Last week was my last week of the good life. Now as I type this, I’m sitting on my rack in a 12 man room in an old Army barracks. After an easy time of living in a hotel (swimming, drinking, et al), I’ve moved on to the training that I was originally scheduled to have completed a month ago.

As I mentioned in the previous email, we were measured for a new set of uniforms on Monday. We picked up the uniforms and related accessories on Wednesday. The rest of the week was a lot of nothing. We finished all we could for the EXW book the previous week, so aside from the new uniform issue, we were just burning time until we were released to travel to our next duty station.

Tomorrow I start advanced combat training. It differs from what I had started doing before in that it’s more than twice as long: six weeks rather than seventeen days. The new mission requires we go into the field with a much broader range of operational knowledge, hence the additional training time.

I’ve been hearing a lot of rumor as to how, exactly, this training is going to work. It sounds like there will be some significant portions of downtime unfortunately, and we still haven’t heard any concrete details about the leave period we were supposedly getting at the end of this. In other words, it’s exactly the way everything has been going so far; no one knows anything until the moment that it is—or is not—happening. For example, I was optimistic that I’d have more of substance to write about by the end of this week. But then, at evening muster, someone said that the Army doesn’t have anything scheduled for the first week other than gear issue—which takes one day. Is this true? Perhaps, but ten bucks says the guy who made that statement doesn’t know any better than anyone else.

One of my roommates is talking on his cell phone by the foot of my bunk. He just said, “They take something that’s supposedly idiot proof, and add idiots.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the military.

-Ted