More One Bullet Away
So, after racing back onto the USS Dubuque, Nate Fick ends up deployed in Pakistan/Afghanistan and it's miserable and fucking cold and he wears the same set of clothes for 40 days out in the field and gets his first shower in 40 days when he's (and the rest of his squad) are brought back to the well deck and stripped and hosed off and deloused before they're allowed to go to their quarters. He promptly takes a long hot shower (getting off even more caked in grime), eats 3 plates of spaghetti and surprisingly, doesn't sleep like the dead -- he's got insomnia.
On the steam back to the the US, one of the Recon Marines suggests he join their team, and
RIP [Recon Indoctrination Program] and BRC [Basic Reconnaissance Course] taught me almost nothing. I had learned most of the tactics and technical information during my earlier training in Afganistan. But they imparted something even more valuable: legitimacy. BRC for enlisted Marines is the gatekeeper to recon. Graduation changes their MOS to 0321, "Reconnaissance Man". It's a rite of passage. By suffering through the same three months they did, I'd be a known commodity to them. I had been there, too. Earning rank was easy compared to earning spurs.
In June 2002, my BRC class returned to First Recon Battalion on the Friday afternoon of our graduation. As new recon Marines, we ould go on to advanced parachute and scuba training, survival school, and specialized courses in foreign weapons, demolition, mountaineering, and others. We ranked our preferences a few weeks earlier. I put "practical" training at the top of my list: special operations mission planning and a certification course to rig helicopters for inserting and extracting recon teams with ropes and ladders. Running my finger down a scheduling board in the battalion's admin office, I stopped at the school written next to my name: advanced water survival. It had been my last choice. My one irrational fear was being trapped, powerless, underwater. Drowning. Someone had noticed, and starting at 0400 on Monday morning, that weakness would be beaten out of me.
In reading this book (and Generation Kill) I'm learning that it's probably not a bad thing that my back injury prevented me from being eligible to serve. Stress+Sleep Deprivation are my biggest migraine triggers. I'd've probably gotten a medical discharge from OCS, as I can only do 4 hours of sleep a night for about 4 days before bad things happen, and OCS is a month of 4 hour nights. (My dad said that 4 hours a night in OCS was a good night and you never got a full week of that, and he was Air Force.) Hell, just trying to ride along like Evan Wright did would've had me curled up in a blind*, vomiting little ball of agony before the first week was out.
*I get migraine with aura. Specifically: negative scotoma with zigzag distortions.
On the steam back to the the US, one of the Recon Marines suggests he join their team, and
RIP [Recon Indoctrination Program] and BRC [Basic Reconnaissance Course] taught me almost nothing. I had learned most of the tactics and technical information during my earlier training in Afganistan. But they imparted something even more valuable: legitimacy. BRC for enlisted Marines is the gatekeeper to recon. Graduation changes their MOS to 0321, "Reconnaissance Man". It's a rite of passage. By suffering through the same three months they did, I'd be a known commodity to them. I had been there, too. Earning rank was easy compared to earning spurs.
In June 2002, my BRC class returned to First Recon Battalion on the Friday afternoon of our graduation. As new recon Marines, we ould go on to advanced parachute and scuba training, survival school, and specialized courses in foreign weapons, demolition, mountaineering, and others. We ranked our preferences a few weeks earlier. I put "practical" training at the top of my list: special operations mission planning and a certification course to rig helicopters for inserting and extracting recon teams with ropes and ladders. Running my finger down a scheduling board in the battalion's admin office, I stopped at the school written next to my name: advanced water survival. It had been my last choice. My one irrational fear was being trapped, powerless, underwater. Drowning. Someone had noticed, and starting at 0400 on Monday morning, that weakness would be beaten out of me.
In reading this book (and Generation Kill) I'm learning that it's probably not a bad thing that my back injury prevented me from being eligible to serve. Stress+Sleep Deprivation are my biggest migraine triggers. I'd've probably gotten a medical discharge from OCS, as I can only do 4 hours of sleep a night for about 4 days before bad things happen, and OCS is a month of 4 hour nights. (My dad said that 4 hours a night in OCS was a good night and you never got a full week of that, and he was Air Force.) Hell, just trying to ride along like Evan Wright did would've had me curled up in a blind*, vomiting little ball of agony before the first week was out.
*I get migraine with aura. Specifically: negative scotoma with zigzag distortions.
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