Happy 235th Birthday to us Marine's on the board!! We've come a looooong way since the Continental Marine's way back when to become the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.
Just an update in case anyone was wondering. I have 14 graded events left in Primary Flight Training, I'll be finished in less than two weeks if weather cooperates. 5 Of those events are simulators practicing instrument navigation and instrument approaches, lots of geometry work and quick thinking. 9 actual flights left, 5 instrument flights and 4 visual navigation flights. For the inst flight's I'll be doing the same stuff as in the sim, just that it's in the actual plane and talking to real people. For the v-nav flights, it's some low altitude stuff flying checkpoint to checkpoint as we pass them flying overhead. Everything left is pretty easy stuff that I've done a ton throughout my 4 months here, so no big deal. Selection will be after Thanksgiving. I'll get to pick what kind of aircraft I get to fly next depending on 'The needs of the Corps', what's available, and my grades. I probably won't get jets because the only guys to get those are genius's with through the roof grades. I'll probably end up with Helicopters or Ospreys, which is the direction the Marine's are anyway, so it won't be bad at all. I could possibly get C-130's, but there are so few slots for those. God I can't wait to be done, Primary is a bullshit fest.
Lucky bastard, I'm stuck in Pensacola until April. I get the feeling that it's a lot better for officers, though. I've been here for eight months, and I have another six months before I can finally get out to the Fleet. I signed a five-year contract and found out the hard way that it's a five-year contract because a fucking YEAR of your time is spent in MOS school. With my luck, I'm going to end up in Quantico or Cherry Point, at which point I'm probably going to gouge out my eyeballs with a spork. If you're ever up at the MATSG-21 Headquarters at about 8 in the morning and see the MATC platoon marching by, I'm in there. We see a gagglefuck of officers up there every once in a while, so it might be you guys. My own job is far less glamorous than flying; I'm training to fix radios in air traffic control towers. Fucking schematics. My brain is going to start having a keying voltage if the transistor logic gets any harder.
Sebastian Junger, in his book "WAR" tells about the battle in the Korengal Valley that lead to the first MOH award to a living soldier since Viet Nam. His name is Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta. I thought 60 Minutes did a decent piece on the story as well. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7054225n" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7054225n</a> What all you men and women that serve do is simply amazing. Thank you.
Well, AF BMT was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Time for tech school, Aerospace Propulsion 2A6X1E.
And with my last two flights today, I have completed Primary Flight School. I have a week off before I get to select my next platform on Thursday next week. I probably won't start that next phase until the new year though because of timing, which is pretty sweet.
Selected today and I'll be flying Helicopters here in Florida. So for the next 7-ish months, I'll keep you guys updated on my status as a Helo guy!!
Some how I ended up as the platoon daddy for the medics in a Guard Infantry Battalion. Best job ever (in the Guard/Medical field). Anybody with questions about Medics or the Guard I might know a bit.
Just tested out on the second radio. The tests here are pretty simple - the instructor kicks everyone out of the room, fucks with a part in the radio, and calls us back in one at a time to find the problem. You have thirty minutes to do an operations check, find the circuit card with the problem, and isolate the component. If you find it, you pass. If you don't, you fail. You have to get 2/3 right to pass the test. If you know what you're doing, it's relatively straightforward. If you aren't getting any reception or sidetone, then you take a look at where both of those signals are common - it has to be the audio card, where the two signals are combined to go to the speaker. Take the card out, stick the probe in the middle of the path, and see if you're getting a signal. You then just keep halving the space where the problem could be. Once you find a component where it's good going in and bad coming out, you turn off the radio and do a resistance check. If it's high resistance, that component is open. If there's no resistance, then the capacitor in that space is shorted. Once you've narrowed it down to one card, it's pretty easy. The hard part is playing Dr House with the radio and saying, "Hmm, my FM reception isn't working, but I'm still getting noise. It must be after where the AM splits off, (otherwise AM would be affected too) but before the mixer that produces the noise." That mindset of "bracketing," as it's called, is what we spend most of our time learning. Once you know bracketing, it doesn't matter if you're working on a dinky radio with ten cards or a humongous radar with a hundred, troubleshooting is easy. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to have a lot of fun figuring out which one of 6000+ components is fucked up. Definitely not something you can do in 30 minutes. Our next radio was made in the 50s and is so cramped that the resistors are literally stuck endwise into the circuit board and packed together so closely that you can blow something up by sticking a multimeter probe in the wrong place. My favorite is a card where a solder lead with 26 volts is stuck right next to the ground test point. Stick the probe in too far, and you get smoke, sparks, and the staff sergeant going TURN IT OFF TURN IT THE FUCK OFF FUCK FUCK FUCK RAAAAARRRRGH. I hate electrical engineers with a burning passion.
Get my first set of foreign jump wings today. Polish ones too. They look badass. Several of my buddies are getting theirs too. They got slotted for Thai, Canadian, Estonia, Ireland, and Latavia. Pretty exciting day since were all relative cherries here. Its days like today that I love being Airborne in the 82nd.
And... 7 lifts got scratched, mine included. No makeup date for it either. Good news though, this was the largest turnout yes for Operation: Toy Drop, with over 4,000 toys already donated for needy families in the area. One of the sponsors agreed to match and then pass the number of toys donated from Ft. Bragg. Looks like almost 10,000 kids will have a Christmas present they otherwise wouldn't have had.
