Georgia

So I'm gonna try my hand at one of these non-political posts. Strange, huh?

I spent last week, from Monday through Friday, down in Columbus, Georgia, which is right next to Fort Benning. Fort Benning is the home of the Infantry, basically, and it's enormous. 200,000 acres, so I learned. That's about 25 times the size of Picatinny, where I work, and Picatinny's huge.

So we got down there on Monday evening, and we were given a list of places that we weren't allowed to go. Places like the Traffic Light Lounge and the Boom Boom Room. Places that we wouldn't have wanted to go anyway, I'm guessing. I mean, the Boom Boom Room has got a fun name, but.....c'mon.

Tuesday we ate lunch in Alabama, which was pretty cool. The place was amazing. Run-down and dumpy, it looked as though it'd been abandoned for at least ten years. But the BBQ was amazing. Ribs, coleslaw, BBQ sandwiches, baked beans and sweet tea. Good stuff all around. That afternoon we went to the National Infantry Museum, located right there at Fort Benning, which had all sorts of displays dating from colonial days right up through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pretty cool stuff.

Wednesday we were issued our uniforms and equipment very very early in the morning, and we drove the 40 minutes out to the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Ware Range. We got to watch soldiers calibrating their weapons, eat MREs, and then follow a squad through the woods on a dry run of their training mission. All this while it was raining out! Awesome!

Thursday I woke up sick as a dog, but that didn't really bother me too much. It sucked, but it wasn't all that bad. We went back out to Ware Range and got to witness a live fire demonstration of the same training exercise we watched the day before. We made sure to keep our helmets on that day, I'll tell you that much. After that, we got a chance to talk with the VC (vehicle commander) of one of the Striker Armed Personnel Carriers that they were using. He even let us take a ride, which was awesome! I'll see if I can figure out later how to put some pictures up here.

We came home on Friday, and I spent the weekend miserable with sickness. But anyway, I'll write more later.

Fargus...