This is Eric now. After a while scouting for mopeds in the area, I found this baby in Honolulu and bought from a guy who was moving back to the mainland in a few weeks. It goes almost 40 mph and can probably get up to 60 on a good hill. This is mainly for me driving to work and back which is only about a 5 minute drive, so it will save quite a bit of gas since it gets between 80-100 miles per gallon. It will also be perfect for going to northern beaches which are closer and I don't have to drive on the freeway to get there. It has a push button start but also a kick start in case I feel like a cool biker guy sometimes. The top picture is of me getting ready to roll out of the parking lot, peeling out because it has so much torque (49cc engine).

New Blog

Christina created a new blog titled The Sturzinger's in Hawaii at http://sturzinger.blogspot.com She plans to chronicle our lives in Hawaii on this blog, so be sure to check it out.

Almost gone!

As of today, 2/20, I will be out of Ft Benning next Thurs., the 26th. I am so thankful that after all this time in what sometimes feels like a prison I will be going to my unit for the first time at Schofield Barracks, HI. Christina and I are planning on flying Fri. morning and arriving late that night. We will try to go have some fun over the weekend. Hopefully we can get into a house right away. We are both excited to move, mainly because we can live together again, and that fact that we are going to a place that has a little more scenery than the armpit called Georgia. First thing's first when we get there, go to the beach of course, but when we move into a house, buying a couch and a TV. The movers are picking up our stuff on Wed., the 25th so we will be leaving the next day. I have been trying to sell my car the past few weeks and have gotten lots of interest for only $ 1,300. I am planning on selling it to someone on Sunday. I will write later when we are closer to leaving and we finally do arrive.

Labor Day

It's Labor Day weekend, which brings a few extra days off for us. I have been in IOBC for about a month now and it has gone OK so far. I did well on my fitness test and land navigation but had trouble qualifying with my M4 rifle this time around. It is frustrating because I qualified the first time in my last class and now I am having difficulties. I do not like shooting my M203, which is a grenade launcher attached to the standard M4. This makes it tough for me to maneuver the rifle quickly since it is much heavier, especially when I am supporting it with only my arms. I have learned a lot since I started this class, mainly from NCOs who have just gotten back from Iraq and teach us the real way to do things, and sometimes not how the book says. Many of the manuals we use are products of cold war mentality and more specifically,Vietnam. Not to say the information isn't useful, but assaults on a target in the woods or the jungle do not really happen in the conventional military much more. In Iraq, a vast majority of combat takes place within urban areas, making situations much more complex, especially in a counterinsurgency environment when it is hard to distinguish friend from foe and having to bridge cultural and religious differences between particular groups within those areas. The biggest negative part about the class is the training environment. Most of our instruction comes from NCOs, which is great to an extent, since they have an enormous amount of experience. But we are treated like basic trainees many times, making it feel like daycare. In some ways, it forces us to act like kids because we are treated like it, so we end up screwing around often, as well as wasting large amounts of time every day. One some days when we go to the field for training, we show up at 0600 to draw our weapons, then come back at 0745 or 8 to actually load the bus and go to the range. Then once I go through the training iteration on the range that lasts from 10 minutes to a half hour, I wait for about 6 hours for everyone else to get done. The next few weeks should be the same kind of stuff.

Week off

Well, it's Wednesday, July 30, and my next class, the Infantry Officer Basic Course, starts Monday morning, at the comfortable 04000. We had graduation for BOLC II on Thursday morning, and on Fri I drove down to Panama City to be with Christina during my 4-day pass they gave us. I got back yesterday afternoon. So, if you would like to know what we do during the week in between our classes, we show up for PT at 0545, workout, show up for another formation at 0900 and once again at 1300, or 1PM. What is nice is that I haven't got stuck with any crappy work details so far so most of my friends and I have been able to just go back to our houses or apartments and rest and take care of personnel stuff, which I have been doing all day. So this week not much is happening, which is fine with me. I was able to set up my language classes on Rosetta Stone recently and have already completed a few lessons. I am taking Arabic for the Army requirement and German as an additional one. Arabic is definitely going to harder to learn since I have no prior knowledge of it as well as having a much different alphabet. German goes much faster since I am able to read and learn it much faster. Its been nice and hot every day here so at least I can count on that. I will write again after a few weeks of class.
Eric

BOLC II

I started my training June 9th and now have 3 of 7 weeks complete. The first class I am taking is the Basic Officer Leader Course II, or BOLC II. Since I am brand new to the Army, I have learned quite a bit in the first few weeks. I qualified with my M4 carbine rifle the first time I tried this last week after only a few hours a prior practice. I didn't get a great score but since I passed my first try I was pretty happy. I could have tried to get a better score for fun but it was about 97 degrees outside and my safety glasses had sweat running down them making them blurry, while my eyes were burning at the same time. That was a fun day except it was miserable at the same time.
The first week of the class was all in processing (getting all my information into the Army system) so I will get paid and all my personnel information is correct. I will not get paid by the Army until July 1st (hopefully). And even then, my pay rate will be wrong because as of a few days ago I should be a 1st Lt.
The second week we did combatives, which really means wrestling moves. When I take more advanced courses, like the one that starts in August, they will teach us how fight standing up more so than just from positions on the ground. It was fun since I have never learned standard wrestling moves or even wrestled. Since I have bony knees, they got bruised up and were pretty sore for a few days.
The third week we practiced marksmanship and then qualified with out rifle on a big shooting range. The ear plugs they gave us worked very well, so I was thankful for that. The only thing that is not so fun about training is that for every good hour I get instruction or practice shooting or something of that nature there is a bout four hours of sitting and waiting for the NCOs to come tell us what to do. The communication flow is not very well organized and thus we end up sitting around waiting for people and/or waisting vast amounts of time that would be appalling in the private sector workplace. We also got to do a night fire on the same range, where we had to get up before 3 AM, but we got to use our night vision goggles, which helped us get used to them since we will use those all the time in various situations.
Next week we will be practicing urban operations and short range marksmanship.
Christina and I have been able to spend the last couple weekends together thankfully. Last weekend for my birthday, we went to Atlanta and walked around the Georgia aquarium, which was cool except there were so many people there. We walked around town for a while and went to random places and then came back here. This weekend we stayed around here, which was nice, even though it rained a lot yesterday, and is going to rain today as well. Next weekend for 4th of July, I am going down to Panama City to stay with Christina for the weekend.

