Day 4 at NTC

[aadler]

 

Slept in till a reasonable hour (6:00 AM), then showered and shaved. A luxury, the first since our arrival: I’d been using an electric razor for quick morning prep, and personal hygiene was a now-and-then affair with wet paper towels. Field expedient.

After a quick breakfast, I went with our commander to the brigade TOC (tactical operations center) to meet some people and become familiar with how we’ll be operating at the brigade level. Then our NCOIC for this exercise took me to a subsidiary office to meet more people and convey an inventory of our sensitive items (weapons, secure radios, night vision devices) to higher HQ. Back to the big tent to grab a packaged lunch and try to contact another NCO about coordinating for personal MILES gear (think laser tag, using actual weapons and blank cartridges, with infrared pulses to track hits), then return to the TOC.

Thus from one place to another, sometimes with the detachment commander and NCOIC, sometimes out on my own with instructions of variable specificity.

Susan called in the afternoon, and I provided her information so she could use my debit card to make a tuition payment by long distance. (The money was hers, transferred from her own account; my account, and card, were simply convenient conduits for payment.) She’s started an advanced practice program — a doctorate — through the online access for a relatively prestigious university. I’ll help her navigate the system in the beginning; according to the schedule she’s set, she should finish while I’m in Iraq next year.

Something I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post. Though I continue to produce draft on “Queen’s Gambit”, there’s still a morale-reducing element in how long it’s getting and how much time I’ll apparently need to finish it. As an antidote to this, I’m now allowing myself to work on other (shorter) stories. On any given day, the amount of wordage I’ve contributed to QG is the amount I can do on a separate story. That way I won’t be quitting to work on something more interesting; output on anything else is dependent upon — and cannot exceed — the output for QG.

The conference Susan and I are looking to attend in Amsterdam? It’s in November. So, apparently, NaNoWriMo is off my list of achievable goals for another year.

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A couple of hours before what would have been my bedtime, I got sudden news: my team is to be deployed “downrange” tomorrow, for an indefinite time but probably less than a week. (We were specifically instructed to pack light.) Since we were scheduled to have vehicle MILES gear installed in the morning, we packed up the truck immediately, drove down to the draw line (which was already four columns wide and nearly twenty vehicles deep), set up cots outside our truck, and settled in for the night.