5 Sept 08

Well, we're at the big caliber rifles classes. They are very boring. Imagine 200 guys sitting shoulder to shoulder on covered bleachers with rain gear top, LBV, & IBA - it is quite crowded. Tough to say awake. But it should be a ton of fun shooting a 44 lb machine gun! The 50 cal. has been around since WWII. the other 2 rifles are the M-240 B and M-249 or "SAW" that we often use in America's Army game. we also fire the M-203 tomorrow, I believe. But the breifing classes are tough. Especially to keep 200 young men awake at the same time. If there is an issue with sleeping or dozing off, the whole company can be punished or "smoked". This is exercise until your muscles are "smoked" or pushed to fatigue. I'd much rather smoke myself!

I did have time last night to go outside and run on the PT area with just a few of the guys in the platoon. that was nice. I'm hoping to be able to get my AFPT scores to 90% in each category by the 12th. That is 65 Pushups, 68 Situps in 2 minutes, and then the 2 mile urn in 14:24. The run and sit ups I feel I can get. The Push ups, too, but they weill be a challenge to perform them cleanly. I'm generally doing 200 pushups a day to build the muscle memory. I do sets of 40 and try to get those very tight. Apparently, my form slips around 30 reps. As has been emphasized, PT Studs get the best assignments.

Well, ti is the back end of the day. After lunch (the day revolves around when and how much and how good our chow is, by the way) we got to shoot the 249 SAW (same ammo as M-16), 240B (.762 mm) and the .50 CAL - big machine gun- large ammo! Big bang! We also looked thru a night vision thermal scope. Pretty neat stuff. Oh, we also saw the claymore mine. It is real cool! Basically a "grape shot" effect. But it isn't used much in today's warefare. Bit Explosion!