All Alone in the Night

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller

I note that quote as I realize that our first week of training is over and we're already about one-eighth of the way to jumping on a plane to Kuwait. And while a part of me looks forward to getting this training behind us so that we can get on to our mission, there is so much for us to learn in such a short time it is also mildly disturbing to know that the training is flying by so quickly.

We closed out the week preparing for qualification ranges on Monday and Tuesday. Friday night we hit the simulators and practiced firing our weapons for the first time wearing all of our body armor. It was an unpleasant experience. I'm quite happy to have the body armor, since I know it markedly increases my odds of surviving my trip to Iraq, but it is bulky and heavy and inflexible and wearing it for a full day is going to sorely test me. Saturday we conducted Preliminary Marksmanship Training, or PMI, which involves practicing firing our weapons, rehearsing the fundamentals of marksmanship, and preparing our various sights for live fire. Having grown up in an Army where iron sights were the only option, the new sights we have on our weapons make me feel like I'm suddenly fighting in the future. I won't get into the details, but suffice it to say we've come a long ways from iron sights.

Earlier in the week we spent three days on Iraqi language and culture. Arabic is a tough language and we only scratched the surface in our initial training, but at least we had an opportunity to start learning some basic phrases. The cultural training was more in-depth and should help to ensure that we avoid some of the more common mistakes made by newcomers in a foreign society. Although it should be noted that due to the Army's rotation policy and our ongoing presence in Iraq, the Iraqis are a lot more culturally aware than we are. Part of the training included a cultural immersion dinner where we all dressed up in dishdashas and ate some nominally Iraqi food (they substituted beef for lamb because lamb is too expensive) and conversed with some of the Iraqi-speakers the Army has working here.

I should mention those as well. The Army has contracted for a lot of Iraqi-speakers, most of them former Iraqis who since moved to the U.S., to actually live and work on the FOB with the trainees. They play Iraqi commanders, police, local nationals, and so on, and provide us with excellent opportunities to learn more about Iraqi culture and language. The best training we had all week came on Saturday afternoon with a meeting with two of them playing an Iraqi battalion commander and his second-in-command. A third played my interpreter and I had to role-play my initial meeting with my Iraqi counterpart. It was incredibly challenging; working with an interpreter requires a lot of concentration, and the flow and rhythm of the conversation is very different from what you're accustomed to in conversation with someone you share a language with. Add to that the cultural differences (I introduced my XO as an intelligence officer, forgetting that in Iraq 'intelligence' is associated with Saddam's internal security services) and it was a draining but very illuminating experience. We'll get seven more of those meetings, and I'm quite confident they will be a huge benefit in preparing for our mission, not to mention motivating me to learn more Arabic so I can rely less on my interpreter.

All in all it was a good week, albeit a very tiring one, and I'm quite pleased they give us Sundays off to try and recharge our batteries.