I made it!

Well, it's finally May 22nd and I am now officially in the U.S. Army. My time in the Air Force is difficult to explain, but I did somewhat in the first entry. These last few weeks I have been running around all over Eglin AFB to get signatures and checked off for certain things required to out process the base as well as the AF in general. 21 May was my official last day in the AF, and I took my Army oath this morning with my friend Scott. It feels a little weird now that I won't be driving to Eglin in the morning every day, but at the same time I feel liberated in the fact that I will be taking on a new challenge with something that may not (actually I am sure it will not) be as comfortable and easy as my now previous assignment. My commitment to the Army is three years starting today! It would seem like a long time to most, but I think of it more as (at least) a three year adventure taking me to distant and exciting places in the world, although they may not be as safe as the states. I have gotten most all of my supplies ready for training, which starts on June 8th. Christina and I will be getting ready to move on the 28th when the movers come to pick up our stuff. Then the next day I will drive up to Ft. Benning, GA and begin looking for a house. I always wanted to be a soldier but I realized, with my wife's help, that I simply joined the wrong ROTC detachment at OSU. I do not regret my decision to join AFROTC, I learned a lot and made many friends, but I am assuming I would have fit in better in Army ROTC. Many in my AF detachment had the wannabe pilot syndrome where they would do anything and everything to become pilot, even if that meant screwing over your friends or putting yourself above all else, which is the common attitude. I chose not to try to be the #1 person in college, and that doesn't mean that I could have if I tried. I wanted to be a simple cadet, work hard in everything, commission, and do well in my job that I hopefully enjoyed. I have nothing against those that I graduated with who had better grades than me or who were stratified higher than me; they worked hard for it and they deserved it. Sometimes I questioned their motives but the majority of the time they had unselfish ones. Why am I telling you this? Because, I believe, there is a fundamental flaw with our system we have today. Call me cynical, or call it wishful thinking. Everyone's goal in ROTC, of course, is to make it through four years of school and training, and commission. I remember my commander teaching us the difference between groups and teams and he said that we didn't have a common goal, we were not a team. We were just a group of kids who all had their own goals, without any team oriented goals. He was right! Everyone's individual goal was to get the best grades, best ranking, best career field (most waned pilot of course). So everyone commissioned with different accomplishments, grades, and subsequent jobs in the AF. My commander also explained to us how that changes very much on active duty where a unit is working together to accomplish a mission. I was excited to be in a unit like that where people weren't competing with each other because they were thinking about how better to work together to accomplish the mission at hand. Looking back at my first assignment now, I regret the fact that I don't believe I was in a unit like that. Who knows, it may have been different if I was in maintenance, communications, etc. What was hammered into us time and again was how to get stratification, what we needed to do to get bullets on our performance reports, what is good to have on award packages, etc. Not once were we taught how to work together as a team (probably difficult due to the nature of our unit). The most important thing we were told was how to get promoted to the next rank, what we need to do, what kind of jobs we need to have, what are career killers, etc. They talked about how going on a deployment as an acquisition officer looks good on your performance report. Wow, I don't remember them saying you should go on a deployment to serve your country or contribute to the mission, but rather for a couple lines on a performance report. Since many Army soldiers have deployed 2, 3, 4 times to OEF or OIF, do you think that all they are thinking about over there is this is going on my performance report? Probably not, more like staying alive, watching my buddy's back and completing the mission. This is what I am hoping for in my new unit in the Army. I know that I will go on several deployments during my time. But we will be a team working together for the common goal, not doing our own thing, and maybe helping out a friend if it may benefit us.
I can see how this mirrors civilian society. In America, our society is based on money, capitalism. I don't believe there is anything wrong with that. But, as no system is perfect, capitalism can have some negative qualities as well. In this country, outstanding individual achievement is the most highly regarded quality in a person, whereas team accomplishments are usually not as respected. For example, in baseball is a player who broke the single season home run record (even though he may have an * next to his name) or that another team won a few championships? I admit, it depends on the situation, but just think about it in general. In America, if get educated, work hard, and you don't try to cheat, then in most cases you will make a good life for you and your family. This is the greatness of our society: it doesn't matter where you start, but only what you do after you start. But it seems that some will do anything to get rich. I will get off my soapbox for now, and in no way do I intend to sound self-righteous or that everyone else is wrong. From my experiences, I have been trying to understand why things are the way they are. I am the same as every other human who wants to well and achieve more: I worked hard, got decent grades, and now I am successful so far. This has been the story of most Americans. The problem is once you start having success, you want more and more and more, and that is when it is difficult remember to think of what is best for this team I am a part of, could be your family, friends, unit, company, etc... If you agree or disagree with me on any of this, please comment. I like to hear other people's opinions about anything, it gives me an even greater perspective. I will write again soon when I get closer to my training.