Now at the Conus Replacement Center (CRC) at Ft. Benning, Georgia, which has the mission of certifying, equipping, and deploying all soldiers headed overseas.
I left Ft. Leavenworth before dawn with the main objective of not hitting a deer, which the previous TOD had done. This was not an easy task since I hadn't slept all night and had no breakfast. I did see one young deer making a run for the on-ramp, but he thought better of it and veered away.
The flight to Atlanta was smooth and I got on the Groome shuttle bus from ATL to Ft. Benning without any problems. The flt was 3 hrs and the shuttle took about 2.5 hrs. With waiting time and layover, the whole process took about 8 hrs from the time I left the KS hotel to the time I was signing in at CRC. The main thing to remember is to plan everything to arrive before the 1800 evening brief. There are 3 briefs a day, but you have to be there by the last one.
CRC is an isolated, self-contained little "camp" on Ft. Benning. It is mostly for individual augmentees, one-offs going to support units, and civilian contractors. There were a LOT of contractors - probably about 2/3rds, and included a lot of translators, which was my first exposure to them. This was nice in a way, because everyone was in the same position, no cliques. Military tended to be slightly rank heavy, with lots of MAJs, LTCs, and COLs running around.
Re: interpreters, I had always assumed that they found local Iraqis who spoke English, but apparently, many are US citizens. At dinner, I sat down next to a nondescript guy with close cropped hair and noticed that he had a Mass State Police shirt on. We started chatting about MA and turned out that he lives in Framingham! Then I found out that he was going as a translator. I asked him where he was going and he said that he didn't know. Apparently, they give some preference here and then they get a pinpoint assignment. I mentioned that the area that was "hottest" in terms of insurgency was in the north. He seemed surprised and then said that he was actually from there, from Mosul no less, which is where most of the unrest is. I asked him whether he would request to be posted somewhere else because of threat of reprisals to family members still in the area and he indicated that he was still deciding. Apparently, he wants to see his old neighborhood and see family, and perhaps feels he might be more effective with local knowledge. It was a short conversation, but meeting Marwan helped me realize that interpreters are just like us soldiers in many ways - they may be serving for more than just another paycheck. [Note: I later learned from someone in my class company who is going over to Basrah also to manage all of the translators in southern Iraq, that the mix is about 60% local, 40% naturalized US cititzens. Also, that the locals are all Level 1, who have no security clearance and are used say, on checkpoint operations, and US citizens are either Level 2 (secret clearances) or Level 3 (Top Secret, which I don't even have).]
After dinner, we formed up and then waited for an hour and a half before starting briefings. This was the Army I know and (don't) love. Briefings covered what activities would occur during the course of the week, standards & behavior expected, transportation and baggage allowance, and then the form filling started. We filled out probably about 20 different forms that night alone all needed to deploy in some way or another. The cadre did a good job moving through the material as quickly as they could, I'll grant them that. The best feeling of the night is when they asked for people who had a memo of training completion and I (with about a quarter of the people) was able to sign out on that training requirement. Still it was 3 hours before we got out of there. If nothing else, it was a reminder of how good the Army teaches patience.
At night, we had a couple hours of downtime before racking out. We stay in a simple barracks, 4 to a room, with bed and wall locker. My roommates are a logistics reservist major and a contractor. Neither is much of a conversationalist, so we just mostly grunt greetings. That is, until nightfall. The civilian guy was sleeping by the time we got back (8:30pm), so I tiptoed and used a flashlight. Silly me. The other roommate wasn't even back when I slept at 11:30pm. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night by what sounded like a buzzsaw mating with a meat grinder. Both of the guys are volume snorers and the earplugs barely helped. Please God, don't let my roommates in Iraq be the same way....
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