another life blog

Since I don’t want any repercussions on myself by revealing too much concerning what I’m going through at the moment, I thought it best to log what I’m doing on a weekly basis instead of daily.

I started Commisioned Officers Training this past Tuesday (I actually started driving on Monday at 1100 EST and got to Maxwell AFB at 2100 CST. The Air Force is really an impressive organization ~ inprocessing on TD0 of more than 200 COT students did not take nearly as long as I thought it would. Everything standardized, and everything went through like we were on a well-honed production line. With 15 flight commanders working us, we began acting (or try to) like an officer before we even step through the door to be processed. As the recruiter and those who commissioned me on 20060426, there’s not going to be any slacking allowed.

The first thing we did was learn how to stand at attention and how to “speak.” Everything has to be done in a certain way, and I’ll go into it a bit here ~! If I’m initiating a conversation, I begin by saying, “Sir/Ma’am, 2nd Lt Lastname reports to ask/make a question/statement.” When I get the go ahead, I would start every line with, “Sir/Ma’am.” Before finishing, I will ask, “Will that be all sir/ma’am” and ends with “Good morning/afternoon/evening sir/ma’am.” It sounds easy, but without a bit of practice, it’s pretty hard to squeeze out the proper phrasing. They don’t allow any slack at all in the phrasing either. If you don’t start a sentence with Sir/Ma’am, they have you start over. If you don’t greet them at the end properly with “will that be all sir/ma’am,” you start over. … there’s a lot more to it I suppose, but it’s enough details here to fill a chapter.

Marching, is something we’ve done a lot of. Everywhere we go, we march. We march to go to eat, we march to go to classrooms, etc, etc. Marching is quite fun to do - except when you’re the one needing to bark the correct orders. It easy to fool yourself into thinking, “the drill sergeants have it easy…” but their job is super tough! Following orders is the easy part really… imagine you’re marching a flight of 15 individuals two elements wide with a guide ~ as the flight leader, you stand AT the rear of the formation, and you have to bark, “Column right/left…… … march” at the exact right moments, or else the whole formation looks stupid. At first I thought it wasn’t gonna be that hard, but… 1) you gotta be marching 2) you gotta be doing the left, left, left, right left 3) you gotta be watching all around for incoming higher ranking officers and dangers 4) you gotta be watching the guide post to make sure they’re in the right place before barking column right/left march (and you’re like 20 paces back!) .. it’s hard. I haven’t gotten it right a single time yet. The time in to say Column right/left must be like 2 paces before the corner, and then march must be done when the pivoting foot is one pace before the corner. … I can sort of visualize the concept at the moment, but I can’t do it well yet. Ah well.

We learned how to do a variety of warm-up and stretching exercises ~ nothing new. Earlier today, I ran (walked like half of it prolly) 1.5 miles in a very poor grade of some 17 minutes, below average of 30 some pushups and situps — it’s a shame how out of shape I am in comparison to some others — but that’s okay =) There’s no insane people shouting at me to keep going with spittles flying out at me - the standard is “try your 110%! but don’t hurt yourself!”

The three most exciting thing all day, is chow time. The mess hall seats a 40*4*2 = 320 students at once, but there’s only 2 serving line, and about 600 students needing to eat within a range of about 2 hrs or so. To make it orderly and fast, there’s like 6 pages of procedures on how to get your food. Here’s COT’s experience with eating at Maxwell AFB:

1) Form up outside the mess hall door, when there are less than 4 people against the wall waiting to get their trays and silverwares, then the flight can go in.

2) Once the flight goes in, we fall into 2 elements. First two will be at attention, the rest at parade rest.

3) When the tray area is clear, first two will yell post, move up, grab tray (a lot more than just grabbing tray and etc, but I won’t get into it), move on. Flight will then move up.

4) Get food, get 4 cups of water/drinks, pay, go to the dining area.

5) When I step into dining area, I scan the 40 tables, looking for a table with people still standing up (or if no one is standing, go to the nearest empty one). A table seats 4, unless all 4 is full, 1-3 people can’t sit down to eat.

6) Once table full, the 4th person in tells everyone to be seated, pass napkins, pray, and begin chow time.

Thus, begin the fun part. How fast you eat, depends on how fast the next table that comes in eats. If the next table that fills up finish eating before your table… it looks funky, cause they’ll get up, leave… and boom, it leaves a table empty in the middle of the dining hall ~ the MTIs (Military Training Instructors and Chow Sharks) don’t like that at all. When they don’t like something, they make sure YOU knows it.

That’s the whole eating procedure. I’m eating a lot of food, so I doubt I’ll lose any weight… heh. Oh well. Anyway, the hard part really is staying awake in the late mornings and afternoons when the instructors start teaching stuff about military standards, history, and etc - being caught asleep is a huge no no - and they recommend you getting out of your chair, and stand against the wall to keep awake. I saw someone fell asleep, and was waken up by the teacher ~ it’s not pretty. They need permission to touch you, but man, they get you pretty hard.

All in all, it’s not hard. Waking up at 0430 is not tough, nor is shining boots, following orders. I’m not living in a crazy weird barrack ~ but a rather average looking hotel like room with 2 single bed, 2 faucets, one shower, and one toilet. It’s really not much different than living at Holiday Inn express really! I’m having a lot of fun, even though I’m one of the slowest in the entire Guardian squadron and the Golf flight. Heh… a lot to improve!

It’s saturday now, and we have the day “off.” Yesterday, we went to Burger King for dinner, and that was nice.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 8:36 am and is filed under Air Force. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.