Culmination Week

This past week at BOLC II was "Culmination Week". Simply put, it is a melding of all the tactics we had learned to that point. It was rough. I didn't get much sleep. I counted 12 hours of sleep for the 4 nights that we spent at the FOB. But it was all good training. The majority of my lack of sleep was due to the 10 mile ruck march that took place at 2am on Friday morning. I didn't actually sleep that night. But believe me, I slept Saturday morning. For like 12 hours. 12 awesome hours.

The best training that was conducted, in my opinion, was the night urban ops training. The McKenna Range was divided up and each platoon had 4 or 5 buildings that they had to clear. We had to use night vision devices in order to effectively clear the rooms. There was a constant barrage of artillery and grenade simulators being dropped and blank ammunition being fired. I swear I sort of saw my life flash before my eyes.

I actually could have slept on Thursday because it was my platoon's turn to provide OPFORs (opposing forces) as training aides for the other platoons. They only needed 6 and for some reason, I volunteered. It was actually really fun. I basically got to cause chaos while American forces tried desperately to destroy me. Good stuff.

Oh yeah, one more thing. One guy in my platoon, Frye, said that I should blog about blogging. I decided to take it a step farther and blog about the conversation that we had about blogging about blogging. So there it is. Here are some pics from the week: