OBLC- Weeks 7 & 8

Yesterday I graduated from OBLC (Officer Basic Leaders Course). I still have another week to go of Dietitian-specific training, but the basic Army skills portion is done. It seems like just yesterday I was scrambling to pack up my apartment in San Diego and finish up projects with the USOC so I could come out here to San Antonio to start training. With the blur of last weeks' classroom instruction & this weeks' graduation, time seems to be in fast forward!

I tend to only make it home to see my family about once or twice a year, so my parents took advantage of my close proximity to Louisiana and drove out here for my graduation. The ceremony itself was short and anti-climatic. We wore ACUs (essentially a working uniform) instead of our dress Blues which we wore the day before for an inspection. Undeterred by the lack of emphasis, my parents maintained the streak of attending all my important graduations (Navy boot camp, undergraduate and masters degrees). It was great to spend a little time with them before I head out to Ft Bragg next week. In the pic above in ACUs is myself and Goguen in front of the AMEDD school static display after the graduation ceremony.

I thought this side by side comparison of me from my "boot camps" would provide a chuckle for those of you who have known me through the years. The one on the right is of me as an E-1 in my whites during a liberty pass at the end of Navy boot camp in 1989. The one of me as an O-3 in my Army dress blues is of me during the OBLC inspection in 2009- twenty years later! I was way skinnier from the smoking & drinking back then, but I am much healthier now! I remember asking Mama Babin (my maternal grandmother) once before I left for boot camp if she felt old. Of course, to a 19 or 20 year old, 60-something seemed ancient. I'll never forget her smiling and relating to me that although her body had aged, she still thought of herself in her mind as being my age. Although 41 is not old, I'm just now starting to appreciate the truth in that statement all those years ago. I may look different, feel different and have experienced so many different things since that picture of me on the right was taken, but I still think of myself as being that age. To be sure, I have days where I feel the weight of my age physically or the weight of my experiences emotionally, but for the most part, I'm still the same! I'll continue to move toward the next big adventure!!

Not sure how next week will flow with the move, but I'll post when I can. Have a great week!!

The Ski family!

I set the stage for this long holiday weekend to be one of relaxation. After weapon turn-in and arriving back in my room on Thursday, I immediately got online and cashed in some Hilton Honors points and reserved a room here in San Antonio to get away for an evening. By 9:00 pm, I was relaxing in a whirlpool bath in my deluxe suite eating a slice of pecan pie and sipping a glass of Cabernet wine from room service! I know, I know, the field wasn't exactly arduous, but I felt like pampering myself! I enjoyed a late checkout Friday afternoon and lazed around in bed watching movies and then getting a message.

Yesterday afternoon, I hooked up with Pam & Ski and family. Although we've kept in touch with each other through annual Christmas letters, I hadn't actually seen them in 15 years! Through Facebook, we realized that we were only a few hours from each other, so Pam & Ski loaded up their two kids, Adam & Anna and headed towards San Antonio. After giving them horrible directions to the base (I guess land nav didn't really cure my terrible sense of direction after all!), they finally found me and we all headed to the Riverwalk for dinner.

Pam & Ski met in VP-17 back in Hawaii and got married after they got out of the Navy. They have two wonderful kids who have definitely inherited both of their playful personalities. After dinner at the Riverwalk, we hung out reminiscing about our old Navy days and even texted a few former shipmates that we keep in touch with who couldn't believe that we were all together again! We laughed and caught up on each other's lives until we finally got tired and called it an evening.

This morning, the Ski family picked me up for breakfast and a day of sightseeing. We started off at the Natural Bridge Caverns north of San Antonio. Although I had been through underground caverns before, I like this one because it wasn't cold! With 99% humidity, the dense air was actually much warmer below ground than the air above! We descended around 180 feet amongst huge stalagmites and stalactites. Because the caverns remain sealed by climate proof doors, the caverns remain "alive" and are still forming the grotesquely shaped rock formations. I'm always fascinated by unique construction methods of mother nature!

