Time for another rousing addition of your favorite and mine, PreMob! If I remember correctly, and I do cause I checked, I left off with us flying from Grand Island, NE to Fort Sill, OK on a chartered Air Force flight. Our first stop at Sill was at our HQ building to scan our ID cards in so we were on their system. We no more than step off the bus than one of our troops, SPC Lethlean, passed out and had to be rushed to the Hospital and helicoptered up to Oklahoma City. It turned out that he had a benign brain tumor. It was removed but he was unable to deploy with us for obvious reasons. He was our first, but not our last casualty. Sill was composed of a lot more training. Now the training was being geared for Afghanistan rather than Iraq. We did some cold weather classes and some language courses. For the language courses, as well as the Afghanistan Cultural Awareness courses, they brought in some native Afghans to teach the courses. I thought that it was very helpful to have them there to ask questions after each class, but to have 2 Afghan guys try and read PowerPoint slides in English didn’t really help. Most of our time in Sill, however was spent out at the ASP (Ammo Storage Point). We worked alongside the civilians that worked there to get more practice at the job we would be actually doing overseas. Typically the only time that you get to “job train” is at Annual Training for 2 weeks each year. Drills are spent bogged down in paperwork and other B.S.. While on Sill we stayed in the mobilization barracks and ate at the Mob Café. I think they throw in the word Café whenever they want to make something shitty seem better. The barracks were not too horrible. We were split up into rooms of anywhere from 2 to 8 people. I was in a room with 6 composed of members of my squad. The best thing about the barracks is they had a Wi-Fi service that you had to pay for, but it was really pretty quick. Sill was the first place that they start really cracking down on only wearing Army uniforms outside the building. Any time you went somewhere you had to be in either your ACU’s (our camo) or our PT (physical training) uniform. For the duration of our time there we were constantly being given different info about where we were going and what we would be doing. We were given 2, 4 day breaks to go home. 7 of us guys rented a van and drove back to NE both times. The first one was over Christmas and the second was over New Years. So even though we had been mostly gone and training since the start of September, I had still been able to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years with my wife. We were only supposed to be in Sill until just after the 1st of Jan 09, but we didn’t end up getting out of there until 8 Feb. Since Sill had only anticipated us being there until early Jan, it was up to us to find stuff for us to do. One thing we did was hooked up with an aviation unit that was staying in our building and got to go on a Blackhawk ride out to a mock Afghan village to practice some urban assault. We flew in, jumped off, the birds flew away, we assaulted the village and the birds came back in to get us. It was pretty fun. I have a lot of pictures of it on my Facebook. Once we found out we were gunna be around a while, we lined up a class in Redstone, AL for the SAAS crew. We flew down for two weeks at the end of Jan. It was a nice little break as it was just five of us. Since the base was out of housing, we stayed at the Embassy hotel in Huntsville. The other perk about Redstone was that my wife flew down for 3 days. It was really nice to be able to see her one last time before we left. That was the last time I saw my wife, besides on Skype. It’s now been about month and a half since I have seen her. I feel guilty that during the first year of our marriage we will get to spend such a small amount of time together. When we got back to Sill we were told that we would be leaving on the 7th. Everyone packed up their things and began to prep to leave. The morning of the 7th, we loaded up all of our baggage except our carryons and waited for our bus to come. About midday the squad leaders were called down to the office and told that our flight was cancelled due to a busted plane and that we were being kicked out of our building as a new unit was set to move in. We grabbed the little baggage we had and move down one building. Since most everyone had packed the majority of their personal hygiene gear and other essentials, we were forced to make a run to the PX for things like towels, shower shoes, toothbrushes and toothpaste. That night you could tell that people were getting a bit anxious to get on the road. Like I said in a previous blog, it’s hard to keep a bored soldier out of mischief.
If you’ll notice in that last picture on the bottom bunk there is the second casualty we had. That is SPC McLean, older brother to the Soldier in the top bunk, PFC McLean. He was diagnosed with depression while we were in Sill and was sent home. After SPC Lethlean went home, we picked up one of the extras that we had with us in McCoy, PFC Norman. He and PFC Bergman went with us to McCoy just in case someone fell out. Since SPC McLean fell out so close to us leaving, it was decided that we would deploy with 46 instead of 47. By the time we left we obviously knew we were going to Bastian. It was a long and frustrating 2 months though not ever knowing really what your future was going to hold. Over that period of time we were told we were going to several different locations, none of which did anyone in my family ever know about. It wasn’t until our New Years break that I even felt sure enough to tell my wife that we had been switched from Iraq to Afghanistan. It’s a learning experience in the Army. Every time we were given an tidbit of info, the kids would all jump on the phone and tell their families. Two days later they were usually back on the phones telling them it had changed. I don’t like withholding info from my wife, but I know that it is in both of our best interests. I’m sure it will be a learning experience for her too and next time, God forbid, she will know what to expect, and if she wants to know everything, she has only to ask me. Get this, I am about to hit a milestone. I am looking at my word counter on Microsoft Word document and THIS is my 20,000th word in my blog. I appreciate everyone following and reading. I’m up to 21 followers now also. You keep reading and I’ll keep writing. Well that’s basically it for all of my Pre Mobilization posts. Like I’ve said many times, I took nearly 450 pictures during the PreMob and most of them are on my Facebook. If you have any other questions about the process or if you think I left something out let me know via blog comment, email or any other method you want. I will write again soon as we do have some things going on now.
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