20s are MUCH stronger and faster than I am.
Veteran of four wars, four enlistments, four branches: Air Force, Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard. I am both an AF (Air Force) veteran and as Veteran AF (As Fuck)
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The Remains of the Day – Two Readings, Two Shadows
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about...
-
Tasks, Conditions and Standards is how we learn to do everything in the Army. If you are assigned to be the machine gunner in a rifle squad...
-
On 10 November 2003 the crew of Chinook helicopter Yankee 2-6 made this landing on a cliff in Afghanistan. Artist Larry Selman i...
-
W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is a novel built on the slow recovery of memory. Rather than unfolding in a straight line, the story emerges throu...