Welcome to the Army: Blogging is Hard

So, I'm gonna pretend I wrote this post a couple weeks ago. :)

Hmm, what's even happened?

Well, for starters, my platoon (1st platoon, that is) won a couple of banners! Each platoon has a flag called a guidon (pronounced like guide-on) and onto this flag we place the banners of honor that will one day set us apart as the Honor Platoon (Apparently in the last two classes, 1st platoon was honor platoon). The first one we won was for the Physical Fitness Test (no help from me, but hey, I'll ride the wave!). That just means that our average score was the highest of all the platoons. The second one was for our midterm exam. Again, I don't feel like my 84% really helped us out much, but at least I passed this one. ;) (I guess this is a good time to mention that I did finally pass the PT test by improving in all areas, pushups, sit-ups, and shaving another minute off my run time. Hooah!!)

Most of our days at this point involve sitting in class, usually being subjected to one Powerpoint after another. If we feel like we're going to fall asleep, it's pretty much required of us to move to the back of the room and remain standing until we feel like we can return to our seats. There have definitely been a few days when I stood up pretty much the whole day. Army life is rough! ;) It doesn't help that we get up for PT (working out) at 5:00am just about every day. I guess it wouldn't be as bad if I could convince myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but that's always been a struggle for me. But really, 5:00am?!?

What else? I got my first paid-for massage the other day. I decided that since I've been having so much trouble with soreness and knots in my upper back/shoulder region, that I needed a deep tissue massage. If you've ever had one of those, you might be groaning a little inside right now. I was sore for three days after. It was... uncomfortable, to say the least. And that was after I asked the guy (who already said he was going light cause it was my first time) to lighten it up a bit. Picture a guy standing above you and putting most of his weight on his elbow and then dragging it up and down your back next to your spine. Over and over and over. Why did I pay for this? Why did I tip the guy? If he was trying to get information from me I would have told him anything he wanted to know, I swear...

The "spa" where I got my "massage". The soothing music and warm ambience almost made me forget I was in a torture chamber.

But for real...

I got this weird thing on my finger that I was pretty sure was some form of skin cancer. I didn't notice it at all until it was in this stage. It was a day or two after my massage and when I consulted the doc that lives down the hall, he asked if the guy gave me a hand massage. He did (it was awesome!), and then the doc joked that I was going to have these all over my body!! This was the only one though. Just a small little infection, who knows what from. It cleared up after about a week.

Notice the very frightening hollowed out appearance.

Also, I got bit by a fire ant for the fist time ever. So painful for such a tiny little creature. And the bite lasts for several days and gets inflamed and looks very similar to the infection on my other hand.

Tiny little ant bite.

One day after class we went over to the Army hospital (SAMMC. It's actually multi-service, but whatever) and toured a place called the Center for the Intrepid. It was a pretty amazing place. It's entirely devoted to rehabbing amputees, and with the way these two wars have been going, there are a lot of them. The soldiers that are there rehabbing are actually assigned to the center as their station, sometimes just temporary, sometimes long-term, and are given housing nearby. Their duty while there, is to attend all their appointments, and they have several daily. It was amazing to see so many brave soldiers, some of them missing both legs, walking around on their prosthetics, smiling and just learning to live and be normal. It was a really amazing facility. Upstairs they have a shooting simulator similar to the one that I showed you in a previous post. They use it to try to find PTSD-related triggers in soldiers, to see how they respond to combat-like situations. While I was up there, I saw this little guy.

Go Caldwells!!

On the 23rd I went to a celebration of the 102nd birthday of the Army Dental Corps. I didn't get that many pictures, but it was a formal, black tie event, so everyone was dressed to the nines. For the active military guys, that means dress blues. It was a neat event (although very long) and I've never seen so much glassware on a table.

I only used one glass. For water. Although there was a gift wine glass in the middle with the dental corps birthday emblem on it that I got to take home. Yippee for free wine glasses!!

Just chillin'.

We also took our final exam recently. And although we haven't been awarded the ribbon yet, we've been told that it belongs to 1st platoon! We're on our way to Honor Platoon!

So that's pretty much all that's been going on recently. I'll write another post soon about my adventures in Field Training Exercises or FTX. Oh, and I guess before I go, there was this other thing that happened on Valentine's Day. I went to visit Noelle in Philly. The army gave us a four-day weekend for Presidents' Day, and it just happened to nicely coincide with Valentine's Day. I was originally scheduled to fly out early Friday morning (the 15th), because we had class scheduled until about 5pm on Thursday. But they let us out of class early, so I booked it down to the airport and caught an early flight and surprised her by showing up to Institute, where she usually goes to class on Thursday nights. I think it was effective. In fact, she was so surprised all she could do was ask how I was in Philly, and then she draped herself on me like a blanket. Not awkward at all... :) Unfortunately I didn't plan ahead to have anyone take pictures of the surprise, so we only have a couple of candid shots that neither of us were aware of.