Dave's Choice of DMX (with my heavy weighted suggestions)
/ Tori Amos 08.24.99
I think I finally found a weapon I'm good with.
Right from the get go, I was nailing the target with the M60 machine gun.
I ended up qualifying as a Sharpshooter, all told (Marksman->Sharpshooter->Expert,
in order of excellence)
Now I'm qualified to wear three Bolo badges, one
expert (grenade), marksman(rifle) and this one for machine gun...
I'm thinking of wearign my Class A Uniform home for my
mom to see me in it--and this is another medal to show off. :)
THe Range meant missing Sergeants TIme Training that the 82nd Legal Division had put together....that sucked--they were gonna run a pre-ranger obsticle/qualification course. I had been really lookign forward to that but the range took precedence. HHD 525 so rarely goes to the range, particually the M60 range that I had to take this opportunity while it presented itself...so it's good that I slammed on it.
It rained in the morning so I wore my wet weather gear--gortex pants and rain jacket-which of course now are stained mud because of laying in the wet terra firma...but it cleared after not too long and it actually got to be nice and bright out...
For 14 people, we had 16900 rounds...so each of us fired over 1000 rounds over the course of the day (0700 to 1900)...we fired for qualification, for fun, off the hip, at pop up targets, suppressive fire, we changed barrels, fired on tri pods nad bi pods...it was great. On the way home I stopped lamenting having gone out two hours past COB (close of business --1700) and just was happy about what a great day I'd had. When I was a civilian, I **never** would have had the same opportunities I had today, nor the same amount of pride in myself or exhiliration from my shooting...My civilian life was so wildly different han my life is now...night and day; there's never any going back. For good or for ill, for the rest of my life, I'll be, at the least, a former soldier, accustomed to a soldiers way of doing things, a soldier's outlook, a patriots opinions...
But it's not the same military it once was...but that's a topic for another day. It's 2200 right now, and it feels like I've been up for days. I'm gonna start to wrap this all up;
Got a couple emails from Christa. She wasn't unduly disturbed by what I had to say about her and took everything OK. Even better is that it didn't weird her out so that she felt too weird to see me in a couple weeks...trying to lay plans to meet up...shouldn't be too big a problem, if for nothing more than a single night though...So I'm happy about all of that. Alex is now in Cali and at Mum and Pops--he sent me an ICQ message from Dad's machine saying he was looking forward to seeing me...so I sent an email about my plans for us two...I'm quite anxious about going back there.