Now in Louisiana

After about a six-hour bus ride, I made it to Fort Polk, Louisiana.  I'm a part of what's called the ADVON which is a different way of saying advance team.  I'm here to coordinate and set-up communications before the rest of the brigade shows up. I will spend most of February at Fort Polk before going back to Camp Shelby for final  preparations for war.   

Preparing for the Next Chapter

The time has come where we are done with the training exercises hear at Camp Shelby.  We are now packing almost all our stuff up into big metal containers.  Some are slated to go overseas while others are going with us to Fort Polk, Louisiana.  We will be there to test our skills that we’ve been improving on since September.  It’s getting closer but I’d rather just get over there and get things over with.  These train-ups prior to deployments are the worst experiences of my military career.  

In the Middle of a Training Exercise

We are doing a training event that involves everyone in the brigade that I will be deploying with. We are running 24-hour operations which means that I'm working 12-hour shifts. I report to the operations center at 0700 and my shift ends at 1900 (7pm). I usually don't get out of there until close to 8pm since I have to brief the oncoming shift and we all have to sit through an update on major events of the day. This exercise will go on for a few more days and then we will prepare for our temporary move to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

Back to Camp Shelby

I'm now back at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. We've continued our training where we left off before the Christmas break. We are doing maneuvers to try to simulate what we will be dealing with when we get over there. We will soon have an exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, to test our abilities. I'll have more on that later.

A New Blog For 2006

I will continue to post to this Blog when I return off of leave in early January. In the mean time you can check out all my entries from 2005.