A Little More Training

The past couple of days have been pretty good training for the team. After the excitement of the ranges we settled into some classroom stuff and a little bit of driving training.

The classroom stuff has been specialty training for the different disciplines on the team ranging from Advanced Communications for SSG W to Logistics Training for CPT P and SFC R, Advanced Coallition Effects for SFC T and MAJ D and digital battlefield training for me, MAJ L and MSG P. Throw in some more medical training and for SFC J and military intelligence training for CPT F and SFC C and we have pretty much the whole team covered. Most of the guys are letting me know the training is ok, nothing they weren't expecting or out of their ability sets, so that is a good thing.

The digital battlefield (aka: Blue Force Tracking (if you go to Wikipedia and type in blue force tracking it gives a pretty good run down of what we have. Here is the link to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Force_Tracking) training can be confusing, mostly because it is something new to me (once again, old LTC, new trick) but it is very important to understand, it makes communications on the battlefield very fast and allows instant tracking of battlefield assets. In the stone ages when I was a LT tramping around Panama we had no idea GPS navigation was out there, the map and compass were skills to be mastered. If you ask my mom, she will tell you I rarely mastered those. Luckily I had some very good NCOs that could keep track of our locations as we were moving along (We were never really lost: My definition of lost is they never find you). Navigation got a little easier by Haiti and Bosnia time, we had Global Positioning Systems and I kind of knew how to use them. Now, everything is digital, if you understand a computer game, you can understand this. Luckily, I have played a few of those. Tomorrow is another day of digital battlefield training, should be a hoot.

We also had a day and nights worth of HMMWV driving. The HMMWVs we are driving are not your grandpa's HMMWVs - the first generation of HMMWVs weighed about 7,000 lbs. The monsters we are driving now weigh just shy of 13,000 lbs and are armored like crazy. The doors alone weigh over 450 lbs, pretty incredible. Nothing but armor, bullet proof glass, engine, radios and one bad ass air conditioner, which was quite a pleasant suprise - - nothing like opening up your vehicle on a 105 degree day and being met with a blast of cold air. They drove pretty well, SFC R let me know that I drove like his grandma and I should speed it up a little bit. I let him know that I come from a long line of poor drivers, once I get used to the vehicle, my bad driving habits and poor automotive genetics will come out and me driving too slow won't be a problem.