From the caverns, we headed back south towards downtown San Antonio and had lunch at the Buckhorn Museum & Saloon. This unique establishment has been in continuous operation since 1881. Apparently, the impressive collection of horned animal busts began back in the 1880s when a stuffed animal head could be traded for shots of whiskey or beer! As you can see in the pic of the saloon, there have been a lot of thirsty hunters over the years! Being the animal-rights activist of the family, Anna preferred a tour of the Texas Rangers Museum over that of the Museum of Horns, Fins & Feathers!

It's been a while since I've posted a food picture, so I thought a pic of my purely Texas lunch would be a fitting one for today's post! The BBQ brisket was super tender and went well with my Shiner Bock beer. Although the sausage & coleslaw left a bit to be desired, the chunky potato salad was pretty good. The Haagen Dazs Belgium chocolate milk shake obtained down the street from the Alamo that followed wasn't half bad either!

Tomorrow is another day off so I'll do some reading and catch up on paperwork before classes crank off again on Tuesday. Hope everyone had as a great a weekend as I did and that treasured friendships will pop up unexpectedly in your life too!

OBLC- Week 6

FTX-3 (3rd week of Field Training Exercise) was a short one. With Friday as a training holiday and Monday President's Day, we only stayed in the field for 4 days in order to accommodate the 4 day weekend. How's that for a work to rest ratio?!

This last FTX week, AMEDD (Army Medical Department) skills week put everything we learned up to now to test in a simulated war scenario. As a Dietitian who has specialized outside of the clinical realm for the whole of my career, it's been an adjustment to think of myself as a medical health care provider instead of simply a performance-enhancer specialist. Every time I shout our class motto, "Train to Save" as we're called to attention in formations, I am reminded that I am now part of a team who's primary mission is to save lives on the battlefield.

There are various levels of medical care provided to Soldiers during engagement. Although the lines blur and don't follow such a well-defined linear pattern in today's modern battlefield, the basic concept is the same. Level 5 is the one most folks are familiar with and think of when they hear about casualties of U.S. Soldiers. It's the huge medical facilities found here in the States like Walter Reed Medical Center in DC and Brook Army Medical Center here in San Antonio. Level 4 are places like Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. This is where Soldiers are evacuated from the theater of operations and receive definitive medical care in a permanent facility. But what happens to them in-theater?

It's easier to go backwards from here. The Soldiers on the "front lines" have combat medics embedded with them. For my Navy friends out there, a medic is the Army's version of a corpsman. Like independent-duty Navy corpsman, these Soldiers are not only skilled as First Responders, but also provide the day to day care required to maintain the health of their troops through preventative medicine. Like the Navy corpsman, they are usually called "Doc" even though they aren't Physicians. The immediate care that they provide at the point of injury is known as Level 1 care. The medics are supported by Battalion Aid Stations. The mission of the Battalion Aid Station is primarily to collect the battalion's sick & wounded, stabilize the patient's condition, and provide emergency medical evacuation to a combat support hospital or other facility. The Battalion Aid Station can be split into two functional units that can operate independently for up to 24 hours- a FAS (Forward Aid Station) and a MAS (Main Aid Station). For our exercise, I was assigned to a FAS. In this pic, you can see the "wounded" that we collected and were getting ready for evacuation. Click on the pic to see how we identified the "gunshots to the buttocks" injury!

The next level of care is level 2 which is the first level of resucitative care. Level 2 consists of highly mobile forward surgical teams that directly support the gunslingers in the field. Level 3 is known as a CSH (Combat Support Hospital, pronounced "cash"). CSH is a modernized version of MASH (yes, like the TV show!). The Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals of yesterday could provide intensive surgical capabilities but was not equipped for primary care capabilities (e.g. internal medicine, pediatrics, OB/GYN, etc.) required by today's battlefield environment. Today's CSH is a mobile 200+ bed hospital that can do all that as a single unit or can be broken down into smaller forward deployed units. This pic of me is as a casualty at Level 2 with two nurses attending to my "shrapnel to the abdomen" wounds as I awaited a simulated helicopter medivac (Medical Evacuation).

At first I was pretty disappointed when 5 minutes into the start of the "war" one of the cadre handed me a small card that contained a description of my injury and told me to lay down on the ground. I soon recognized what a great learning experience this was for someone who's normal working environment has not been clinical care based. The blur of Powerpoint slides from the first 3 weeks of this course started to make sense as I was loaded onto a litter and taken through the various steps of care. I'm a hands-on learner, so the whole week proved to be highly beneficial in my learning process.

