The past month has dragged on in some ways, but a month in Iraq is behind me. Being away at war is an experience I can say I’ve felt in the past tense now. I still have a lot of time left, but future tense is going home now. This, my friends, is good news.
Much of this morning was spent with SFC Grump preparing some training and getting things done. In spending more time with him, I have a better impression. We actually seem to mesh well together. I believe it helps that I am eager to hear his point of view and talk out the issues. I even had him draw me certain explanations of our company on the marker board.
Tomorrow he and I will be doing an initial counseling meeting after our BUB (Battle Update Brief). It will be a helpful start for both of us, and I hope that it goes beyond just being an Army formality. After that we’ll be off to start my first inventories.
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At lunch I started a new bench press routine that I read about in The 4-Hour Body. It is a program tailored to increasing the bench press max of an individual in four months—which should work well with the timing of my deployment. For the first module of it, I will be benching once a week with three grips—power, wide, and narrow—with two sets of each but power. Each week increases in percentage of related to overall body weight. Should be fun!
I’ll track fitness stuff here soon along with some results in my change in overall body weight (since the 193 I started at when landing in Kuwait and haven’t weighed myself since), body mass, body fat, etc. It’s easy to spend time getting in good shape out here! Feel free to ignore those posts, but I’ve read that by making your goals public, you make them harder to break.
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Towards the end of the day today, CPT DD asked if I wanted to go to the DRMO yard (I still don’t know the acronym’s meaning. Google it for me, as I’m writing this post during a usual civilian internet outage). Basically this place is a dump with the value in the hundreds of thousands.
Instead of paying for shipment and repair, the units bring what equipment they can gladly remove from their property books and conscience. What is left is a ton of equipment that the Army no longer cares about, since it’s not being officially tracked. The equipment is officially wasted. Without logistical support, the junk is made junk.
I could not believe that yard. So much stuff! Included in the DRMO yard were piles of cable, refrigerators, monitors, military instruments, musical equipment, and even a fooseball table. CPT DD and I were equally appalled—and acted essentially like the guys on American Pickers for about thirty minutes. It was a cool moment, and a nice break from the norm. Hopefully we can salvage some cool stuff for our company eventually (especially the fooseball table).
