This is the Army? (again)

After much thought, I figured out the motive behind the Army’s training plan—It is to get the Navy guys here so mad, the will be happy to go to Iraq. After spending all day in the cold yesterday with no cold weather gear, we went to the rifle range today. The first process in qualifying with an M-16 is to “zero in” the sights. Since every person is different, you have to adjust the sights to that particular user. In other words, I can hit the bulls eye every time with my rifle, but if I pick up someone else’s rifle, and put the sights on the target, I’d miss every time. The way you zero in a rifle is to shoot 3 rounds, walk up to the target see where they hit, walk back, adjust you sights and do it again. You keep doing this until you are “zeroed in” which typically takes 12 to 18 shots. Well, today it took 4 hours for us to shoot 18 rounds each. After that, we were supposed to go to another range to actually qualify by shooting at pop up targets. We waited another 4 hours in the pouring ran only to discover that: “opps, we forgot to schedule the ranges. Sorry about that”. Unbelievable!!
To make matters worse, I just found out that we have Thanksgiving off—the night prior. Had I know this earlier, I could have made plans to see some family in Charlotte or had Braye and the girls come up to Columbia. Family is very important to me and I would have loved to spend Thanksgiving with them. As it turns out, I volunteered to stand weapons watch tomorrow during the “special” dinner planned at the DFAC (Army lingo for the dining facility), so some of our junior guys can enjoy T-day.