Well, that was it for our field training, next week we'll be back in the classroom. I hope that my attempts to decipher all the Army acronyms and describe the training I'm receiving help you to visualize what this experience is like. I'm still giddy about being back in the military and am enjoying the learning process. I'm hopeful that my new found ability to exercise patience beyond any level I've been able to achieve in the past will stick with me as I move on in my Army career!

OBLC- Week 5

Our second week in the field was much less physical than the first. Instead of navigating around the field and negotiating the confidence course, we spent more time in the FOB and preparing for practical tests. Counting the reservist augmentation, our company is about 280 strong. Although there are personalities representing the whole spectrum living in close proximity, there hasn't been a whole lot of drama. There's been more down-time compared to last week, so folks are really getting the chance to get to know each other and learn from each others' backgrounds and experiences.

Two of the tasks to be tested out on at the end of the week included disassembly, reassembly & functional check of the M16 rifle in 4 minutes and of the M9 9mm handgun in 3 minutes. Most of us were able to do it with time to spare and those who weren't able to were given extra instruction until they could. As you can see in this pic of study time in our tent, everyone was determined to meet the final requirements.

The day to day operation of the FOB is maintained by various work details which rotate through the six platoons that make up the company (I'm in 2nd platoon). It's a little amusing that the only 2 RDs (Registered Dietitians) in the whole company are both in 2nd platoon. The person with me on KP duty (Kitchen Patrol) in this pic is the other RD, CPT Dunn. KP duty is actually pretty easy since we don't actually cook the food, we just serve it (it's brought in pre-made from DFAC [post Dining Facility]). The food doesn't exactly follow the performance-based menu we serve at the USOC, but is really good hot chow for the field!

Included in the weeks' training schedule was CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear, Explosive Incidents). Back during my military days the first time around, it was just known as NBC (Nuclear, Biological & Chemical), but the prevalent use of improvised explosive devices has obviously changed all that. One thing that hasn't changed, however is the donning of the various levels of MOPP (Mission-Oriented Protective Posture). You see me here in the highest posture level holding my weapon. It includes a very thick protective hooded coat, pants, overboots, gloves & gas mask all worn over the ACU uniform and boots. The last time I had worn this gear was on a flight line in August in Gulfport, MS during a two-week annual drill for the Louisiana Air National Guard. The few minutes we spent in this suit here in cool temperatures was actually quite pleasant compared to performing aircraft maintenance while wearing it for a couple of hours in the extreme heat & humidity of the Gulf Coast in summertime.

For the third time in my life I went through the "gas chamber." I sympathized with the new Soldiers who had never gone through it before and were getting all worked up over the unknown. Of course, some of the cadre and other students seem to revel in telling stories that raised the anxiety level of these first-timers! My memory proved accurate as the experience turned out to be unpleasant but tolerable. The whole point to being exposed to chemical agents with the protective mask both on, then off is for the Soldiers to gain confidence that the mask will protect them during an attack.

There's a lot of tears and snot flowing as you exit the building with arms out to the side to allow the wind to clear the gas from your face and clothing. It burns the eyes and throat quite a bit, but a few minutes of walking around brings it down to a tolerable level pretty quickly. As I was exiting the building unable to see my surroundings through the tears and snot, I heard one of my battle buddies yell "Daigle, this is the first time during this whole course I've seen you without a smile on your face!" This comment of course immediately put a smile back on my face!!

One of the other cool things we got to learn was clearing houses. The feces would really have to be hitting the fan if me as an RD were clearing houses, but I was grateful for the experience for 2 reasons. First of all, you just never know. Second, it gives us medical providers a small glimpse as to what the infantry soldiers are going through. As we stumbled over each other through the exercise, I gained a whole new appreciation for the Soldiers who train these moves on a regular basis and are able to move fluidly as a team with little to no verbal communication. My awkward attempts with my team resulted in shooting 2 bad guys and a hostage. Hmm, need to work on my target identification I guess! Playing one of the bad guys afterwards was a lot of fun though!

That pretty much sums up FTX-2. Next week will be our last week in the field and we'll have to put everything we learned into action during the week long training operation. I'm looking forward to the challenge of our final week in the field.