It's really fun when you get one of those old fucking radios that don't even work properly and trying to troubleshoot gripes that even the instructors don't know are there. Still, those things have been probed so many times you don't even really need to troubleshoot because you can see grooves where the leads have been placed ten thousand times before.
Right now, none of them work. The instructors are "troubleshooting" the radios, which mostly consists of the gunny hitting the chassis and yelling incoherently. We call it the Marine Corps Maintenance Program, and it doesn't seem to be working very well. Once they can get one of them working, they're good because they can just take cards out of the others one by one, plug them into the good radio, and see when it gets fucked up. What makes me laugh is how retarded the problems are. Sometimes it's actually difficult - the instructor will actually fuck with the solder and short something. Usually, however, he'll take a pair of pliers and yank a resistor out and fold the wire back in on itself to make an open. You then see the actual problem in about fifteen seconds. Hilariously, kids still fail. If I was an instructor, I'd see if I could get some fake components. Resistors that say that they're 10k ohms and actually 10M ohms, capacitors that are actually just wires connected together, transistors that are just plastic-coated rubber, etc. Do they sell those?
Jesus fuck, no wonder we all consider Marines to be technical idiots if this is what your tech school consists of. I went through ET A-School, the second most failed school in the military, after Navy Nuke School. They had real components failing for us. Is that the main difference? Us finding bad components on otherwise working radios, you finding bent wires and gummy bears in place of transistors? What you just said makes me embarrassed for Marines.
Like I said, it depends on the instructor and the problems. It also depends on what you put into the class. If you want to slime along and not learn the radio, you'll slime along and not learn the radio. If you want to learn the radio, you'll learn the radio. Sometimes they're actually intelligent about it and make some good problems, other times they do the gummy bear approach and you facepalm when you pull the card out. Those are for the practice tests; the actual tests are at least reasonable. Usually.
I can't wait to be out of technical school. They made such a big deal about going from the phase program to the transition whateverthefucktheyarecallingitnow program. They posted all of the things that would be different in the new program right before exodus and 95% of it is minutia, the only difference is that the first transition period is slightly less strict than it was before. Also, what is it with people being preachy about dress and appearance? One of our instructors told us about how he irons his uniform every morning and washes it every single day after work regardless of whether or not it's dirty, gets a haircut every 7th day, and on and on. He then went on to tell us that people who don't follow his style of doing things are people who like to cut corners and push the limits as much as possible because they are lazy. Then he followed up with a speech about how much better BDUs were than ABUs because it was easier to tell who took care of their uniforms and therefor easier to tell who is the harder worker. Really? Really? The worst part is he isn't the only one. I'm all for not looking like crap, but it's kind of ridiculous when we get hour long speeches when we could be actually doing something productive, and some people just take it way too far.
This. I think that there's something to be said for military appearance - look like you actually care about being there. Shave, get a haircut, make sure you don't smell like Pigpen from Charlie Brown, make it so that your uniform doesn't look like ass. But that's about as far as I'm willing to go unless there's a damn good reason (uniform inspection) to go further. All those motarded fucks who flip out because of a pinhead-sized hole in a pair of utility trousers need to be stabbed with a soldering iron. It is a WORKING UNIFORM. As in, "I do my job in this uniform." I can understand lifing someone for not having a perfect dress uniform, because you wear that uniform only to special occasions. My job involves working with unyielding metal objects, many of them sharp. Small rips and holes are part of the wear and tear. I am not going to spend forty bucks on a new blouse every time I accidentally poke my sleeve with an o-scope probe. Yes, gunnery sergeant, I know that you don't have any holes on your uniform. Wanna know why? You're in the fucking office all day long. And I respect that, because you've done your time, shoveled your shit, and so on. But just because you treat cammies like a fucking dress uniform doesn't mean I can or should. And if I have to, I'll print out the damn MCO that says "As long as the hole is dime-size or less, it's still serviceable" and tape it to my ass. </rant> In summary, if I actually look like ass, then by all means, correct me. But if you're just itching for someone to bitch out because the CWO5 threw so much paperwork up your ass that you're shitting trees, go fuck yourself.
I'm in the Army, but went to AIT (tech school) on an Air Force base. I think the worst part of being in the Air Force during tech school is the way they make you cross the street. We called it the Dirty Bird - arms flapping, clicking heels. Also the Air Force had to wear class B's every Monday, and we just wore ACUs the whole time. Ultimately your life will be better than mine, but I do reserve the right to giggle at some of the Air Force gayness you have to go through. Slightly different subject, but I hope you can tell what a real m16 looks like. During our weapons immersion I constantly overhead Air Force students debate over whether our weapons were real or not.
Don't know if any of you remember me from the old board -- I didn't post much, but was a member from pretty close to the beginning. Anyway, I wanted to thank those of you that gave me advice and guidance over the years, you know who you are. After what will be about a year and a half, I've finally managed to sign an 18x contract with the ARMY. This took about a dozen trips to MEPS, lots of "no's," and multiple letters from Dr.'s to waive my two shoulder surgeries. Being forced to get PRK after finding that my left eye was only correctable to 20/25, and would not be waived. Being lied to by the recruiter, told I had to switch my MOS choice, etc. etc. But I finally fucking did it. Signed a 5 year contract for a record low $3k bonus -- 2 for length of contract, and 1 for my college degree. I couldn't be more excited. Any and all advice anyone feels like sending my way will be appreciated. I ship out for Benning on May 23rd.