Big news in the beginning of January, I now have a “wait” slot for Sapper School. This means that if they have open slots for the class I may be able to walk on to the class beginning February 10th. This is good news, as I really want to go to Sapper School and it is only a month long, thus taking less time out of my deployment than Ranger School would. Sapper School is the combat engineers’ small unit leadership school. It is very challenging and meant to test you in nearly every way possible (physical, mental, and psychological). To top that off, the February class is the closest of the year—Essayons!
The final few weeks of BOLC have gone very well. We finished up our last block of instruction on stability operations (think counterinsurgency) two weeks ago. This block arguably has some of the most important material for the missions that we will be conducting downrange. As a class, we also completed a large Capstone briefing, which was presented and critiqued by a Lieutenant Colonel and Command Sergeant Major. I was chosen as the S2 (intelligence officer) for our class and had the privilege of intensely researching our area of operations (AO). S2 briefs analyze infrastructure, capability, and leadership of the AO, along with the composition and disposition of enemy forces, the terrain, weather, and so forth. It is a job I enjoy and excel at. Overall, our briefing as a class went very well and we received kudus from the panel.
MLK Day Weekend was a four day weekend, here at Ft. Leonard Wood. My friend, Andrew Sauceda, and I decided that we wanted to go skiing out west and settled upon Lake Tahoe as the best option as they offer free lift tickets to military service members. We flew into Sacramento on the 14th and were greeted by a warm sun, palm trees, and green grass (the first I had seen since October). The drive up to Tahoe was picturesque and the skiing was even better. Though we did not get any fresh powder, we did have some very nice spring skiing conditions. We built up our confidence on the first evening during some night skiing at Squaw Valley, were the 1960 Winter Olympics were held. The following day we headed over to Alpine Meadows and enjoyed fine skiing with exquisite views of the lake. We made sure to hit up the double black diamond runs and the jumps in the terrain park for good measure. That evening we crossed the state line (all of 100m from our hotel) and hit up the casinos of Nevada. I spent the herculean sum of $4 on slots and decided to pocket the rest of the change. We did some people watching and found a great place to have breakfast for $5 in the casino. Sunday provided great skiing yet again, coupled with an early turn into bed as we had to catch a 0600 flight out of Sacramento the next morning.
In the two weeks following MLK Day Weekend, we ran our final Army Physical Fitness Test. The class had improved substantially since our initial test in September, and I did better in nearly every event too, scoring a 294/300 (although I was shooting for the max). I’m pretty proud of my run time (12:32 two mile), which placed me 3rd in our class of 66. Granted, we did run at 25F temperatures, which probably gave me an advantage. Last week we completed our final Field Training Exercise (FTX). We were in the field four days and ran six separate missions including a dawn raid to recover a pilot taken hostage. I was the platoon leader for one of our missions, which involved doing an infrastructure analysis of a village we were looking to assist in improving. For the entire FTX, we used paintball guns, which was good fun. It also allowed us to see who actually got shot and where they were hit (two big improvements over blanks). I got shot once in my body armor, I’ll be sure to wear that stuff downrange!
This coming Friday is our graduation from BOLC. It has been an interesting experience. Exasperating at times and intriguing at other; a good transition back into the Army overall. I’m looking to turning the leaf over now. Hopefully I’ll get into Sapper, but hey, going straight to Germany is not all that bad either.
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