Another drill weekend and I'm swamped with school work and a training class to be given Sunday afternoon. My class would be given on defensive positions on our mortars as well as the capabilities and limitations of them. No big deal, I had began writing stuff up during the week and just had to fine tune some things on Friday after my math class.
Friday was an extremely busy day though. After going all the way to USF from St. Petersburg, I had to return home in St. Petersburg to finish writing the material for my class, pack my gear for the weekend and pick up the house since I had Army gear spread all over the place like a hurricane went through here. I wanted to be in Central Florida by 1830 but that would mean I needed to leave my house by 1500 because I had promised to pick up a fellow soldier that lives close to Oldsmar. Not to far out of the way but we all know how the traffic in Tampa on Friday is; it is standing still in many places. If you don't get ahead of it, you will be slow moving just a little bit faster than my neighbor down the road and his rusty cane.
Everything ends up going well, I only left 15 minutes late but was still a little bit ahead of some still at work. By the time we needed to report, we were going to be leaving within two hours to an undetermined place somewhere out in the woods in Central Florida. Sounds creepy huh? This place is not on a military installation and there are civilians driving jacked-up trucks, small trucks and even a Chevy cavalier once in awhile will drive by. Just when I thought I'd seen it all, haha. It must have been close to the beginning of hunting season with dogs? I have seen more hunt dogs trapped in their cages in the back of too many trucks this weekend along with hearing them all howl half the night; I'm good for the year.
Well, we get out there and set up our headquarters supporting location along with picking up some ammo (blank rounds of course) and a much needed water buffalo. After things got set up, I was in my sleeping bag, under the stars, on the cold ground that was trying to suck the life out of me while I slept. The time was a dreadful 0230 Saturday morning and the wake up time of 0545 was coming quick. It was cool at night with temps down to the low 50s but during the day training in the hot sun with zero cloud coverage was sweltering.
I woke up and it barely was enough time, the 3 hours, to have any crust in the eyes but I washed and shaved my face to get ready for a long day of training. I was heading over to do some training with another counterpart of mine from another company. The rest of my company was setting up for defensive ops. My training was a little bit different than theirs since my counterpart and I are mortarman, we were hitting the books reading over stuff on the procedures of Fire Direction Center. It is a lot of reading and found myself nodding off at times with the 3 hours of sleep. I ended up getting back to my camp by 1930 and yet the work was not done for the night.
Finally, I bedded down for the night around midnight. My eyes were blood shot and killing me since I had allergies flaring up before I even got out to the field. Our headquarters squad is fairly small so I had them put me on the radio watch list at 0200. Usually, the specialist and privates pull those duties but it doesn't bother me, we are lacking the personnel. It was not too dark since the moon was almost full, there was still some sort of peacefulness in the early morning. Along with some peacefulness came some strange noises that helped me stay awake that hour...
OK, 0530 comes quick when you don't want to get out of your warm and cozy sleeping bag with low 50s temp. I decided that the cold water from my canteen was not getting on my face to shave and waited til I got back to our armory. We had some cleaning of equipment to do, weapons maintenance and the NCO class I was giving still to complete on Sunday. All in all, the training weekend ended up being a success because again, we accomplished a lot of tasks in a short period of time.
With the 7 hours of sleep for the weekend, I knew the over two hour drive home was going to be a struggle to say the least. I had to drop off a soldier in my unit and ended up getting home by 1930. Tired as Hell, I fell asleep watching a late night football to finally see the score in the morning news. It's weird how a weekend that seemed so long can go by so fast. I just hope my next three weekends off will go by slow...
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