Training Exercise - (Germany) Day 29

This morning I was picked up by my boss, but instead of heading to PT formation in our winter PTs, we all had our ACUs on. I also had to bring my body armor and helmet as well. This week they are roll playing a scenario and we have to play along, so no PT this morning. We found out that a big portion of our office would be getting their weapons and heading off to help guard a gate. They work along side the normal gate security contractors but will be checking multiple cars all day for bombs or terrorists. I wasn't one of the ones picked because I haven't had the special training to check for bombs yet.

I headed to the office where it was just me and SPC Whirlwind. He's called this because he has a hyper personality and seems to be all over the place. We also had our platoon sergeant and our NCOIC there as well. This did give us some time for SPC Whirlwind to show me some things that they do in the office. I also ended up heading to the shoppette and purchasing a Stars and Stripes newspaper as well as the latest Army Times. That gave me some good reading material to pass the time when SPC Whirlwind didn't have anything to show me. It's kind of tough to learn anything so far because it seems like I'm getting little bits and pieces of the picture at any given time.

I had Subway in the food court and then headed back to the office where I did a lot more reading. I read every single article in the papers and I take my time slowly reading everything trying not to run out of reading material before the day ends. I may need to purchase an actual book since I can't bring my iPad in the office.

I was almost able to log into the computer today, instead of getting nothing…I'm able to log in with my CAC card, but I have only a very limited DoD visitor's access. This gives me basic guess access to the computer, I have Internet (only via IE) and once logged off it does not save anything. That was fine though because I was able to log on and renew my expired AKO password as well as surf the web a bit. With almost everyone gone I was able to spend a little time on the computer.

The guys that had to go play army man, came back to the office around 1500 and all were worn out and very hungry. It sucks that they had to take part in that. I know every soldier is a "soldier first", but it seems a little ridiculous that they have people in our office participating in this training exercise. I can see soldiers with a tactical MOS doing these exercises all the time, but not mine… I'm a 25B (Information Technology Specialist) and I've been trained to fix computers and networks in the army. You would think they would try and put those skills to work, but I've given up on any common sense in the army.

My boss took me home at about 1745 where I spent some quality time with my wife. She has an interview tomorrow for a job which will definitely help out with the budget. Cross your fingers!!!