My Birthday

I completely forgot it was my birthday. This is what I was up to though, SULE I. This isn't my fireteam in the picture, but this was the obstacle I got as fireteam leader. So how it went was we hiked 6 miles with out ILBE packs, which we packed with a bunch of crap, like the checkllist was a page long. At first I though it was just dead weight we were going to be carrying because we stuffed extra socks, shirts, blouses, trousers in there but I think I actually did end up using most of the stuff we packed. With our rifles, water and MRE I'd say the load was about 60 or 70 pounds. The trick was getting everything in the pack. My tentmate had pneumonia bad that week so I had to carry the whole tent, which made it an even tighter squeeze. I think I neatly packed everything in then hopped in the pack to smush everything inside. THe hike wasn't actually that bad, I think the company staff took it slow cause there was snow everywhere and the prednesone medical gave me was finally kicking in so I was feeling pretty good that week.

So we finally camped out and it was freezing cold. Thank god I bought some underarmour coldgear to keep my ass warm. I slept pretty good in the sleeping bag too, I think the best sleep I got was out in the field the whole time I was at OCS. So we woke up the next day at 0430 and it was a zoo because we were trying to put everything back in our packs. Once we got moving we moved on to the start of the course. We were to run in fireteams on a 3 or 4 mile circuit with 4 stops at SULE stations. At each station we rotate as fireteam leader and lead our team through the obstacle. Teams took off every 5 minutes so we had to wait a while before our team was launched. We sat on our stools and ate our MREs, and as I was preparing my veggie burger sandwich I realized, holy shit I just turned 27.