It's Always Warm Here Before It Rains

Never believe that south Georgia is warm in the winter, because it certainly isn't. However, today we enjoyed a fairly warm day. I noticed last week on Friday it was fairly warm right up until it rained. Today was the same way. It was warm right up until it rained. It's kind of fitting given the OCS experience. Things churn by well until it starts to get bad.

We came back from Thanksgiving without incident. Given how hard my cohorts partied all weekend, I expected something to happen along the lines of a late person to formation or maybe a drunken incident. Everyone was able to return on time without any problem. I was pleasantly surprised. Two weekends in a row of passes without incident usually means that we get more passes. This weekend isn't looking good though. There's already an 8 hour map reading class on the schedule for Saturday from 0800 to 1600. 8 hours of map reading on a Saturday. My guess is it will be yet another class that parallels what I already know from WLC or BNCOC. We have to cater to the college ops though.

The return from Thanksgiving yielded a grouchy cadre. They have driven the student leadership nuts. A few incidents have disturbed me with regard to the cadre this week, but it's not really legal for me to discuss them here. Needless to say, people have received Class 2s (comparable to an Article 15 in which you receive extra duty, but it's not an official UCMJ act) like candy this week. There has been a lot of yelling due to people falling asleep in class. The problem is that there have been some late nights and early mornings due to disruptions in our lights out schedule. And then I had to work two nights of CQ in a row leading to two short nights for me. They decided on night 2 that nobody did the actual CQ cleaning details and the people from night 1 had to work it again. I tried to argue because the previous shift to ours was cleaning when we took over for them and we cleaned before we went off duty. Explanations fell on deaf ears and we endured sleep deprivation. Our instructors told us to submit a memo requesting the cadre to allow caffeine for class. Apparently this is how it's done in OCS, but the cadre have already informed us not to waste our time. So, people fight the urge to sleep in class and we all get punished. Mass punishment is a favored method of the cadre, despite the fact that all it does is make people mad.

The physical aspect of OCS continues to be hard. I ran with the correct run group on monday and it started out at a dead run. I clocked about a 6:50 pace during the first mile. At the 1.5 mile point they stopped to do hill repeats, but if they didn't, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to maintain that pace for the entire 3 miles. When we finally resumed our run, the cadre told us that they apologize that it was so slow, but they had to run back to their office and then catch up to the formation to lead it and were too tired to run the formation at their desired pace. I thought I was retarded for thinking it was fast, but my buddies confirmed that it was furious. Not sure what will happen next week. Wednesday was the second 5 mile ruck march. About 10 extra pounds was added to the march due to our LBV. The extra weight put me at 58 pounds. They marched us at a 15:40 pace, 3 minutes faster than the standard. One person fell out - probably someone who could have passed the march if they had gone the minimum standard. Not only that, the marching standard IAW Army regs states you are supposed to rest after the first 40 minutes. We didn't do that. Yet another candidate possibly screwed out of OCS. I feel bad for these candidates.

Tomorrow is the graded 3 mile run. It is yet another opportunity to screw candidates. Our company's policy is that you will run it at a 9 minute pace. If you run it too slow, you will receive a negative SPOT report. These add up to Class 2s and eventually add up to a drop from OCS. Problem with this is that the OCS standard says all you need to do is complete the run. 9 minutes doesn't sound like it's all that fast, but there are people here who definitely can't run that. Some of them can pass a PT test with a 19 minute 2 mile! Why should they have to be able to run 3 miles in 27 minutes! We'll see what happens with that.

Anyhow, tomorrow is a test on Leadership, Ethics, and Military Law. After that, we hit up the leadership reaction course. It should be a basic obstacle course where one person acts as leader and gets their team over the obstacle. The last time I have ever done this was an NCO team building session back in 2006. This one apparently has obstacles over very cold water. Everyone in the company is hoping for an overnight pass after the map reading class on Saturday. After this week, a little bit of time off would be fantastic. I have to apologize for my tone today, but I'm feeling a bit depressed and dejected. My wife and child are on my mind often and school rules do not allow me to talk to her every night. Also, the way things have been this week have really knocked around my mood. Hopefully, this next week will be better on me. Until next time, OC Sharp out.