So first of all this was by far the hardest week thus far. You get out to the field pretty dang quick, by 1000, and its go time. We had the squad live fire first. This is similar to the team live fire from week 3 except now youll need to shift and cease fire. They are incredibly strict on safety and if you do anything unsafe in the practice fire with blanks beforehand you will be crushed. Also make sure to conduct good PCC's/PCI's. One of our squad leaders got fired and got a major minus because the M249's jammed because they didnt have any CLP. This was also the first time we used the two different military radios. Out platoon did some extra practice and while one squad was conducting the practice on the live fire with blanks the other three squads were assaulting the trench. The squad leaders got the opportunity to rotate as PL's and control all four squads. The hardest part was communicating on the radios. As the PL I had three seperate radios, and literally had conversations with 9 different people. My PSG, 4 SL's, then four other cadre who take the role of Company Commander, 1SG, Fires, or other assets. I admit I had a blast and it was fun, but it is really hard to keep track of everything. Thank goodness they keep repeating themselves but I did completely miss CAS. Practice makes perfect. Anyways after everyone goes through the live fire (which is a smoker) we began our squad lanes. The rest of this week is almost the same as week 4, except this time each squad will teach classes and conduct lanes instead of the cadre. They are basically evaluating our ability to train soldiers. NOTE: You will not sleep this week until Thursday night! At least our platoon didnt. We stayed up for somewhere around 82 hours. It was basically LDAC on crack. I have learned that its only really hard to stay awake between 0100 and 0500. During daytime hours its not too bad and you are so dang busy you simply dont have time to sleep, or think about sleeping. A lot of guys dip to stay awake. I use BBQ sunflower seeds and bring out four or five bags when we go into the field. Anyways, as SL I was OIC for my squad's portion of training. We had nine hours to conduct training and lanes for the other three squads for nine hours From 2000 to 0500 until we had PT. We had react to contact and had four different lanes with different OPFOR. But I have to admit it was some of the hardest training we had done. First of all guys had already been up for like 50 hours when we started and their motivation wasnt at its peak. Then the terrain was rugged and using NVG's in rugged terrain is one of two things--hilarious or deadly. Or both. People fall all the time, usually not too bad but we did have one guy go down a ravine. He wasnt seriously injured but was a little woozy for a while. Anyways there were plenty of times when people zoned out. We had people falling asleep standing up. When I was evaluated a late, sometime around 0300 I was standing behind the SBF with the machine guns blazing. I leaned on a tree and the next thing I knew I faceplanted right between the two M240B's because I had fallen asleep. Like I said, less than five feet away from two machine guns. Its a difficult couple of nights. Thursday night we FINALLY got to sleep, and we got 5 hours! We were so jacked before going to bed you would have thought we had won a the collective lottery. Bad news is that Friday morning is the 8 mile ruck march. We had 35 lbs dry and then we carried an additional 8 quarts of water so your ruck wasnt the normal 80 lbs it had been during the week. They let us leave an assault pack with stuff in it so our rucks weighted roughly the same. You have two hours. The fastest did it in under an hour and twenty minutes. Most of our platoon was exhausted so a bunch of us just did the first mile in 13 minutes and the next seven miles in 15 minute miles. Not super hooah hooah high speed. But I didnt give a rats ass and we came in at an hour and fifty seven minutes. Once youre done with that in the morning you load buses and go back to the company to clean weapons! It wasnt too bad, but we got out a little late at about 1800. I crashed immediately when I got home and slept a ton.
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