army randomness...

so we spent the first 4 or 5 days on a machine gun range, teaching people how to shoot. that was a blast. long days out on the range, cycling people through, getting them zeroed and qualified. cold as hell. seriously. cold as a mutha. there was a day where with windchill it never got above freezing. that's fine when you're walking back and forth from the car to the office, but when you get out there at 6:00 am and stay out there in it til 4:00pm and you're not really moving a ton to generate body heat... miserable as we should've been, most of us had a good time. these guys needed ALOT of help. most of them listened and we got them dialed in. it was fun to work with the other coaches/safeties to get these guys to listen. tag-teaming them, playing good cop, bad cop on them. shooting SHOULD be the easiest thing in the world, especially when you have a coach. shut your brain off and just listen and follow really basic, really simple directions. but that's alot harder than it sounds. for myself included. i can't just point fingers at these people. i do it myself. the other thing that was kinda fun about it was seeing how much... stuff i've crammed into my noggin over the years. there was really good info up there, really good skills to train these guys with it. once again i have to tip my hat to all those who came before me, trained me and gave me the skills to turn around and train the next generation of guys.

the last three days have been wrapped up with building on those basic shooting skills. alot of advanced shooting stuff. which has again been rewarding, but was also alot of suck. over the last 3 days we've never been more than ten feet away from our vehicles. we were riding in the "trunk" of the hmmwvs watching guys inside of the vehicle and seeing how they operated. acting as "safety officers" to make sure they don't accidently kill one another and that they're learning good habits for down range. cold as hell riding back there.

all in all a pretty good 12 days, but some of it was a little discouraging. these guys are pretty close to leaving for the desert and their skill levels should've been alot higher at this stage in the game. we did as much as we could to get them up to speed, but they're going to need to take alot of personal responsibility and practice this stuff on their own. they're still good kids and they're doing okay. but they're with alot of guys who've been downrange before and should be passing that knowledge on. i'm not 100% sure where the roadblocks are. so it was really rewarding for us, but maybe it shouldn't have been?

we managed to get our hands dirty. these guys shot ALOT of ammunition. we were babying these weapons to keep them firing. and there were a couple times when we had a captive audience... that's me trying to get them to understand the "tap-rack'n'roll" method to clear a misfeed on a weapon. hopefully they'll practice it and remember it when they need it.

so it's over. fly home for denver sometime tomorrow and then back to work on tuesday. alot of pretty big changes happened in the office over the last couple of weeks while i was gone. hopefully for the better. we'll see how it goes. hope everyone else has been good!