I guess some people actually enjoy this stuff, so I'm posting one more. Most of the really funny stuff though I think has been posted.
I Can Dress Myself Drills /Tuesday 6 May 2003
I think the most memorable thing about getting ready to fly out was learning just how much faith our leaders place in us as soldiers. I'm a big boy. I'm thirty three years old, a faithful husband for over 13 years and father for almost 12. I don't know exactly when I first learned to dress myself, but it might have been before some of these sergeants were born.
So why were we doing dressing drills over and over and over?
Let me first explain a little bit about military uniforms. There are standards for everything. If one item of dress is worn, then there are other items of dress that must be worn with it. So if you remove your kevlar helmet and put on your boonie hat (looks like a desert sand fishing hat), then you have to remove your flak vest (bullet-proof vest for those civilians that seem to think that it would actually stop a bullet) and the load-bearing vest that's attached to it.
With all equipment on I weigh 229 lbs (as opposed to my normal out of the shower weight of 175). That's a bit of equipment. I have with me my M16A2 with M203 grenade launcher, seven magazines (sans ammo), a protective mask with all attachments and decon equipment, two quarts of water, and my helmet.
Sounds like a lot, but it?s not hard to put it all on, really it?s not. But the first thing they had us do was put on all our gear for when the buses arrived. Once the buses got there, they had us take it off. When we got off the buses we put it back on again, only to take it off again so that we could work baggage detail.
I lost track of how many times I put on and removed that extra gear, (Yes, I kept my desert dress uniform (DCUs) on the whole time, it was just the equipment that was being changed out.) but my word, it got old fast. I'm told the reason was so that we would have to keep track of all our "sensitive items" (pronounced "you're in big trouble if you lose them because loss is not authorized.") but since it was all attached anyway, I'm not sure what their worry really was, if it wasn't that they simply were not confident in my ability to dress myself.
That pretty much sums up the trip to Kuwait. I was on baggage detail, so I was one of the people assigned to load and unload the baggage. In one of the few nice moves I've seen in the Army, that put me in Business Class for the trip out. On a 747, that is very nice.