Camp McCready to Belvoir

Wednesday and Thursday we finished up all of the classroom time with First aid - lots of gory pictures, Intro to the Army's Sincgars radios, a review of the 9-line medivac request, and Calling for fire (mortars and the like). On Wednesday afternoon, I was voluntold that I would be a driver, cool, I like to drive, especially Humvees! -no that is not sarcasm :) So as a driver I have to be at the classroom at 0615 on Friday morning. Since our class is so small, 12 people now, our convoy will be instructor led, we will drive the course and discuss the treats instead of reacting and having a convoy commander make the decisions. The first threat is a culvert, it usually has a huge mortar round in front of it. We discuss the procedure - Back up, while the convoy commander calls EOD, and perform security measures. So we are told that the next threat will be a far-ambush and we are to just drive through it and fire our weapons(we don't have blanks for the exercise so it will be bang, bang, bang...) So we are driving along minding our own business, and BANG, pow, pow, pow, pow... Smoke canisters are flying etc... the vehicle in front of me STOPS, so I stop too. We get word over the radio to back up, so I do as fast as I can go. I am cursing the vehicle in front of us because we were told to drive though, and what the *** are they thinking?!?
The air clears, the shooting stops, and the instructors tell us to cut the engines and circle for an AAR (after action review) We settle the confusion, Truck 2 (we were Truck 3) commander told the driver to stop and backup. The gunner in our turret was given an atta-boy for his attention, an reaction. The opfor (opposition force) gave me an wtf-wow for backing up at 90 mph (an exaggeration). And over all it worked out OK, because the instructors were thinking what on earth are they doing, and realized that the bad guys would be thinking the same thing. So all was well.
When we got back to the classroom, I had to pop smoke to get back to the Fort Jackson SRP site to clear medical. The ride over there was OK, but when I finished, the other driver was nowhere to be seen, so I hung around waiting for him. Luckily I over heard another NCO saying he was going back to the battalion, so I asked him if by that he meant McCready. He did so I was able to get a ride back, and get back before noon when we were moving out to the airport. We arrived at the airport at 1300 ish, the plane to DC left at 1730. So Rea and I drank some and ate some as we waited. We arrived in DC at 1900 and one of Rea's buddies in DC picked us up from the airport. Since we would be a little while in processing at Belvoir, we dropped the buddy off at his apartment. After four hours of chasing our tails and hanging around the AIT barracks we found the housing POC (point of contact) So by Midnight we were able to get to bed. I was up at 0500 for breakfast and the convoy. Friday was a long day! Saturday was more leisurely, we hooked up with some of our buddies from AIT and a few of Rea's co-workers and walked around the National Mall, went to the Smithsonian - Natural Science, and made our way to Lincoln, then we walked to the Metro at Arlington Cem. We ate dinner at Sin/e(there is supposed to be an accent over the e). Much nicer than Friday. Sunday I took care of some errands at the PX and walked all of the way over to the Starbucks on post to access the Internet(map below). Rea hooked back up with me just now and let me know that tomorrow, Monday, we have a 0430 formation to move to the 0500 AIT PT formation. >:( GRRR. To make matters even better, it is a run day, I am not trying to get hurt. More to follow!!