The Training Is Over, It Is Real Now

I don’t know how much time if any you spend on airplanes, but next time you take a flight ponder the sheer strangeness of the experience. It’s like time travel. You travel down a narrow walkway into a metal tube, hours later you emerge into a new place, and a new time. Time changes really screw with me. It is weird for me to think that as I fly today two hours of my life disappear. They are just gone, and yet, I will get that time back ten days from now as a I travel the opposite direction. It is strange for me to think that my family and friends in KC have already lived two hours of their day by the time mine starts. I know it’s a very simple concept in reality, but it is a strange reality we experience in an era of constant communication more than in the past. In a few weeks I will really get a shock to my system, I will be starting my day 9 hours ahead of you all. At least I start earlier than you. I don’t like being on the other side of the clock. Constant communication is something we take for granted so easily these days too. Try spending a day without your cell phone. Most of you will feel lost. I have started getting used to days at a time with no outside communication. It is really strange at first, but as your days become consumed with the here and now it starts to matter less and less. I love to hear what is going on in the lives of those I love, but I am much more self dependent any more. You don’t realize how interdependent we are as a people these days. Communication, whether meaningful or casual has become a safety net that we exist within. You could say it is an obsession with not being alone. As you have probably noticed I have not posted in quite some time now. For the last month I have been without any internet access, and before the beginning of August my life was extraordinarily uneventful. Up until August I was working night shifts doing paperwork in the vault on the SIPR. Exceptionally boring. I am the kind of individual that cannot stand a desk job. Sometimes I really think I should have been a grunt. In August I was attached to Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. I am part of a grunt company now, and I love it. August was the start of Exercise Mojave Viper. Mojave Viper is part of what the Marine Corps refers to as hyper realistic training. It takes place in balmy 29 Palms California at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, where temperatures average over 110 in August. One day out on a range we had a temperature of 128 degrees recorded. Anything left in the sun becomes unbearable to the touch, and drinking the water is like drinking hot tea. Animal life consists of 3 species of rattlesnake, scorpions, tarantulas, coyotes, and the rare and revered desert tortoise. The landscape is tortured and ruptured, if hell were in southern California, hell would be in 29 Palms. The setting is ideal for acclimatization to either Iraq or Afghanistan, making it the ideal place for the final training evolution before deployment. The exercise is set up to take place in a made up country I will refer to as X which is torn by a civil war between those desiring a Sunni Sharia government and those supporting the post communist block secular government. The UN had been conducting peace keeping missions but the situation got out of control and 3/24 was called in as one of the infantry elements of a Regimental Combat Team to straighten the situation out. The exercise begins with platoon sized operations in a huge town constructed from shipping containers complete with Arabic speaking role players. From there the operation test s the abilities of the Battalion (Bn) to conduct operations against conventional and unconventional forces at the Company, and Battalion level. The exercises include live fire ranges, and mechanized operations. In the last month I was in the field for a total of at least three weeks, sleeping on rocks, sand and whatever else was handy. I the number of showers I took could be totaled on two hands. I lost a few pounds and a few inches in my waist. Let me tell you, MRE’s get little old. And you know that it is no longer fun to be dirty when your blinks feel like fine grit sand paper against your eyes. I had the experience of sleeping in a sand storm and I have ridden for hours in the back of an AMTRACK amphibious tracked landing vehicle. Those vehicles are exceptionally loud and hot. I was bounced around in the back of MRAP’s (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) Those machines are capable of withstanding the blast of a 500 pound bomb, but also have no suspension, sitting in the rear of the vehicle is not advisable, you will be an inch or two shorter by the end of the trip. I worked 19-21 hour shifts as the CLIC chief in my Company during the final exercise. I questioned individuals in Arabic, compiled biometric databases, processed evidence, put together target packages, conducted link analysis, created Daily Intel Summaries (DISUM’s), debriefed patrols, and generated collection plans. Me, my Sergeant and two other LCpl’s were able to do a job the Marine Corps suggests should be done by 6-8 Marines, and we did it well. My Company survived the exercise without a single heat casualty, and preformed well overall. We are finally at the end of the work up for a deployment to Iraq. It may be uneventful, or it may be a lot more exciting than we would like. Regardless, as one Gunnery Sergeant so eloquently put it: “The training is over, from here on out, this sh#t is real.” The casualty evacuation drills will be real, the rounds that we hear snapping over our heads will be intended to kill, the mortars will no longer be artillery simulators. You probably aren’t hearing much about Iraq in the news anymore, but the Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen are still taking casualties. No matter how over the war may be, we are still in harm’s way. Bullets and IED’s still kill just as effectively in 2009 as they did in 2006, we just have fewer of them , thank God. We are trained, we are ready, and we are willing. I will be in Iraq within a few weeks time, and I have no idea how long I will remain there. Rumors are not worth reporting. All they generally do is make people worry. It’s been a blast for me to be attached to an infantry company. I don’t do well in an office environment, and while my job requires me to use a computer a lot, I have been operating off of a power inverter in the middle of nowhere in the back of an MRAP or HMMWV. Occasionally I get the opportunity to roll out with a patrol and see the area we are operating in first hand. I am a field Marine for sure. I went from heavily demotivated working at the Bn level as an analyst, and I have absolutely loved getting to work with a CLIC (Company Level Intelligence Cell). Twenty Nine Palms is miserable place for sure, you are always sweating, always tired and always dirty. After a few days without showering or a change of clothes your cammies get a really nasty, greasy, gritty feeling to them. You find your hands blackened by grime and there is really nothing you can do about it. But it is an environment and work that I love being a part of. Not to mention that the sunrises and sunsets were incredible, and the night sky was breathtaking. I have been to some remote places of the country way out in Kansas and Wyoming and a few national parks; but I have never seen night sky’s like this. There is nowhere you can look that the stars don’t go on forever. The band of the Milky Way is so bright and close you feel as though you could dip your hand into it and cup a pool of shimmering sky in your hand. Out there away from everything I found myself in a natural cathedral. I thought of all the buildings we have tried to create to worship in, from Solomon’s Temple, to the Sistine Chapel, and God out did them all. His night sky is the most incredible cathedral ceiling imaginable. The quiet expanse of the desert is an incredible place to examine your relationship with God. In His desert cathedral I was able to read by the light of the moon, and meditate on Him. An odd place to grow spiritually to be sure. I am a part of a violent profession, the stillness of the night was often shattered by machine gun fire and artillery explosions, the dark of the desert lit up with tracer, and artillery illumination rounds. It just goes to prove that Christ is with us, and will never leave us or forsake us. Twenty Nine Palms was a month long desert journey for me, physically, mentally and spiritually I was pushed beyond anything ever before. And yet I was brought through it. I will be landing in KC shortly after I finish this, and I will spend a few days at home. I hope to see some of you then. To all of you, God bless.