It all started here.......

....when we landed at the Manhattan Regional Airport in Manhattan KS on 26 July 08. On the bus to Ft. Riley, the driver was playing war songs from the Vietnam era. He probably thought it was funny. I thought it was eerie, to say the least, and that was my first impression of the place.

We stayed up on Custer Hill the first week for various briefings, gear issue and acclimation to the KS weather before we started training in earnest. Then we moved down to Camp Funston (aka FOB Army Strong) where we moved into 40 man open bay barracks.

• This was taken inside our barracks, that's Clint Dawson in his IBA (Invidual Body Armor). We were getting ready to head out for some training ops.

We spent a couple of months being trained on counter-insurgency ops, Afghani languages and culture, mounted combat patrols, other combat tactics and various weapon qualifications. About 90% of which I hope I never have occasion to put into actual practice.

The weapons qualification/familiarization was my favorite part of the training. I had no problem qualifying with the M9 pistol or the M4 rifle or the many foreign weapons we fired including the AK-47 and a Chinese sniper rifle. Bottom line here is I'm very likely to hit what I aim at. So if it comes down to them or me, I intend to make sure it's them.

Now the crew-served automatic weapons were another story, I couldn't hit anything to save my soul with them. Now it WAS my first time to fire any of them, they weren't zeroed correctly and there were other issues but I was thinking "how hard can this be? It's a machine gun, rounds are flying everywhere...surely something has to hit the targets..." Right? Wrong! My various coaches, in an attempt to soothe the bruised ego, told me in so many words, "This is a suppression weapon, it's supposed to keep the enemy's heads down while we get into a position to take them out with our precision weapons the next time they stick their heads up". Small consolation.....my only hope with one of these things is that I'll scare them to death.

My team was under the guidance of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor, Delta Company. These were a great bunch of guys and they took care of us.

We graduated on 4 Oct and took a 10 day Intermediate Stop and reported back to Riley on 15 Oct to await transportation to Afghanistan. We flew out of Topeka, KS early on 20 Oct..............

That is it for now. Yep, I've been here three weeks now and I'm still waaaayyyy behind on this blogging thing but it's time to hit the rack and it's one more day in the books. Only 340 or so to go...........ouch!