Got to Love the Engineers

Well, it’s been a few days, and the only reason that I haven’t written is that I haven’t written. Kind of funny how that works out. Anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen, I’ve created a facebook profile for myself, which has been fun. You can read my blog entries there, now, as well as here. The weather here has started to change. Most mornings are sunny and warm, but we’ve had rain (and even some hail) in the afternoon. I have been reunited with Team Bronco (we even got an email from Bronco Mendenhall a week or two ago), however, due to leave rotations and other things, I will soon be the only member of Team Bronco on Team Bronco, at least until Scott gets back from leave in a couple weeks. Life here at Zerok is very different! The army brought in a platoon of engineers, who have been busy improving our humble abode. They’ve added more rooms, more amenities (we have hot running water for showers), 2 large fridge/freezer units and more Hesco barriers (large metal boxes that are filled with dirt used as bunkers). Anyway, it’s amazing at how much things have improved (Some how the Pentagon got word of what life at Zerok was like, and suddenly we had generals and colonels tripping over themselves to get some improvements made). Morale of the infantry troops has also improved, for obvious reasons. We’ve gotten to fire tons of weapons systems, as well. The new First Sergeant believes in test firing the weapons often, and so we’ve fired the .50 cal machine gun (still my favorite weapon in the Army’s arsenal), the Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher, 120mm mortars, the M14 sniper rifle, the M203 grenade launcher and more. Things here are going well- I’ve read a couple more books, which has been good. I just finished “Not a Good Day to Die”, about Operation Anaconda, which took place not too far from where I’m at. It was a semi successful operation that took place in March of 2002. It was an ill-conceived operation, which could have ended in tragedy without the audacity of a few individuals. Of course, for the individuals who were killed because of bad decisions, it was a complete tragedy. Now I’m reading “Relavtivy- the Special and General Theories” by Albert Einstein. The intro says that anyone with a high school education should be able to understand it, but I’m not sure I buy that. I've also been reading some of the Army's doctrinal manuals, learning more about the way things are "supposed" to happen (SUPPOSED is the key word of this sentence). I've reviewed some of the briefings that we received when we were preparing to deploy, in the hopes of improving the next group's training. Anyway, I’ll stop now, and just say that things are going well. By the beginning of November my team should be done with our leave cycle, and we will most likely spend the rest of the deployment as a team, which will be nice.