On active duty in two weeks!!!

 It's time to start posting again. I will be on active duty for three months beginning Wednesday, August 7.   So in just two weeks I will be a full-time soldier. I am not going overseas and I'm only going someplace dangerous in the sense that I will be writing my bicycle in suburban Washington traffic.

I will be  in Army journalism school at Fort Meade Maryland until November 5 of this year. You might wonder why the Army would send a 60 year old soldier to school. I have been trying to get into this school since I got back from Iraq in 2010. Last year I got the chance to possibly deploy with a Stryker brigade.  That deployment would have started in November of this year. To get ready for the deployment I needed to be an Army trained public affairs Sgt. So the plan was that I would go to the school and then joined by deploying unit with the correct MOS  or military occupational  specialty.

President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that the United States would be leaving Afghanistan faster than the current schedule. This meant the deployment was canceled. But I had changed jobs in my unit and I needed this new MOS. So I am going to school at age 60 to learn how to do the job I have been doing as a civilian since 1978.

It may sound silly for me to do this but I am looking forward to this school. The military combines the training of all five services in public affairs so I will be in school with soldiers from the Marines, the Air Force, the Army, Navy, and even the Coast Guard. As you can imagine the military has the best crisis  management training available. Crisis management has not been one of my specialties so I'm looking forward to learning from the best.

 Anyway,  I will write every day on active duty about what it's like to be in training with 20-year-olds from all five services. Or at least I will do my best to write every day. Homework first!!