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.