Monday, September 29, 2008

First Day of Training

We go to a range tomorrow to zero our weapons. As it turns out, the first day of our five-day training session is officially a travel day. Since the three sergeants attending the course from our unit are local, we arrived at 8 am to sign in. There was no training today, but there were barracks to turn in and ammo and spent brass to return to the Ammo Supply Point (ASP).

So the first day of the exciting live-fire exercise began with picking up trash around a couple of barracks used by another training group. Which lead to the joke "How many sergeants does it take to pick up a cigarette butt?" Three--because that's how many of us showed up.

Then we removed many cases of 5.56mm, 7.62mm and 9mm ammo, plus several hundred pounds of brass from the range and brought it to the ASP.

Tomorrow we will actually be out on a range. I should have more to write then. I have been running, riding or both for 20 years, but I haven't fired a weapon since the last time I was in--February or March of 1984. So things should get exciting in 24 hours.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

  Blindness  reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...