Saturday, February 7, 2009

The longest 4 weeks of my life

I'm done with WOCS. It was long and painful. No, it wasn't hard and yes it was only 5 weeks long but it was boring and took forever. Don't get me wrong. I learned a lot but sitting in class for 8 hours a day and then having the remaining 6 hours of your day planned out with nothing interesting to do makes for really long days. I'll give you a quick run down of what the weeks held for me.
I couldn't have arrived at a better time. The first week is what we call Snowbird Phase. It is all about in-processing. Its not hard but your every move is scripted and watched by TAC Officers. I arrived over Christmas exodus so no one was there. They gave us a packet and told us to get everything finished before we classed up with the rest of the class. Each day we would spend an hour or so getting paperwork done and then we could go into town or watch TV or take a nap. It was the best time to do Snowbird phase ever.
WOCS is normally a 7 week course but since I have been to PLDC I only had to do 5 weeks. We classed up with a class that had already been there for 3 weeks. I can't remember what day we did it on but we went in the morning and did a physical fitness test (PT Test). After we passed it we marched over to see our new class. There were 8 of us and we were all older guys that had been in the army for a while. They put us with 75 young new guys and we decided to swallow our pride and let them show us the ropes. It made life pretty easy for us.
Our schedule was pretty much set. We woke up at 0530 and had 7 minutes to be dressed, beds made and formed up for first formation. It was crazy in the morning. After stretching we worked out for an hour from 0600 till 0700 and then had 15 minutes to get ready, clean the barraks and be downstairs for breakfast formation. After breakfast we went to class for 4 hours then lunch and back to class till dinner. After dinner we would either have another class or have study time. At night we would have one hour of personal time, one hour of barraks cleanup and one hour of study time before we were in bed ant 1045. The next day it would start all over again.
The field was fun. We did patrol operations, urban operations, and FOB operations. It was cold but fun. The week went by fast. I wished we could have spent the whole 4 weeks out there. The time would have flown by.
In the end we only lost two people from injuries and we all graduated the newest class of US Army Warrant Officers. It was a great feeling.
After graduation I checked in with housing and got our house signed for so when Brenna and I roll in on Feb. 11 we pick up our keys and go straight to our house. I'm anxious and a little nervous for what lies ahead but I'm sure its going to be fun and I cant wait.