September 8, 2007

Praise the Lord! I have several praises today to share with you. First of all, we did pretty good tody so the drill sergeant lifted the half the platoon on duty at a time which means it's back to normal fire guard, which means I get a full nights sleep tonight. That's exciting, epecially after only getting about two and a half hours of sleep last night. The other praise involves today's training. Today was grenade qualification. You have to qualify in order to graduate. First they had us go through some training to learn proper range procedures, safety procedures, and how to properly through a grenade. Then we threw a couple of practice grenades so that they could make sure we were doing it all right. I passed that just fine and then it was off to the live range to throw two real fragmentation grenades. I did fine there too. (I was praying the whole time). After that, we had to go through a series of seven stations. They involved things like throwing a grenade into a mortar position from the kneeling position at twenty meters, throwing a grenade into a trench at twenty-five meters from the standing position, indentifying various types of grenades by sight, and things like that. If you got four or less, you didn't qualify (each station was pass or fail). If you got five, you qualified as second class. Six got you a first class qualification. Seven, and you qualified as an expert. I got expert! I know the Lord helped me a lot. I was praying about it pretty hard once I found out that passing is a requirement for graduation.

Wednesday is the start of our second FTX (Field Training Exercise) and this one is a three day, two night deal...I know I will be pretty tired when we get back!

It sounds like at least some of the guys who had the dip and stuff are going to get restarted to day one. Hopefully it will be soon so that we can get them out of here. Several of them figure they are getting restarted anyway and so they aren't even trying to do what they are supposed to do anymore.

PFC Sam Jones